beyond seven mountains, seven seas, seven hills

“In fairy tales, form is your function and function is your form. If you don’t spin the straw into gold or inherit the kingdom or devour all the oxen or find the flour or get the professorship, you drop out of the fairy tale, and fall over its edge into an endless, blank forest where there is no other function for you, no alternative career. The future for the sons who don’t inherit the kingdom is vanishment. What happens when your skills are no longer needed for the sake of the fairy tale? A great gust comes and carries you away. In fairy tales, the king is the king. If he dethrones, his bones clatter into a heap and vanish. Loosen the seams of the stepmother, and reach in. Nothing but stepmother inside. Even when the princess is cinders and ash, she is still entirely princess.”

In its ability to destabilize a sense of coherent self-identity, to disorient the self-positing subject, even if only momentarily, the uncanny does stand in conceptual proximity to the sublime. However, rather than mimicking or re-representing sublime awe, uncanny encounters with frightening others (or with the otherness, the strangeness, of oneself) bring back something past, yet in altered form. Like the sublime, the uncanny involves an encounter with otherness; a sublation between subject and object takes place. But while the sublime entails the awareness of one’s own lack of understanding, the uncanny is a moment of understanding all too well, a mistake or malfunction of memory that simultaneously reveals something real. In the broadest sense, it demonstrates that no matter how alienated or dissociated we may feel from the past, from others, and from our own selves, these entities all belong to us and we to them.

“It has a language, but not one I know…I am asking you to study the dark.”