Thought Shrapnel

I was sure I’d written about this article from 2020 with the evocative title “Fuck the Bread. The Bread Is Over”. Written during the early days of the pandemic, Sabrina Orah Mark weaves motherhood, professional identity, and fairy tales for a column entitled Happily (which ran until March 2021).

The parts I’ve excerpted contain a lot of questions about a world that has changed, and is, changing rapidly. Mark contrasts the world of fairy tales, where each character is made entirely of their role, like a stick of Blackpool rock, with the lives knowledge workers now live, dragged slowly into the Precariat.

What does it mean to be worth something? Or worth enough? Or worthless? What does it mean to earn a living? What does it mean to be hired? What does it mean to be let go?

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.

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The new world order is rearranging itself on the planet and settling in. Our touchstone is changing color. Our criteria for earning a life, a living, are mutating like a virus that wants badly to stay alive.

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I feel like I’m in Gertrude Stein territory, where the buttons are so tender they’ve come undone. The whole kingdom is spilling out of itself. There are holes everywhere.

Source: The Paris Review

Image: Are.na