You know something is happening here, but you don't know what it is

[sovay]

While mowing the lawn this afternoon, I ran across a toad. Not literally, I am pleased to report, but it was a close thing: the toad seemed to think that if it flattened itself down into the grass, this would somehow make it invisible to the lawnmower, and unfortunately this tactic almost worked on me. But I picked up the toad, which was the usual brown-and-olive camouflage that turns up in backyards around here, and carried to safety; admired it for a few moments, and went back to the lawn. And less than a minute later, I had Bob Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man" stuck in my head, where it is still in residence.

I had nothing better to do with my brain while finishing the lawn, other than periodically checking to make sure the toad hadn't thrown itself in front of the mower again (it remained sedately under the rhododendrons), so I marked down the chain of associations. It started with Hans Christian Andersen's "The Marsh King's Daughter," which I have been wanting to work into a poem or a story for some time now—it's perhaps my favorite of his tales, and full of eerie echoes.* And went from there.

In the day she was as beautiful as any fairy, but she had a bad wicked temper; at night on the other hand she became a hideous toad, quiet and pathetic with sad mournful eyes. There were two natures in her both in soul and body continually shifting . . . by day had her mother's form and her father's evil nature; but at night her kinship with him appeared in her outward form, and her mother's sweet nature and gentle spirit beamed out of the misshapen monster.
—Hans Christian Andersen, "The Marsh King's Daughter"

Faced with her future in the form of a toad, she bargained badly: she exchanged her childhood for me.
—Patricia McKillip, "Toad"

Lay me in the milk-bath, oh my mother—
I will turn the frogs to roses.
—Catherynne M. Valente, "Still Life with Wicked Stepmother"

the failed movie director with eyes like Gatsby's
green light . . .
—Catherynne M. Valente, "Freaks"

Gatsby was amazing. He even managed to see to it that the book about him was regarded as a novel, fiction, as though he didn't exist. Even Fitzgerald, by the time he was through writing it, believed he'd made the whole thing up.
—The J. Peterman Company, "Gatsby Shirt"

You're reading Fitzgerald, you're reading Hemingway
They're both super smart and drinking in the cafés
—Regina Spektor, "Poor Little Rich Boy"

You've been through all of
F. Scott Fitzgerald's books
You're very well-read
It's well known
—Bob Dylan, "Ballad of a Thin Man"

If I count all the Valente poems as one step (her poem "The Frog-Wife" may be considered as a side-shoot from the initial Andersen, as well as a passage from Laurence Yep's Dragon of the Lost Sea where the character Civet recalls how she was drowned as a sacrifice-bride to the King Within the River), it's like six degrees of Bob Dylan. This is how my brain works. My synapses are permanently set to "quotation."

Look, it works for me . . .

*Even when I take into consideration the weird emphasis on Christianity in the second half of the story, "The Marsh King's Daughter" still has too much shape-changing, time that runs differently in different worlds, and katabasis for me not to love it. This passage in particular terrified and haunted me as a child: "I seemed to be again in the vast Egyptian Pyramid; but still before me stood the moving alder stump which had frightened me on the surface of the bog. I gazed at the fissures of the bark and they shone out in bright colors and turned to hieroglyphs; it was the mummy's wrappings I was looking at. The coverings burst asunder and out of them walked the mummy king of a thousand years ago, black as pitch, black as the shining wood-snail or the slimy mud of the swamp. Whether it were the Mummy King or the Marsh King I knew not. He threw his arms around me and I felt that I must die." I have never read the original Danish; that translation was done in 1946. But those are still images that I wish I could write.

Comments

[seajules]

I'd never read "The Marsh-King's Daughter" until someone asked me to do a mashup poem of it with "Swan Lake." There are definitely some haunting images in it.

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

The places where I live have always been blessed by toads. I killed one once whan I was young and did not know any better, and was horrified by what I did; since then, they have been my animal not so much in the deliberatly misunderstood new age spirit animal sense, but probably in a more authentic sense. I am responsible for toads.

In a book on Gypsies that a friend lent me many years ago, there was a whole section of a chapter on toads and their importance both to the Roma and as a symbol in Europe of all people harmed or hated by Christianity and as sort of a symbol of those callously and systematically destroyed. I much respected the author's ability to convey that without invoking the usual implied/explicit OMFG oppressed-by-the-patriarchy!!!11!!! histrionics that tend to cheapen the subject matter.

Said friend is recovering from a month in the Filipines [/jealousy] I'll try and get a Author/Title.

[thehornedgod.livejournal.com]

Oooh. I'm flitting back and forth in Andersen at the moment so I'll settle on "Marsh-King's Daughter" before bedtime tonight and see if it seeps into my dreams.

[lesser-celery.livejournal.com]

My own lawn-mowing experience today was oh-so-prosaic, although significant in that it seemed to signal the end of the Deluge. Planting the garden this morning was rife with symbomlism, but hardly on a level with "The Marsh-King's Daughter," which I must now find and read.

[norilana.livejournal.com]

Great post, thank you for the snippet poetic progression! :-)

Ri ram a rog...

[hans-the-bold.livejournal.com]

A toad? That's like a frog! And that can only mean one thing, you know:

The Frogaboo Song!

Which Bob Dylan didn't write, but that's okay...

[yukihada.livejournal.com]

I like reading the progression of other's thoughts. And that was a lovely circular path you lead us on.

My own toad story is not so nice. We have plenty of frogs and toads as there are many trees and a sizable pond in the backyard. I was stepping out of my father's truck one night, facing the cab as I descended and I felt a crunch as I put my put my foot down. When I realized I had crushed a toad, I was hysterical. I was miserable with guilt. I was the child that watched her steps on the sidewalk as to not crush any ants. The magnitude of killing a toad was awful. I could only hope at the end that his death was swift and relatively painless as only a foot from the sky can be. Of course, my family members still remind me. Whenever we see a toad or frog and it begins hopping away, they usually comment that my reputation must have proceeded me as the toad-killer.

recently discovered your lovely journal, by the by

[tomnoir.livejournal.com]

I live in Florida, and we have a surfeit of frogs, especially in the summer. They come in two varieties: little tree frogs in fluorescent green that stick to your window all night like suction-cup toys, and fat brown toads who sit out on the sidewalks (to soak up the heat I guess). They bigger won't budge even if you walk up right beside them. They probably figure they've got you outnumbered anyway. They really are everywhere at night. And when it rains, oh man, they'll strike up a chorus that's absolutely deafining.

Possibly due to the fact that Floridians have frogs on the brains, I once wrote a story (http://www.dontbeafraid.net/) about one.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

sovay, thank you for linking me to this post, for so many reasons.

First off, just for the story of saving the toad. What I've nearly run over in the lawn has been shaggy-mane mushrooms. Mmmm, but I've stopped and picked them instead.

Second, for the train of associations. I *love* the way those work and have often wanted to do exactly this--map one--but have not, in fact, ever done it. And this map of this train is fascinating.

Third, for the taste of The Marsh King's Daughter, about which I'll write more back at your original comment.

Fourth, for the gorgeous snippet of Catherynne Valente's poems, especially the first; I love the idea of turning frogs to roses; it's like a shorthand for a bunch of magical associations.

And fifth, for these comments! Now I'll get to read another poem of seajules (whose poetry I enjoy very much), plus the story that another reader linked you to looks, from your response, like it must be interesting, and I'll read it, too. So one train of associations leads to others.

Also, it's very cool to look back in time. This conversation, here, feels so alive as I read it, yet it happened in 2006--and yet here, two years later, I'm also participating in it. Isn't this a kind of time travel? And better even, because it's simultaneously a journey into the past and a conversation that extends into the present.