Image description: A hand is holding a Tarot card, Ace of Swords by Pamela Colman Smith for the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot. In the image, a hand is coming out of a cloud and is holding a sword with the blade facing up. The sword has a crown on its tip. Behind the card is a green grassy lawn.
Old stories can be a good way in and through pain that feels personal, but is not. The fantastical and exaggerated images of fairy tales, myths, and legends contain a severity that reflects the severity of life, injustice, and unwanted change.
When I have been burned and need to better understand fire, I often turn to the Italian tale of Silver Nose. It has all the elements of a transformative story:
Sisters with flowers in their hair; rose, carnation, jasmine.
A collapsed and incapable mother.
A man who’ll do anything to get what he wants.
There’s a fire room too, where the man sends any girl who’s too curious.
The tale begins with an encounter between Silver Nose, who is a business man, and a family of four women and girls who are workers. With their eight tired hands the mother and daughters wash all day, everyday.
But they still don’t have enough.
When flashy Silver Nose arrives and asks the eldest daughter to come work for him, the mother protests. “No man on earth has a silver nose,” she tells her daughter, frowning. “If you go off with him you might well live to regret it, so watch out.”
But the girl is desperate to leave, so she does. And if you’ve ever lived years feeling unseen and un-special, you likely know how easy it is to be carried up and away by shiny invitations.
They walk a whole day. As they approach Silver Nose’s castle, the girl sees it glowing from the valley like hot coals in ash. She becomes uneasy and afraid.
Do you remember being in a situation like this? I do.
Maybe you were going in a promising direction and something was said or done that made the hair on your neck stand up. You knew enough about life to know somewhere deep that this could not, and would not be good.
Still to give up on the dream now seemed impossible. You pat down your neck hairs and refuse to turn back. In hindsight you may have been tempted to pathologize this behavior. I think it’s human.
Inside the castle, Silver Nose gives the girl a key to every room but notes one that she’s not to enter for any reason. As she sleeps that night he tucks a fresh rose into her hair. When he leaves for work the next day, she goes straight to the forbidden room.
Seeking painful truths can be protective.
If you’ve ever snooped around seeking proof to support the case that you’re in danger, you have a relationship with knowledge like I do, which is that knowing is linked with feeling safe. If I’m going to get burned, I want to see it coming.
But not everyone’s oriented this way. We do different things to feel safe. Some are more inclined to avoid or to hide. Others, especially those who’ve been deeply harmed by secrets, may feel desperate to know. It’s plain to see which groups Silver Nose and the eldest daughter fall into.
As she peers into the room she finds that it’s chock full of fire.
But it isn’t the flames that cause her to slam the door shut and recoil. It’s the sound of agonized souls, screaming in pain from inside. As Italo Calvino tells it, when she looks into the room she realizes that the business man was the devil, and the secret room was hell.
When Silver Nose comes home from work and sees that the rose he’d placed in her hair has discolored and shriveled from the flames, he knows straight away what she’s done. It is goodbye to her then, and into the fire room she goes.
Silver Nose goes back to the mother and asks for her middle daughter, to come help with all the work. They walk all day to his glowing valley home, which she too feels uneasy when she sees.
He gives her the same spiel about the keys and the room and tucks a flower in her hair as she sleeps, a carnation. The next day, she too is curious. When Silver Nose sees the singed petals, she’s reunited with her sister in the hell room.
What would it take for these girls to get free of the circumstances which it seems they themselves have waltzed willingly into? Surely we must be careful not to victim blame here, but there’s a thing happening that some of us might recognize.
It is the overriding of that moment when one sees something that one will surely recall later as an obvious warning sign. And ignores it.