Light the Way with the Laterna Magica

Reading the Laterna Magica is like being browbeaten senseless with a moral stick. It is a thrifty version of life through childhood, love, living, and eventually death and what follows. Each story that follows the other seems equally unrelated to the first and yet they all have a dreamy, childhood thriller story quality. The first section speaks of death in the terms of a literally ferryman who is waiting to take the narrator away, and as he walks through the town he sees the people there and reflects upon them. There are the children, newly born into the world who are reluctant to leave it, just as humans are reluctant to leave life, as if we are yet children in the terms of out immortal souls.

And there follows tales that reflect what the narrator has found to be the truths behind the public masks that the townsfolk wear. The ghosts, the three weavers are possibly the spinners of fate, the maid, the matron and the hag, who spin our lives through time. As the children playfully plan their futures, fate is “sizing up the two brothers.” But a point is made that not all plans are completed, but the journey changes to fit the adventurer. Take Jakob and Urd, two unfortunates who have be left lame by the world. At first, it may seem, to the public and to religion that they are deviants in their untraditional love but it only brings about the peace. In the guise of devils, white birds bring joy and song. They have made their own lives just as Stubborn Stina has. No one understands her desire to be alone. There is no “great loneliness” for her. She is happy and comfortable with her silence and waiting. And yet, society believes that she needs a man to be happy, to be married. The wait for her misbegotten Thomas gives an excuse for her freedom and independence, and his death only highlights that she waits only for herself and not for him. And the Miracle, the absolute freedom, when age and disabilities cease to hold back the soul and it may wander as strongly as ever. In childhood we would believe such things, just as these tales may be told by them in darkened rooms, under covers and taken for the magical miracles they are. But the Miracle is squandered and unbelieved by the ‘rational’ world. The pastor, religion, stems the impulse to believe in it, to close the third eye, the sight of imagination and truth. The pastor tells the deacon to blind his eyes and bind his lips so that none will know and all will be in peace in ignorance.

And yet the narrator, on this journey through the viewfinder perspective of behind closed doors finds that the truth, the good, the human is the greatest joy. For here is God, to pick you up when you fall, to grant miracles when you find fate within yourself. The child who traveled far with his footstool-ship was more alive inside than the one who imaged a safe life and saw nothing beyond the stool than just a stool. It wasn’t a ship or a journey, just something familiar and the same. But to seek after the Laterna Magica, to believe in it blindly without knowing its full meaning or purpose brought the greatest happiness. It is like the innocent faith in life itself or in religion. We need not define our lives through the collective or through the opinions of supposed representatives. Stina, Urd, Jakob, Old Tonnes, they created their own fates that were far happier than society could have provided for them. To the world, they were lame, they were old, senile, and stubborn. Their lives were wasted. And though things may not come about as they were planned. Though imagination may not come to fruition, the faith itself is enough to sustain.

Well...that was a nice beating.

Heinesen, William. Laterna Magica. Fjord Press: Seattle, 1987.