At the beginning of the story there was a bad fairy who deceived some other fairies. Since then, there have been swarms of trouble, and there are legions of dangerous fairies and fairies who pretend not to be fairies at all. Some fairies have cut off their wings and explain fairyland according to “natural processes.” They reside in what is called the University. There was an ongoing battle between fairies even in the University. But nowadays the battle is different. It is different because the Universities have pervaded with a keen magic and so now most folks don’t even believe in fairies and magic anymore.
But everybody knows that fairies are still fairies and magic is still magic no matter what you call it.
It seems that folks in the South may not notice they live in a fairyland but that is not because they deny it (though they may deny the language but not the reality of it as indicated by their behavior). They may not notice because they are so accustom to living in it. They assume it. The aforementioned fairy stories are all a part of the Southern consciousness, often subconscious. “God willin’ and the creek don’t rise I’ll make it to work on time.” Some might interpret this to bespeak an imbued sense of the tragic in the Southern consciousness, but there is another way of understanding this. “‘God willin’ and the creek don’t rise I will get to work on time’ cause everybody knows you never know what might happen next in a fairyland.”
Folks living in New England and on the West coast seem to have been playing the pretend game that fairies and magic do not exist. And now they have begun to believe their game is actually true. When they were children the game was pretend, but since becoming adults they say it is actually the way things are. There is no magician, and so there cannot be any such magic. They assert that there is no magic and there are no fairies. So they say. But even the folks who say such things are merely under the influence of bad fairies or fairies who have since cut off their wings.
Growing up involves a lot of things. Sometimes it involves forgetting. When I was a child, I preferred fairy stories (I even wrote a few), but when I grew up something happened. I grew into a “greater appreciation for ‘realism.’” I forgot about the fairy stories. I didn’t want them anymore, so I pretended they weren’t true. And then my pretend game seemed to grow more and more true, until finally I was convinced that yes indeed it was true. There is no magician, no magic, nor fairies. All this while I still lived in the last (admittedly so) fairyland in the United States. Then one day, I moved away from fairyland, to a place where people said there wasn’t such a thing as fairyland or a magician. I thought without them life was real, but this was still part of my pretend game, though I lacked the acumen to realize it. And then I saw it, the magician, the magic, and the fairies: all before me doing what they always do, continuing to soar through the air and continuing to do what they were meant to do in the first place.
The South seems to be one of the few places in the United States that still remains content with living in the world of the text, in the world of Scripture’s story, a world filled with real magic and real fairies. It may seem strange to speak of a magician, magic, and fairies, but I can think of nothing more germane. We have a propensity to be so modern, so enlightened that we begin describing everything according to sterile laws and banal philosophies. For those of us who often refrain from living in the magical world of the text, fairy stories are just what the doctor ordered, for “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in [our] philosophy.”
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