Month: October 2017

[caption id="attachment_450" align="alignnone" width="376"] Keppner Boxing ring, Athens, GA[/caption] “I like you. Let’s fight.” -Robert Bly One of the first things I did after I got out of the hospital was go to Keppner Boxing, a local ‘old-school’ gym where several prominent fighters trained under the supervision of husband and wife fighters Keith and Lissa Keppner. I’m not the kind of person who has any business in such a place. I’ve been in training all my life to be a poet--a lover, not a fighter. I started with their super-intense cardio class and barely made it through the hour without tapping out. I felt like I was going to puke in front of everyone and I was ashamed of how weak and uncoordinated I was. It was hopeless. This shit just wasn’t for me. Because of my schedule I could only get to one class a week, and every time that class rolled around my mind started putting up very logical excuses….I’m too tired, maybe coming down with something, my shoulder needs to heal, I’ll go next week. But I went anyway. Every time. I always felt thrilled and proud when I made it through another grueling workout. And then something amazing happened: I got better. Don’t get me wrong, it sucked. It sucked for a long time. It still sucks. But there were these little surprises along the way—burts of irrational happiness while I was trying to hold the plank position. The thrill of getting a combination right. Finally.…

Hansel and Gretel ends conventionally when the children are reunited with their father: “then their cares were at end and they lived happily in great joy together.” But that isn’t the end of the story as recorded by the Grimm Brothers. There is a little coda, a tail of the tale, that appears after the end of the story: “My tale is done, A mouse has run. And whoever catches it can make for himself from it a large, large fur cap.” It’s a strange appendage that seems to serve no purpose other than a whimsical nod to the act of storytelling. When a gifted teller (think of Martin Shaw) begins a powerful story, there is a kind of enchanted circle that forms, a mythic space that is often demarcated by “Unce upon a time…” and when the story ends it seems proper to de-invoke the mythic powers by some ritual words. For most stories “they lived happily ever after” serves this function, and that’s initially what I assumed the purpose of this passage was. But since the story already had its happily-ever-after moment, those last lines continued to seem strangely superfluous to me. Nature is not profligate. A story is a living thing, and it evolves the way animals do. Like a snake or a hawk—or even a mouse—there is no wasted flesh. I consulted the excellent annotated resource Surlalune for help: “This ending reflects the oral sources from which the tale came. Storytellers would often end or begin…