Goblin Market: Come Buy, Come Buy

A Field Guide to the Internet as Fairyland

Hello, friends! As promised, here is the first part of my deep dive into what fairy stories can teach us about life on the internet. My goal with this series is to integrate several different ways of looking at how we relate to the internet, through my own experiences as an Orthodox Christian and an author of creative fiction, as a thinker who is interested in the ways scientific and spiritual realities intersect, and as a person who both likes people in general and likes to think about what makes them tick. What was originally planned to be a single piece has grown into at least two, possibly three, pieces centered on the same poem, plus some other stories and ideas I’d like to address eventually. This is the first essay in what will hopefully become a connected series that explores ways we can venture into the fairyland of the internet and not only come back in one piece, but potentially better equipped to live well.

(Also coming soon: an end of summer newsletter post talking about House of Leaves, Piranesi, and Bachelard, plus some meditations on houses and labyriths, with updates about the flash fiction party prizes, our upcoming next round of flash fiction, and my next children’s book and novel.)

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Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Okay, I admit it. I’ve made unpacking the “internet is actually fairyland” metaphor into a new personal quest. As a model, it is simply far more powerful than any other model I’ve ever encountered. Most importantly, it has far reaching explanatory power, being able to sort a much more complex range of internet engagements and uses. This is particularly important because the previously dominant model of screen addiction has proven to be really unsatisfactory. I have personally observed too many conflicting and inconsistent cases. Plus, the screen addiction model has no space to account for the strange and self-contradictory phenomena of its anti-technology corners. (I’ve known Mennonites and Amish all of my life, have neighbors who used the phone at the gas station to schedule doctor appointments. That’s what people who actually refuse the siren-song of technology look like.)

However, fairyland as a interpretive framework elegantly reconciles all of it, and from my thinking, this reconciliation is not overly reductive. I believe this is the case because perceiving and interacting with layers of reality is a timeless, universal human experience that appeals not only to our very modern, enlightened, left-brained-a-la-McGilchrist, consciously deliberative pre-frontal cortex mediated thought processes, but also to everything else in the mind-matrix that is left out of that description. Plus, the fairyland metaphor has the significant bonus of being rooted in our most ancient stories and myths. By using this model, we can draw upon a toolbox that is accessible to everyone who has ever encountered such a story, and we can evangelize and empower the ignorant by exercising the most natural of human gifts. We can tell each other the right stories.

Let’s read a poem story together, and I’ll show you what I mean.

For the full, uninterrupted text, click here: Goblin Market, By Christina Rossetti

Morning and evening
Maids heard the goblins cry:
“Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy:

The stage is set: fairyland, the goblin market, has something to sell us. If you can’t see the parallel to the internet here, honey, I can’t help you.

Seriously, though, everyone here is selling something. Some of us are selling actual products or services (Hi, I’m Laura E. Wolfe, I write books...); but even if we’re not directly involved in the commerce of things, we’re all involved in the economy of ideas. This doesn’t even mean that everyone is rooting for specific ideological camp, though that kind of idea-selling is also commonplace. At the very least, anyone with any kind of online presence is selling an idea of Self: This is how I want you to picture me. These ideas of the self can be used to sell products and ideas/ideologies, but can also be used as a form of magic, in that they are attempts to control the autonomous perceptions of others.

This process of externalizing control has become so normalized, we don’t often see it for the extremely enchanted, anti-materialist idea it really is. How could one person possibly control the perceptions of others?

Only by interacting with them in a purposeful, curated, disembodied way. This is how we become fey to one another: by using the power of our words/spells and our images/glamour. When the goblins of the poem ask the girls to buy, they show that there is no clear philosophical demarcation between marketing/advertising and magic.

Before we go any further, though, I want to stress that that this kind of magical relating also occurs within the self. The internet user example here is the Lurker, whose interacting is all in passive reception and consumption. In this case, the Lurker is selling an idea of the Self to himself: This is how I want to see myself, this is what I want to believe I am like. He is passively allowing the spells and glamours of others to help him visualize himself in a more desirable way.

Apples and quinces,
Lemons and oranges,
Plump unpeck’d cherries,
Melons and raspberries,
Bloom-down-cheek’d peaches,
Swart-headed mulberries,
Wild free-born cranberries,
Crab-apples, dewberries,
Pine-apples, blackberries,
Apricots, strawberries;—

Look at how indisputably good these things are! There is nothing suspicious in this list, no snips or snails or puppy dog tails. Fruit nourishes our bodies as well as satisfies our tongues. The goblins and the internet in general very often offer us access to the satisfaction of very normal desires, whether they are material or relational in nature.

In Orthodox theology, there is an understanding of sin as passion—a corruption of something that is either intrinsically good or at least morally neutral. Thus, sin is not a force of evil that is dualistically opposed to forces of good; it rather begins as misuse, leads to corruption, and only after a process of demonosis does it become the travesty of its original image. This is how wholesome fruit is also able to symbolize temptation; not because fruit is bad, but because our desire for it is susceptible to corruption. We can come to want it in the wrong place, at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons:

All ripe together
In summer weather,—
Morns that pass by,
Fair eves that fly;

Here is the first hint of the otherworldliness of this market: these fruits that seem so good to us are offered outside of seasonality, unmoored from the tick-tock march of chronos. The more you are rooted in the natural world, the more in tune you become to the inexorable rolling of the wheel of time: daffodils are followed by tulips, strawberries are followed by blueberries; eggshells fallen from nests lead to feathers floating from molts. There’s a heartbreaking folk song, “Turn Around,” that captures this unbearable inevitability in our own human lives: “Where are you going, my little one, little one? Where are you going, my baby, my own? Turn around, and you’re two; turn around, and you’re four; turn around, and you’re a young girl going out of the door.” Life is short and goes by very fast. Blink, and you’ll miss it.

All awareness of chronos, of the linear progress of time, will also lead to an awareness of death. And so we seek escape from this terrifying inevitability through the promise of immortality and eternity that fairyland has to offer us. Fairykind are not mortal, and they do not suffer death the way we do. This is how the temporality of fairyland becomes anti-liturgical: it invites engagement on its own unmoored time frame, instead of waiting for the proper rhythm and season to present itself, instead of conforming itself to the boundaries and forms set for it. Fairyland is always slippery.

Sweet to tongue and sound to eye;
Come buy, come buy.”

The next stanza of the poem makes a surprising connection: there is a confusion of spirituality embedded in our engagement with fairyland. We are hybrid beings, physical and spiritual, but fairies? Their physicality is much more energetic than material; they are different. Of course, energy and matter are really the same thing in two different forms, and I think this may be where we get tripped up spiritually. This is especially so because mystical thinkers have lately enjoyed using metaphors from quantum science to describe their experiences; however, I firmly believe that the energetic realm, as mysterious as it is, is actually still part of our material existence, though at a level we don’t have the sensory apparatus to interact with.

As a genuine aspect of material existence, the energetic realm operates according to natural laws, even if we don’t always understand them. This helps explain how digital “addiction”— or a foray into fairyland— can have a neurochemical component that takes advantage of a physical vulnerability as well as be a vector of spiritual danger. Of course, these things are made more complicated by the fact that the physical, energetic and spiritual aspects of existence frequently interpenetrate one another, making it easy to misinterpret energetic messages as exclusively spiritual, or vice versa. The truth is that physical, energetic and spiritual reality are all part of the same fabric, and do not often act independently of one another— this being one of the crucial implications of the Incarnation of the Word of God.

Because we are so dense, physically, materially, we tend to interact with the energetic realm as if it is the same as the spiritual realm, not realizing that there is an entire other level of reality superimposed on our material being. Thus, as physical beings, we possess both corporeality/materiality and energetic reality, though that energetic reality is often beyond our comprehension.

On top of this, we are spiritual beings, able to also grow and learn to interact with spiritual reality according to the development of our nous, the eye of our heart. It may seem like the distinction doesn’t matter, but allowing for these realities to be different creates space for the idea of fairyland as a different plane of existence (energetic) that is still separate from the sacred (spiritual), even when they interact with one another. Thus, in the poem,

Laura bow’d her head to hear,
Lizzie veil’d her blushes:

Our two main characters, the sisters Laura and Lizzie, react to their vision of the goblin market with religious, spiritual postures: bowing and veiling. One is a safe response to the energetic realm; one is dangerous.

Of the two postures, Laura’s bowing is the worse. Bowing is something we do to gods in the spiritual realm, not to other creaturely beings; to offer worship to the wrong kind of thing is spiritually disastrous for the worshipper. In contrast, Lizzie veils herself, embodying healthy shame¹ in the face of an existential boundary. Laura gives of herself spiritually to the goblin strangers; Lizzie reserves herself and cautions her sister:

“We must not look at goblin men,
We must not buy their fruits:
Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry thirsty roots?”

Who really has the discernment to interact well with the energetic and the spiritual realms? Who has the boldness to declare that he can determine the boundaries between the one and the other? Who has the audacity to claim to be able to teach others the ways to walk these paths?

When Lizzie tells Laura not even to look, she is cautioning her sister against the temptations of curiosity and boredom. Laura is curious about the goblins; their magical novelty stands in contrast to the quotidian normalcy of everyday life.

Hey, this was a sticking point for me for a long time as a child and young adult. No one ever explained to me why curiosity was a sin and not a virtue; in fact, curiosity was actively celebrated in schools as the impetus to learning. It was only much later that I learned that the same word, curiosity, was being used to define two very different kinds of desire. Virtuous curiosity is simply the openhearted desire to learn, to pay attention to creation as it presents itself to one’s awareness, to contemplate the world we can perceive. Vicious curiosity, on the other hand, is the direction of attention towards things that are not intended to be known, bypassing the wealth of things laid before us to contemplate. Curiosity that is a vice dismisses all of the wonderful creation before us, and instead insists on knowing the esoteric right here, right now, despite the spiritual instruction that we are given this life as preparation for that coming knowledge. Curiosity, like all passions, has a right place and a right time, and can become disordered when we do not honor this.

Even in typing out this distinction, I see that it’s still not easy to distinguish between the two. After all, how do we determine which knowledge is hidden and waiting for discovery, and which knowledge is hidden and meant to stay that way? “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, then all these things will be added unto you” implies that patience and humility are the reins to place on curiosity, allowing knowledge to unfold in the right way at the right time.

Another, more practical answer is in the relationship between the sisters. “Laura, Laura,/ You should not peep at goblin men.” Lizzie says. The beloved sister, soul friend, observes in her sister the wrong kind of curiosity. She sees that the direction of Laura’s gaze, her attention, is in service of the wrong kind of curiosity and the assuaging of boredom. The poem tells us that in order to see ourselves clearly, we need the soul-mirror of someone who loves us.

Another clue about Laura’s susceptibility to the goblins is in her implied boredom. She has lost the ability to see her material life as magical, and so seeks the spice of magic from another source. She has become susceptible to acedia, the spiritual state of the noon day demon in which we become unable to perceive the beauty of creation rightly. This boredom/acedia is the internal pre-condition produced by an already existing tendency towards disembodiment and disengagement. We make ourselves more vulnerable to it the more we indulge ourselves in envy, in vainly imagining ways the world would be better if it were made according to our understanding. One physical manifestation of this passion is anhedonia, in which a person loses the ability to experience pleasure. Again, since the physical, energetic and spiritual realms are interpenetrated, these conditions often present themselves comorbidly.

So often we turn to the internet when we’re experiencing tedium. If we understand this tedium as something external to us, then it makes sense to try to fix it through stimulation, entertainment, and curiosity. If, however, this state is something that begins within us, giving in the to impulse to correct boredom with external stimulation is exactly the wrong thing. It’s peeping at goblin men.

And, of course, Laura does look. What she sees next is so revealing:

“One had a cat’s face,
One whisk’d a tail,
One tramp’d at a rat’s pace,
One crawl’d like a snail,
One like a wombat prowl’d obtuse and furry,
One like a ratel tumbled hurry skurry.
She heard a voice like voice of doves
Cooing all together:
They sounded kind and full of loves
In the pleasant weather.”

These are costumes, disguises, performative attitudes. They revel in their otherworldliness, delight in their extreme and manufactured portrayals. These goblins are entertaining! They are the answer to our boredoms, the satisfaction of our curiosities. Cooing, kind, full of love— these are the cheap flatteries of strangers with whom you don’t share a street or apartment hallway or bathroom. They can afford the cheap, performative affections of the stage.

Yet what is cheap for the actor is dear to the audience. When Laura admits she has no coin to spend, the goblins ask for her innocence instead:

“You have much gold upon your head,”
They answer’d all together:
“Buy from us with a golden curl.”
She clipp’d a precious golden lock,
She dropp’d a tear more rare than pearl,

Hair is associated with strength of self in traditional cultures across the globe, and gold does the work of recalling a saintly halo from religious iconography. The tears Laura sheds here are the tears of her heart, the sign of her openness and vulnerability. Not only is Laura curious, she’s completely oblivious to how the baring of her soul is going to mortally wound her, is going straight for her sense of self and her ability to love.

To make things even worse, the instant she tastes the gorgeous, magical fruits, she finds that they are “Sweeter than honey from the rock”. So, yeah, it turns out that scrolling on the internet is far more interesting and engaging than saying your prayers and meditating on Scripture. I mean, if you’ve been seriously practicing any kind of spiritual discipline for, say, longer than ten years, you may honestly forget how boring and difficult it feels to the novitiate. The rewards are not at all obvious, especially in comparison to how refreshing it is to have one’s immediate desires fulfilled.

Photo by Alina Matveycheva on Unsplash

The rightly ordered fulfilling of desire is exactly what learning to exercise our power of eros is all about. The verb Rossetti uses to describe Laura’s drinking, her fulfilling of desire, is “suck’d”— and it occurs to me that if you’ve never watched a nursing baby, you might not understand how this imagery of desire is even more primal than its typical sexual associations. A new baby is a screaming nervous system of desire— for warmth, for comfort, for safety, and yes, for milk. To nurse a baby (and here I mean nurse as in to actively cuddle a baby while feeding her— breast or bottle) is to effectively communicate to a new human soul that desire can be fulfilled, that eros is relational and embodied and natural to our being. It is the beginning of education in the right use of eros, established on a foundation of trust and love. The Church teaches us not that our desires are wrong or evil, but that they are extremely powerful, and so must be approached in the right ways at the right times in the right contexts.

The trouble with our desires is that they always seem to run the risk of growing bigger than we can handle, precisely because they become disconnected from relationship, embodiment, and our natural selves. In the case of the internet, that growth and explosion of desire is a feature, not a bug. Ever since the inception of formal studies in psychology, its ideas have been marshalled in service of economic growth and weaponized against us. When we venture forth into the the goblin market of the internet, we will always be found by the growth of our desires, in whatever directions are easiest. Like water, our desire flows in the direction of least possible resistance. And in this metaphor, the digital fairyland is a flood.

One of the hallmarks of this environment is what Laura experiences next: a loss of time. She “knew not was it night or day / As she turn’d home alone.” Without the constant remembrance of death it’s easy to miss how horrific our daily killing of time is— an hour lost to deleting spam emails, to mindlessly scrolling or even “intellectually engaging” is an hour that has been devoured by locusts. We are relational creatures, after all, meant for beholding one another and relating in an I-Thou fashion with each other. Truly, it’s only this way of being that stands any chance of surviving the ultimate encounter with Death. Only that which is joined to Jesus Christ can survive that supreme trauma and be resurrected.

These are hard words, especially for people stuck in their own heads, who are lost, wandering the hill of fairyland. All of our works here are ephemeral. Do I really think my angel will read from my Substack posts in my defense at the Dread Judgment Seat?

It is the most common relational disaster that next comes between the sisters: Envy, which is also called malice by the holy fathers.

You see, once Laura has tasted the goblin fruits, she can never replicate the experience. She is not marketed to anymore in the same way as Lizzie, who still resists the goblins’ thrall. And because Laura can no longer hear the goblins’ call, can no longer see the promises of the market, the fact that her sister can see and hear these things causes tremendous resentment :

Laura kept watch in vain
In sullen silence of exceeding pain.

Envy begins to kill her. She dissolves into daydreams unmoored from relational reality, vain imaginings that cause her to fade and sink into herself. Envy next begets sloth, and she no longer even desires to interact with her home environment.

I want to contrast this to the right use of imagination within the context of the home, as described by Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space: “I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” It is not the use of imagination itself that is dangerous, but the uncontained fantasy that leaves the vessel of the home for the adventure of the uncanny hills. The care of our homes, the living within them, reify our homes as receptacles for our abstracted selves. When we stop caring for them, stop interacting with our physical environment as an important part of our relational selves, our imaginations lose the rootedness that protects them from abuse by abstracted spiritual forces.

I think it’s fair to say that anyone who has ever browsed the internet has at some point done so at the expense of doing the dishes, mopping the floor, bleaching the bathroom, and weeding the garden. What we consistently avoid seeing and admitting to ourselves is that the care and keeping of our homes, of our physical embodied spaces, is the most necessary, foundational antidote to losing ourselves in fairyland. Insidiously, we even invite our fairyland adventures into our quotidian tasks in the form of constant podcasts and audio entertainment running in the background of our daily work. We forget that the boundaries of our homes are sacred boundaries, that to protect us from penetration by unseelie forces is one of their very basic functions. When we care for our homes, we relate in an embodied way to the very space around us, and we become more firmly grounded in physical reality. This grounding is essential for tethering us during our energetic and spiritual adventures, and is echoed for us resoundingly by the embodied liturgical practices of the church.

Photo by matthew Feeney on Unsplash

YIKES, friends. On that utterly terrifying and convicting note, I’m going to divide the writing of the rest of this essay into two or three parts. This is as good a place to pause and think as any. I’m going to go clean something and spend some time in the sunshine, and I hope you do, too. After all, it is only the real and relational that will survive, so I’d better go put the best part of my energy where is really matters. In shallah, I’ll post the next part of the poem and my thoughts about it next week. Until then, let’s glory in these particular moments of the space-time continuum that are given to us for experiencing!

1. See The Ethics of Beauty by Timothy Patitsas and Face to Face by Father Stephen Freeman for an explanation of what Orthodox Christians mean by healthy shame. In short, it is the healthy posture, or affect, of creaturely humility. Not false self-hatred or any kind of toxic garbage.