A Modern Day Maleficent

The primeval forests left in the world are now very few, and they do not belong to anybody. A person, a woman, may walk through their midsts, and hear their eerie silences and the creaking trees, but she does not live there. Not anymore. It would suit her, however, to live there, and all her thought and will is bent upon a solitary place deep in the woods where she may communicate with the silence, wild animals, and with Source. If she had been born there, at the heart of things, or in the heartbeat of the trajectory of humankind before countries were countries, when people were free to roam, then she might live there and live there still. She might have had the skills from birth. But she was born in the kingdom, and not taught how to survive, born spoiled, among the people, or in the city of Stamford, Connecticut, and her circuitous path is shaped like the snake’s egg, drawing further and further out from where her society expected her to thrive, as the man in New York City’s Washington Square who dips a rope in a bucket of soapy water and spreads it out and out until a massive bubble, reflective as a deep lake, emerges and then pops. She has walked slowly out from the highway-jogged origin of her life, from which all her memories seep out and fall back as to a black hole, the more she takes to the outskirts. She has walked the only true primeval forest that cannot be fucked with, that of the deep unconscious; she has trod the byways and highways of the fairytale. She has been the girl who spoke with the devil, with her hands cut off, she has been the girl who could not stop dancing in her gift of red shoes. She has taken her revenges and her reward has been the sharp cold air of God’s indifference, and her continuance as repentance. But, let us back up into the details.

            Maleficent was born while Pluto was in Scorpio in the time of AIDS. Pluto was on the horizon as she inhaled her first breath as well as Venus moving into being a Morning Star, or retrograde; the Venus that loves unconditionally because she loves from a place of her own twisted dark, where her lowest endeavors strive to meet her highest, as Lilith did from her cave, who is of course her predecessor. No planets graced the horizon that represents the ‘world’ when she was born and so we have a girl born entirely unto herself, possessing no means for outreach or connection, destined to walk exuding her aura of solitude. Though she will scream out, no one will hear, and no one sends ropes or lifeboats. She walks alone, she draws her own path like Harold with his purple crayon, which leaves her one direction and one direction only—within.

            She is a precocious child, naturally obsessive, intense in the eyes. She clings to her mother, a meek woman, crushed at the get; she bares her teeth and screams at anyone else. She is tyrannical, excited by what she detects as secrets revealed to her subconscious—how she can subvert others, show them who they really are, turn their actions on their heads, and pummel them to their weakest, darkest point—fallibility. This power, this dark instinct, tingles at her fingertips. Power and possession, but also, the depth-origin of ascendence—devotion— characterizes her childish self. Her mother, being so fairylike, sees through the madness to where her little girl is pure. However, not knowing or forgetting cosmic law, the mother bows down to her daughter from a young age and amuses her with gifts and trinkets. So, the powerful interior of the child, ripe for lessons of humility and justice, is instead swollen with these temptations and indulgences. Given a crown too young. Her arms of tyranny extend and she enjoys ordering her younger brothers around, a pair of angelic twins, and threatening to hit them with hard objects if they disobey.

            As is the case with so many women who possess power naturally, there is no man in the house who inspires her devotion, only an oft distant, emotionally withdrawn, alcoholic father whose bursts of screaming tirades sear through childhood memories that drift about her like smoke. Disassociation is one of the many roads that can lead a soul down within rather than out in the world, and our Maleficent escapes through this route, countering the gifts her mother showers on her in the material world with predilection for the world of spirit.

            It is a short-lived life of wealth and inclusion in the ‘kingdom’ for multiple reasons. There is a downward, avalanche-driving road to her being outcast, and it begins with her father’s bankruptcy, and withdrawal from feeling responsible for the family, so that it falls upon the meek mother to seek her employment among the common people, where she types on a computer at a cubicle and answers phones for an auto insurance company. Their money is now almost solely sourced from the equity of their house, an over large, but woodsy dwelling made of cedar and plaster, where the trees chain down in shadow, and skylights rust and shatter within their double panes. Whole rooms are left empty that might have been made civil to entertain friends or other family members. These images, circumstances, create space in Maleficent for withdrawal and nonparticipation. She traipses through the empty rooms, musing. She already has a sense that her hold on ‘things’ is precarious, and that to secure more would involve entering the world in servitude like her mother, a course the power-hungry child is loath to take. Also, she has nothing to do with that world, its boundaries or its limits, preferring to indulge herself in rituals of obsessive exploration, creating her own fairytales, which both ascends her spirit and isolates her from her peers. She knows the cave of creation from the age of eleven on; she draws in like the departing tides, seeking not exposure but all the secrets of the world within her explorations. This leaves her of course utterly unprepared for the path her mother naively expects of her, that she will marry normally and enter the workforce like everyone else.  

            But that never occurs to the girl, being a creator, aligned with source, she trusts to God—who alone can subjugate her. Nothing in the world sways her or tempts her once she grows up and material gifts cease to psychically activate her: she is for her own road. She is like her beloved Lucifer whose emotionally rendered effigy as a youth she kissed, feeling herself the most adored, and gifted of all of God’s subjects. The whole idea that she must ‘fall’ from grace and go very far from God to test the deity’s love for her, and the limits of her own bodily protection seemed natural. That was the only vocation she ever considered.

            Being a gifted writer, and armed with this art, and militant already in practice before she is fully grown, she has no doubt of her success. She may go out in the tatters of her once upon a time wealth—with a father run away and a mother who cries in the evenings, and no tangible money left, but she has youth and dusky beauty and that is dressing enough. It may have been the empty rooms in the house, the fact that no one was ever invited over and her mother spoke to herself or to their cats, but in time, Maleficent was ready to brave this so-called world and was bent upon leaving the house. Having zilch in the way of practical bodily fear, she lets her mother sign away her stable livelihood in exorbitant college loans, so that she might leave under semblance of freedom. In a way, her milky-eyed mother saw and trusted to her daughter’s brilliance to see her through.

            However, Maleficent takes the money and enrolls herself in classes in the Babylon of New York City without any intention to use what it is an institution can offer, being on her own holy road. It is a ruse, and she laughs at the other students. Certain professors love her or absolutely hate her for mocking their assignments and disregarding their sound advice. She is absolutely arrogant, egocentric to caricature, and dressed all in black or violet. As well as, of course, sexually powerful and it soon becomes evident, able to pick out a single soul among a hundred whose nebulous being can spear into the one place she is vulnerable, where she is unconscious: her womb. This is why Lilith is associated with deep anger and sitting astride the man. She offers her most vulnerable place, that cave, her sacred union, and receives conditions in response. She is entered but not trusted, and so she is violated. This happens with Maleficent, and not just once.

Like a snake sinewed in its first skin, her sexuality at this stage, searching like a lighthouse beam, attracts the experiences that will bring her to the Source of female power. A man in particular who wears his preconceptions like facts, yet will take a woman, is ripe for being ripped to shreds, and Maleficent obliges, though not without being ripped up herself. Being possessive naturally, and in love this is most exacerbated, she feels her soul move bodily out of herself as she attempts to hold down an immature person. Disembodied, in a rage, only in loss and relinquishment does she crawl back into herself. And here the sin of the mother’s indulgence woven with the attributes of rebirth in the daughter becomes exponent: she opens her legs again and again, as was rumored of our holy Mary Magdalene, and becomes less a human than a symbol, the womb space in which between two people everything is revealed. That terribly vacuity between her legs she offers drives multiple men insane, and not least of all herself. We can drop into real time now and see what this looks like.

            She lives in the narrow hallway of a room between rooms. Not yet facing the responsibility she holds for her experiences, she smokes ganja continuously so she can bear her inner tension. She never combs her hair, or lotions her skin, but dresses herself carefully so that she exudes both animal scent and composure. Also, she is too emotionally distraught and imbued with power to work for anyone at all so continues to attend college into a master’s program and live off loans, which, after seven years, fires her work with an intensity and a desperation that is hard to explain, existing as she does without a tangible future, but before a yawning black hole. Like many who used to have wealth but have it no longer, she does not use money well, but spends on herself indulgently or steals at her fancy: innocuous things, like bars of chocolate. Her acts of indulgence and self-satisfaction, her flashing eyes, and obvious discomfort in herself malign her from the other students. Aside from women who are self-destructive or the men who dare look into the deep wells of her eyes, who have something in themselves they are avoiding which she unconsciously represents, she makes no other acquaintances. But she prepares her thesis, writers her dissertation, and performs her work before a committee who shakes her hand afterwards, one woman in particular holding her hand long, and telling her it was a pleasure. There is no glory, there is no offer, and no money to come. Sexual obsession had not turned into lasting love, and she could not call herself artist or writer now without also being laughed at, and her clothes were becoming more and more transparent, holes at her knees, holes where her young breasts point. But rather than crumpling and conforming, she passes the first rung of the inner circle of her psyche, throws a hood over her head, and continues on into the outskirts, place of the inner journey: the desert, where sometimes a high priestess will pass riding a camel astride.

            We must skip ahead here in the interest of time for Maleficent, a woman with stubbornness so pervasive it might not be redeemed until her next life, is a long time in traveling. And though for her time is no matter, and in the material world she puts even less stock, the fact of the matter is that in her current incarnation, she becomes older—nearly forty. An age when, for a woman, embodiment comes whether she has prepared for it or not, and here she might be seen, in some versions of the story with her long hair wound around her head, a gown which whispers over the floor, and proverbial horns. Her cheeks are beginning to cave in though she was born with cheekbones meant to remain high. She has not succeeded to the wealth and glory she prophesized would be hers, but instead, achieved a private notoriety for revenge in the shape of sexual betrayals, affecting those who risked becoming close to her. We find her here in her mythologized exile, the outskirts of which she waits to be drawn from, or ‘invited’ elsewhere. She lives in an unorthodox dwelling, a yurt, within earshot of the interstate north of New York City, on a road where the poor tend to live. She is here because her work has never been ‘accepted’ and she cannot give it up, so she survives on the bare minimum. This round hut in the midst of houses drew her for its solitariness, its strangeness, and atop its branched ceiling there is a window, an eye, which takes in and condenses the passing of the sun and moon, condensing too her own scope to the smallest bodily a human being can have. Having never even attempted to don a career or a full-time job and thus pay off those college loans, she is barred from all traditional means of acceptance and visibility and can own no house and lease no car. Her mother is dead and beyond feeling the pain of what she would have considered her daughter’s shunning of life. She is too good for it, is the truth, and ironically that pride has led her to being eligible for only the most transient and minimum wage of jobs. She tends to work long term in places which highschoolers consider decent enough for a summer. Her pride is something she suffers from under these conditions, which seems to die a daily death like the sun.

            She goes to work down the road at a greenhouse where she hunches behind a wheelbarrow and presses soil into pots all day long so the farmer she works for can sell his spring ephemerals. Her hours are short so she might come home for her children who she had with different men whose trails through her life have run cold. A boy and a girl. The boy has a dark eye and a discerning personality. If people happen by their yurt and ooh and ahh at it, the boy glowers, and he and his mother will laugh later amongst themselves, mocking those who think they chose this life, rather than happened upon it circumstantially, a situation that typically terrifies the many. Maleficent and her boy, laughing, will murmur after them—if you like it so much, why don’t you try living in one room with your whole family? A room very like a lair. This little yurt once part of an apple tree farm and now boasting four scraggly trees which produce indigestible apples. It is her lair simply because she never gets the relief of leaving it, and such lurking imbues with psychic protection and a thickness, as the denseness of South American jungles. Her gifts were not sanctioned or awarded by society, would not be recognized or ‘invited,’ and such repressions always become a darkness. And in some rare cases, an entire person becomes that darkness, her embodiment being all that has been shunned. Such a person, having never given in, cannot take a vacation from her home. Yet home it remains.

            She is part of a women’s group now, who meet online. Women who covet inner healing rather than outer wealth, though it is thinly veiled that the more healed one is the greater the wealth that comes. Maleficent, the most magnificently healed of them all, having survived the darkest road, has obviously reserved her cash in for a later moment not yet experienced. Yet, beneath her sly heterochrome eyes, of gray-green cradling a ring of amber, there is a kind of wealth. She has healed the diseases of her psyche, and thus her body. She knows every plant that grows in a walking or short driving distance as she possesses a rusty car no self-respecting citizen would want to drive. She makes her own medicines, she lets them steep outside in a jar on a full moon. She practices the healing on herself, always on herself, at risk to herself, for this capacity for abandon has always been her touchstone. Thus, she deals in advice from her position of exile. One of her many tightlipped paradoxes.

            It is the end of winter. The back of the yurt is a swamp at this time, to be waded through only with bare feet or rain boots to arrive at a little pond the nearby residents think not worth anyone’s while and throw metal pans and plastic garbage into. Maleficent patiently drags these things out by literally entering the pond, because she knows that despite the proximity to the highway and the evident pollution, little coy fish live here and bull frogs and small snapping turtles. Not to mention that it is her pool of contemplation.

            She is a silent one who watches the crows fight about the powerlines, or the hawks balance on the wind, or the vultures circle; these are the birds of her area, lovers of the highway where wayward deer and rabbits are often left for dead. She cooks all her own food from scratch so that she might have the best of what can be afforded, and gardens also, saving the seeds from yester years. And she has a lover—who helps her parent the two children, and, praise be to God, does not have her corrosive pride, and keeps a job, a normal job. She has called to herself a blue-collar man who, like her, prefers to work with his hands and keep his mind elsewhere. He has his own mythic history, as extreme as hers but divergent, toeing the line of schizophrenia, and some nights he has said to her he’s plannin’ on going his own way and walking down the highway. He sees that no one here trusts him and he can trust no one back, and since everybody’s using him, he’s better off alone. Maleficent then balances her steely eyes upon him with such a stare that the reality of what he is doing sinks down upon him, and the spell breaks. He will sit down and put his head in his hands.

            During his breaks in sanity, she breaks, too, screams, cries, and considers dropping the children at relatives’ houses, far and away, and becoming a nomad. But this man, of mixed race, cocoa-pod brown skin and nappy hair, with big muscular shoulders, hunkers the svelte Maleficent down, apologizes, and returns to his job felling trees. He has never been led into a mire by the gorgeousness of his own dreams, and his inescapability from stark reality led to his unconsciously choosing schism. He escapes without meaning to and travels across universes without actually moving an inch. While Maleficent has no excuse, her escaping and exile have been of her own choosing, the guilt of which makes her back ache to this day.

            She walks often with a hood over her face through the woods, black or violet, of course. When she buried her mother, she watched her die with curiosity rather than grief. And she watches with curiosity how a hawk dares hunt a crow in the sky above her house. Her partner has off today, and they take to the busy road where cars have to swerve to avoid them and walk down by a lake where beavers make their homes. This place, like their own very lives, is not only not part of progressive development but threatened by it, the anxiousness of upstarts to turn a profit. Apparently it may be turned into a landfill, but at present is left alone. Here they dive down a path once made for local conservatives to drive their quads through the woods. They pass where old mattresses have been thrown away and spring’s early toad-lily flowers poke through an earth sprinkled with broken glass. To the back lake no one sees. They hold hands, and she kisses him sometimes. He will look at her when she is not looking. She knows everything about him for he has told it all to her, or she has called it out of him, as she calls all the old stories to her feet, but he knows next to nothing about her. And what he does know makes him recoil. So he no longer asks. They come upon the beaver habitat where trees are gnawed to pencil points and knocked to the ground and perfectly smooth chips of wood are littered about. There is a line of twigs, brambles, and leaves at the end of this lake, containing it, and the beaver den on the far side, a hut of sticks. Some local mallards are just swimming about under the sheaves of sun that do not reach them on the shore beneath a canopy of maple and pine.

            “We don’t need to have our own baby if it will cause too much stress. It might just not be meant to be,” Maleficent utters, for rather than expansion her path does nothing but wind down and down into the deeps of renunciation. Her long dark hair is creating a soft helmet of warmth over her scalp as she looks out to the lake.

            He says nothing, being no oracle like her. Often, especially in the winter, she reads tarot cards and sees what they have to say to her. Though she has not succeeded in the world, her skills are well developed with the other-world, and though, being fallen from grace, she receives no startling visions and is cursed to short-sightedness in the mundane, she reads symbols from her distance, deciphers languages. Sometimes she makes money doing readings at a local shop, wearing brass jewelry shaped like the old symbols, as would befit a fallen queen down on her luck.

            They had left their old job of toiling together like serfs on an old lady’s estate so that Maleficent might have another shot at being queen of the world, or publishing her writing, and so that they might have enough time and space to make their own baby before she turns forty. But alas, like usual, all that met Maleficent was the void—her lair and a silence, which in this world of progress and time is money spells out to her her lack. No one will publish her sacrificial tales. All the closed doors and deficiency of means makes him break down and disassociate; he ceased smiling at her, and she tore at him until he was snapped in two and weeping, and asked her forgiveness for always running away when times were hard. “My mom always said not to tell nobody what’s going on when we were growing up, not to tell child services, not to trust nobody. So, I just always kept it in, disassociated. I suppose it’s not relevant anymore though, since we are together and living our best life.”

            They look out over the beaver pond at the budding trees scrawling their shapes across the lake and the silently sailing mallards. It is not the right time of day for the beavers who swim at dawn or late in the dusk.

            She whispers his name.

            “Yeah?” he says, while she leans into his hefty shoulder, bare in this chilly weather for he does not seem to feel the cold.

            “If we’re not going to have a baby, then what was the point of you taking such a crazy job and having to take care of all of us? I should never have had us leave where we worked together on the estate, where it was so beautiful and we helped each other. I only did that because I thought—I thought I should honor my dream since I was a child and not give it up. But I am just completely delusional, I realize that now, and I gave up work I could have respected myself for, gave up time I could have spent with you rather than us both off by ourselves now at the mercy of jobs and hours that could break us.”

            “No… you’re not delusional. I believed in you too. I still believe. The job may break me but so what, I’ve been broken before.”

            “But it will be my fault. I can’t bear any more guilt on my shoulders. I feel like I am being crushed down to the leaves. There is no more power left in me.”

            “Sure there is, you hold all of us down. You feed us every day, wash our clothes, take care of the house, you do everything.”

            “Mhm…”

            “And you’re not remembering that job correctly. We were the old lady’s slaves and always working with her broken tools, and we had to drive over an hour away to her estate with the car breaking down.”

            “That’s true…”

            Then he turned with her and they began their walk back along the compromised forest floor, that yet, had trees as tall and as cambric as ancient times.

            There are no more primeval woods protecting her, which would mercilessly claim those who lose their way, most especially great innocent beauties whose sweet eyes invite response and whose lips call people closer. A person of such light that the darkness is made watchful. Those dense walking forests are gone, and Maleficent lives where she lives, on the outskirts of society, where no one who has their shit together would choose to live, though it might be the right place to raise a beautiful Aurora. Yes, Maleficent’s daughter is named Aurora, but is not the first she has known.

            She named this little doe-eyed girl after a woman who came and went in her life, whose wide-eyed trustingness was a fair namesake for the little girl. This woman had caught her first baby born in a room that might as well as have been hell. Though there was snow on the ground, and steam issuing from the tops of chimneys across Brooklyn. Maleficent had had to run away with the infant afterwards or suffer abuse and defacement, and this first Aurora, princess to a rock and roll fortune, took her in. Aurora lived in a spare but vast loft where there were plants in pots that towered over six feet high and still could not reach the ceilings. There were plush couches and a California king-sized bed made to feel small by the long draping hush of violet curtains. The windows of her loft overlooked the Williamsburg Bridge, as if to symbolize that Aurora would live a life of scaling distances and crossing over deep waters. She had never had to flee or suffer the ignominy of proving herself. She was born into what she had, and she wore it naturally; her beauty was natural, her face glowing. They took to each other right away, the starkly damaged dusky beauty, Maleficent, and the light eyed, fair-skinned Aurora who took her without thought into her home, leant her a small bed, offered her clothes, fed her, bought her expensive vegan ice-cream, and walked the streets with her, their two sons in strollers side by side.

            Aurora, welcome in the world, photographed, invited on tour so her beautiful sonorous voice might cascade into innumerable hearts. She was so haunting on stage, full hips, lovely breasts, her glowing skin and bright maybe a little somnambulist movement, looking people into their eyes and taking them at their word. Visited often by her mother and her sisters, she had Maleficent introduced to her whole family, welcome at holiday dinners, at which Maleficent sat in silence, only listening, passing the potatoes with some embarrassment.

            For Maleficent is not awake to the life of outer appearances from which she had been offered first false and then an absence of nourishment. She is alive only to the underneath currents, and into this she surveyed with power.

            Aurora had had a child with a man who was a go-between, a dethroned prince of sorts, a busker of the subway. Irish descent, a crooked nose, the long lean limbs of a man who might have galloped on a horse and broken through rose bushes, but in these days toiled at music festivals and on long bus trips where he wanted to reach people with his wounded magnanimity. He and Maleficent shared one glance and mutual efforts in glory were exchanged, as well as something secret Aurora had never taken part in—loss, shame, ignominy. This man knew that in spades, having once been a runaway and an alcoholic.

            It is for another tale, of summer and the noxious scent of geraniums, that might cinch the connection between these three, but we will summarize with the generalization that Maleficent never had any boundaries or self-imposed limitations, and not much respect. She had not cultivated any, having never received what she expected from her unseen journeys and her sacrifices. You could also say, perhaps, she had not enough self-love. She had not yet come to the humble breaking moment of realizing that real loving of another comes through decent loving of yourself. In the dark, after finding him at a club, she opened her legs to this man and learned all his secrets, logging them in her chain of memory.

            It is for this woman she named her daughter. The unspoken truth became an imp which hopped along between them weaving tension so thick that Maleficent began serving Aurora to alleviate it. She would light candles for her, babysit her son, clean her house, tuck in her bed, until, afraid of the symbols appearing in her body and around her, decided to whisper her truth. Aurora never spoke to her again.

            An evening in the yurt in which Maleficent is making dinner, pasta with cream sauce and spinach, and the tree frogs, who love the swamp, the peepers, are just beginning to make their night songs heard. In the one room everyone is occupied in different ways while Maleficent strives to feed them all, to tie them together. She grasps the pasta pot, which has a broken off handle, with one hand on this night, thinking she can manage to do things halfway while her mind is elsewhere, and the boiling water tips back on her and pours gingerly down her leg.

            With a scream and then breath reduced to gasping, she sits back on the floor, tears off her leggings and has her startled family bring her rags and cold water. She soaks her scalded leg. Not one to ultimately blame anyone but herself, nor to trust the modern day medical system to care for her—all injuries having personal, psychic roots—she will tend to herself. Outlier from cradle to the grave. Her skin is singed off, and beneath is raw and red and weeping and this she shadows in deep clay. The next morning, after a sleepless night, when her son goes off to school and her boyfriend to work, she has Aurora stay with her, who is willing.

            The little girl wipes her forehead, brings her changes of dressing, and attempts to rub her feet, though she is only seven years old.

            Maleficent sits up in bed with the covers thrown off of her and her scalded leg bark-stiff, a deep, pitiful frown on her face.

            “Oh mama, you’ll be okay.”

            “I don’t know that I’ll be okay. I bring too much down on myself and it scares me.”

            “Mama… you’ll be okay.”

            Aurora offers her her simple, sweet smile and Maleficent, attempting at last to be kind, smiles back. Aurora brings her cold water, makes her a sandwich, and when she has a spare moment reads to her from her book. Maleficent stares off gloomily and her stone face is broken up only by helpless tears. In three days, having stuck to her initial impulse while repressing a desire to give up and show up at a hospital, she sees that the clay has protected her burn well enough a delicate layer of new skin has grown over it.    

            It is a year and a half later; the day of a book festival—big and small publishers alike are tending to their tables, securing signs, setting out business cards. Chairs are being scraped over the granite of a parking lot outside of a sprawling park in New York City, the trees poured through with sun. Freshly printed books are spread out or stacked or laid open on shelves for the public to peruse. Groups of people tied by income and ambition to certain organizations gather together, talk, clip on ID cards.

            Maleficent walks through the alley of booksellers alone, carrying a bag on her shoulder. She is five months pregnant and dressed in a black body suit, her hair swept between her shoulder blades, a wide, black hat shading her face. She approaches a small, empty table and spreads out a lacey shawl and then her own books which she has handbound in pelt-like velvet. She sits down at this table and holds her hands in her lap. As people pass by, they see, with her tilting back her hat, the dark, radiant eyes and a containment such as the woods preserve through thorns and by way of ticks to warn others not to come too close. Maleficent meets people’s gazes. What she communicates back is the mystery of her own soul.