(My A to Z Blog Challenge theme this year is Beyond Pomegranate & Thorns, my brand-sparkly-new collection of short stories, poems, and art inspired by fairy tales, myths, and folklore, which is released TODAY! If you wish to rush right out and procure a copy of your very own, it’s now available from the usual on-line behemoth, or from the distributor IngramSpark, or contact me if you want your copies signed or accompanied by anything else from my web site.) Like many fairy tales, “Rapunzel” includes sex and violence, trauma and healing, and lots of very odd things without always much in the way of reasonable explanation. (If you’re only familiar with Disney’s version “Tangled,” you should definitely read the original here.) So again, there are lots of interesting places one could go with this story (and indeed, Disney’s version is an interesting re-imagining in its own right) but for me, it started to dawn on me that every part of Rapunzel’s story could be looked at through a botanical lens. She’s even named for a salad! And I began to imagine that eventually, after her long and happy life with her prince and their twins, she would die and be buried, and her long Rapunzel hair, still botanical, would become a sort of mycelial network. Here’s how the poem starts… The salad the mother craved became
The nascent infant in the nourished womb.
The garden the father robbed became
The nursery in which she grew.
The tower the sorceress built became
A tree of stone, as tall and straight
As the surrounding pines, and she, Rapunzel,
Spirit locked within that rocky trunk, became
Its dryad.
Her hair, like aerial roots, became
A pathway for the witch,
And then the man.
The thorns in which she fell became
The heartwood spine of a woman
Pruned from her mother’s arms,
Cast out from her walled garden,
Uprooted from her spirit tree.
Self-sown in the wilderness, she became
A wildflower, a weed,
Until her very tears were healing sap…
Being coy, I haven’t included the whole poem, despite the spoiler in my explanation and illustration. I still want to tease you a little - after all, the book is released today!
I had a very good time designing and carving all the little details of the rubber block print illustration, but it is a rather unusual subject for me. I printed a somewhat smaller edition of the originals than usual because I wasn’t at all sure whether people would want to buy this and hang it up in their home. But it turns out that some people do really love it, and there’s only one left available for sale. I guess I’m so used to being an oddball that I’m not always very good at knowing whether or not other people will share my particular oddball sensibilities – although in this case I am probably actually less attracted to the macabre than the average. *shrug* In any case, the larger plant growing in the middle is an attempt at what the actual herb rapunzel looks like (Campanula rapunculus. Admittedly, no one knows with 100% certainty what herb was referred to in the fairy tale because of the variability of common names of plants, but this is the best guess.)
The moral of Rapunzel is that you are what your mother eats, apparently.
But also, don’t be too uptight; why not let your hair down sometimes?
What’s the longest you’ve ever grown your hair? (And yes, beards count too, in case ZZ Top is reading my blog.) And how do you feel about macabre art, decor, or fashion?
[Picture: The Herb Rapunzel, rubber block print by AEGNydam, 2024 (Image from NydamPrints.com).]
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