Ultraman Taro: The Dignity of Whimsy
"When despair grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be. . . "
I love this poem because it defies the calcification of hopelessness.
Untended despair tends to swell, but sitting in stillness before beauty can heal hope.
Whimsy has a similar power to beauty, I think. The fantastical offers a bank upon which weary souls can sit and "rest in the grace of the world" and find freedom. It offers truth, but in a parallel dimension, trusting us to complete the enthymeme, and vouching for human dignity when the concrete and the sober offer grim projections.
Russian folklore enchants us because it walks a unique line between the conscious and the subconscious. The house on chicken legs that turns around and around, a dwelling among us but never comprehended by us. The Baba Yaga who keeps her sundry parts about the house, a creature who would likely make sense if we could see her in truth, but who appears with two flesh eyes more like a creature of cubist schism.
And yet, within this strange world, exist laws. We must follow the golden ball as it rolls. We must entertain the bird who shows up at our window at night. The world of story might look fictional from the outside, but from the inside, it sings on key.
G. K. Chesterton's chapter titled "The Ethics of Elfland" discusses the laws and the magic of a successful fantasy world. Admittedly, GKC is some crazy uncle with a penchant for preposterous sentences, but I find that if I hold his leash loosely, he has wisdom to offer.
There is a dignity to whimsy that creates its own oughtness, a rightness, a skeletal stability to the workings of the fairy tale world. By the internal rules of a fairy world, a frog might reasonably talk, but he also might require a kiss for transformation. He breaks our laws by talking. But he cannot break his own by foregoing the kiss.
GKC wrote: "The vision is always a fact. It is the reality that is often a fraud."
Perhaps this is because vision is a thing given from otherness while our understanding of "reality" is ever limited to our five senses. In such a way, we know the truths of fairy land in our gut before we know them in our mind. They offer warmth that runs like good whisky into your belly.
Delight has fewer epistemological holes in it than Hume's empiricism, after all.
"A thing resounds when it rings true." (Buechner) And there's such a small space between resounding and delight, if there's any space at all.
GKC suggested that the Creator is a being of delight. He wrote:
"It is possible that God says every morning, 'Do it again' to the sun; and every evening, 'Do it again' to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
The eternal appetite of infancy.
In Taro, the ZAT base stands suspended like the Baba Yaga's house on chicken legs. The vehicles, the helmets, the uniforms all ring of whimsy.
The Taro universe holds to internal laws, unflinching.
Here is a truth from Taro: We must not k1ll the child of the ancient, flying, magic queen tortoise who cries during birth, takes revenge on those who harm her young, and drops cherry-colored bombs from her behind.
Within the Taro dimension, it makes perfect sense that an ancient queen tortoise would fly, weep, avenge her own, and produce explosives.
But it makes sense in every dimension in which the human soul exists that the queen tortoise's child should not be k1lled.
There's a dignity to whimsy. It sits like a sage in purple socks on a hill, beneath a sky full of "day-blind stars," offering healing and wisdom to the world.
Let those who have ears to hear, hear.
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Upcoming
Mother Mary, Mama Bear, and the Mother of Ultraman
A Woundable Hero
Even the Mighty Need Brotherhood
Standing in Defiant Goodness
(Apologies for 1s as I's. AI misunderstood and marked this post unacceptable unless I fixed it this way.)
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