Cinderella's Mother Closed Her Eyes and Stopped Breathing

There is a very bright young girl, about six years old, with whom I have tried to discuss  Cinderella. My thinking in doing this was that she might be able to clue me in to fresh perspectives on this universal story that I have missed.

But I am sorry to say that, bright and quick as she is, she does not have any perception of what I am now able to see at the end of a life of many years of re-reading Cinderella. I can see she that she feels no awe before it, that she acts as if she knows all there

Anton Pieck's Cinderella

is to know about it, and that she is much concerned to show me how bright she is. She seemed blind and dead as a wall when I tried to talk to her about Cinderella's mother, the father, the birds, the tree, the step-mother and step-sisters, the ashes, the glimpses, the mutilations of the feet, the persistent prince, the wedding, the plucked-out eyes.

Part of the explanation for

Disney's Cinderella

her not getting it may be that she knows only a Disney film version of the story. But I think that the stronger explanation is that she has already, even at six years, been corrupted into the applause and admiration for being very bright. It seems that she has had so much applause for her cleverness that her pride, her ascendancy, has become a substitute for that essential love that would have kept her eyes open and her spirit alive.

Ironically, this problem is very much addressed in the opening lines of the story, recorded by the Grimms, begins as follows:

“The wife of a rich man fell ill, and when she felt that she was nearing her end she called her only daughter to her bedside and said, 'Dear child, continue devout and good. The God will always help you, and I will look down upon you from heaven and watch over you.' Thereupon she closed her eyes and breathed her last.”

That seemingly simple opening to the story ironically, profoundly, astoundingly, almost miraculously, describes my young friend's blindness and route to recovery. She was probably connected very early, but now she is barely breathing and her eyes are closed.

That mention of how the mother “closed her eyes and breathed her last” is not just a redundancy carried on for centuries unnecessarily. That theme of no longer being able to see is emphasized at the very end of the story, when the white doves peck out the the eyes of the mean, false, step-sisters. The last sentence of the story tells us:

“And so for their wickedness and falseness they were punished for the rest of their days.”

What is being said here is that when we lose our inner connection to our source, to our ground, to the earth from which we come, our inner groundedness, our true selves, our footedness, we are deadened and blinded.

I am not fooled by my young friend's cleverness, her brightness, her outward show. I can see that she is actually devastated inside, reduced to the level of cinders. I've been there myself, to my long sorrow and regret. I still go through it now in my old age, although I know more surely than ever that it definitely will work out well if I continue devout and true. The white doves from the branches of the hazel tree repeatedly tell me:

“Prithee, look back, prithee, look back

There's blood on the track.

The shoe is too small;

At home the true bride is waiting thy call.”

Now, the message couldn't be clearer. The message is repeated throughout the story in the smallest details, exactly in the way it's done in the “forgotten language of dreams.”

That's why Disney, and almost every single intellectual, scholarly interpreter I've ever read, do not understand the story of Cinderella even though it has “resonance” at a deep level in every culture on earth. It's written in the language of dreams, not materialistic, positivist science or somatic, cognitive psychology. It's not about experimental sociology or psychology.

The interpretations by severely academic interpreters always strike me as dead or even demonic in the sense that I feel the scholar is killing the story, destroying its real liveliness in a vampiritic way, sucking the life out of it for his or her own illusionary life.

The story of Cinderella is told in the symbolic language of dreams and myths and fairy tales. The symbols are derived from experiences in the world, yes, but they are combined and constructed and modified into  dreams and fairly tales that teach us primarily and usually about our selves, not what is “out there.” The symbolic theater or play of dreams during our sleep is usually directly about our selves, our own inner questions, rather than about what's “out there,” although the sign or gesture that gets symbolized is derived from waking experiences. The language of fairy tales and dreams is based in the commonality of the inner and the outer that is characteristic of symbolic interaction rather than of positivistic science, input/out computerism, environment/heredity causation, chemistry, neurology, biology, particles, the neocortex, and mechanistic metaphor.

This symbolism, this language, is founded in love – our ability to put our selves in the place of the other and thus to see what the other sees or hears by a symbol. That is why the great interpreters of dreams, such as you see in the Bible stories, are people who have been through hell, but have remained devout and true, which is to say “loving in truth” or “truly loving.”

When we fail in our human task of understanding the other, and just imagine that the other is thinking what we are thinking, that mistake is sometimes called “projection.” The word implies certain kinds of psychoanalytic theory that may or may not be accurate. It is certain, however, that we often make the mistake of thinking that other people see things the way we see things. It's an ego-centric, solipsistic, attribution to the other of what is inside ourselves. I die inside now as I think of how often I myself have failed in this matter. Tears and ashes.