Survive Fairyland with Right Relationship

Resist corrupted music, the descent into acedia, and the temptation of moral superiority

Welcome back, friends!

Last week, we touched on several ways the internet-as-fairyland metaphor works to help us navigate a healthier way of engaging with the digital landscape, and how our traditional stories about fairyland offer us a number of tools to map this journey. We are using “Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti to show exactly how we can take these story lessons and translate them to our digital lives.

Photo by Mark Tegethoff on Unsplash

Our first observation was that the internet is a goblin market. Everyone is selling something, marketing and advertising function as magic, and even lurkers participate in this by selling themselves a self-image. We briefly looked at the Orthodox theology of desire, and how we understand sin as not inherent evil, but corrupted passion. Good things, like the fruits in the goblin market and many things on the internet, can be used for harmful purposes and for bad reasons. Desires can be misdirected in place, time, and motive. We explored how curiosity is an example of this; how good curiosity manifests as attention to relationships and creation while bad curiosity bypasses present reality for esoteric knowledge.

We also observed that both fairyland and the internet manifest temporal disruption. Both operate outside of natural seasonality and can cause us to “lose time,” and this lack of proper rhythm constitutes an anti-liturgical way of being. We use both landscapes as an escape from the awareness of death through a false promise of immortaility and unmooring from linear time.

We spoke a little about the tripartite human experience, how the internet and fairyland lean heavily into the energetic realm at the expense of the spiritual and the physical, and how we can easily conflate energetic and spiritual experiences. This is a difficult theme, because we tend to be dualistic in our approach to being, reflexively referring to a Cartesian split between mind and body, collapsing the spiritual into an insufficient model of psychology and technique.

We noted that boredom leading to acedia is a spiritual pre-condition that leads to searching out the internet and fairyland as distractions from reality, leading to a loss of ability to perceive beauty in material life. We found that embodied living, such as is found in authentic relationships with others as well as with engagement our physical spaces, provides spiritual grounding that tethers us to reality during our journeys into the digital landscape.

Wow! That was a lot for the first week. We’re going deeper, though. Are you ready?

After Laura returns from her foray into fairyland, she meets her sister Lizzie at the gate, they speak about Laura’s adventure, and the two girls get ready for bed. There’s an important piece of spiritual anthropology hidden here:

“Golden head by golden head,
Like two pigeons in one nest
Folded in each other’s wings,
They lay down in their curtain’d bed:
Like two blossoms on one stem,
Like two flakes of new-fall’n snow,
Like two wands of ivory
Tipp’d with gold for awful kings.
Moon and stars gaz’d in at them,
Wind sang to them lullaby,
Lumbering owls forbore to fly,
Not a bat flapp’d to and fro
Round their rest:
Cheek to cheek and breast to breast
Lock’d together in one nest.”

Yes, Laura has ventured into fairyland, has eaten of the goblin market. But do you know what she has not lost? Her essential goodness and innocence, her creatureliness. Her ability to relate to her sister has been damaged, but not destroyed. And though she has suffered psychic injury that she hasn’t yet fully diagnosed within herself, Laura retains even her own agency. We see these symbols practically iterated in list form: halos, fledglings, innocent sleep, flowers, snowflakes, and scepters. Nature itself acknowledges the innocence and agency of the girls on multiple levels; not just the physical but also the celestial, the pneumatic, and even the sophian/sophiological. The placement of the moon/stars, wind and owls here, with their giving of blessings, fully supports our insistence on the separation and interpenetration of the three realms: physical, energetic, and spiritual. Furthermore, the intersection between these realms evokes the noetic as being the confluence of all three of the mentioned powers: heaven, spirit and mind.

It’s no accident that these three are often mistaken for one another, and that the internet is a great contributor to this confusion. I don’t want to get lost in the weeds here, but I really believe that much of our confusion comes from flattening all the different layers of non-physical existence into a single thing. For the moment, just picture reality as layers. We primarily experience the world physically, and our physical experience largely includes the mental. Our mental experience, however, overlaps into a layer of reality that is more energy than matter (though remember, both are ultimately the same thing). There is then another layer of reality, the spiritual, that interpenetrates the other realms. This is how, in classical mythologies, we can understand a celestial being as multiple kinds of things at once. The moon is a rock in “the heavens”, but it is also an entity that can hold energetic (mind) and spiritual meaning.

In Orthodox spirituality, noetic is the adjective that refers to our nous, which is sometimes called “the eye of the heart” or “the eye of the soul.” Unlike some western viewpoints, this faculty is not synonymous with the mind. It is, rather, the point within the person that is capable of spiritual perception, that is subject to cloudiness and distortion when neglected or used inappropriately. With this understanding, we can see how in Orthodox anthropology, one of the tasks of the sanctified human being is to unite the different levels of reality and allow them to interact more fully with each other.

So how does this relate to the internet as fairyland? Well, because a highly functioning nous is going to be significantly more able to navigate the many layers of fairyland, including both its intentional and unintentional deceptions. It’s the philosophical behind the practical, the mechanics behind how we can sort through the many confusions of the digital world. Up until this point, I have emphasized only right relating to others and to physical space, but the next layer of that is right relating to the spiritual. However, we cannot even begin to do that until the first two are in order. Which is why even getting innocently distracted by the curiosities on the internet, even in forms that are not evil in and of themselves, eventually produces dissociation from reality as it is: first, physically and temporally, then mentally and energetically, leading to an unbridgeable gap between lived experience and the spiritual realm.

We can get into some pretty wacky stuff on the internet, it’s true. But ultimately, the things that happen here, while they can damage us, even profoundly, cannot fully destroy us. This is worth remembering because the corruption here can make us feel as if it actually does have this power. This may be harder to spot in ourselves, but it’s practically a national pastime to spot in others. We are blind to our own corruption, but can easily see how extreme forms of internet relating damage the perceptions of people we know and care about. Our ability to relate to people who have been othered by the forces of the internet may be damaged, but it is not destroyed.

This is now the solid, main theme of this poem: The antidote to fairyland is right relationship, with the physical world around us and with the people whom we love. This seems very simple, but it explains the observable, highly discrepant instances of how different people interact with video games, for example. There’s been a moral panic over those for a few decades now, and we have ample evidence against a causal relationship between video games and violence, or even video games and social alienation. There are far too many counterexamples for there to be causality. However, the concept of “right relationship” allows us to acknowledge a certain correlation: we do see that in some instances of social alienation or violence, video games play a visible part. This can be true even if we know many other people who are able to enjoy a video game as an occasional pastime or as a social activity with others. A right relationship with a video game is one in which the right order of relationships is honored: people and place before game. People who are filling their relational needs through real relationships with people, physical space, and yes, God, are not going to seek the fulfillment of those relational needs in the aether.

The nugget is the quality of right relationship that an individual has with the physical world and with other human beings, which will be foundational for relating rightly to spiritual reality. The digital landscape is far more dangerous to relationally vulnerable people than it is to people who are rooted in right relationship, and people who are not having their spiritual needs addressed in real life are unprotected. This all means that solving the perils of the digital landscape are not about forbidding adventure, but rather about proper scaffolding and preparation.

There are three practical strategies to take away from this: first, in ourselves, we must assess where we are relationally vulnerable. I submit to you that this is the key to the so-called internet gender wars— that they are being waged by relationally wounded human beings. Second, we have to assess our relationship with the physical world around us, and perhaps acknowledge areas where we are outsourcing tasks that are necessary for our right relating. Third, we must determine how to relate to the spiritual without using the internet as a mediator.

Notice that these strategies are not about managing other people, but rather about relating correctly within our own selves. Only when we have achieved that, can we extend our help and assistance to others around us.

Okay, back to the poem. Next, the girls do their quotidian tasks. As I mentioned in my last little side quest, this does not mean the antidote for being internet crazy is becoming a tradwife (or homesteading cowboy, for that matter). What is does mean is that all of those little things we think of as drudgery, the boring parts of life, have an essential function in tethering us to reality. Further, Rossetti next shows that our attitudes towards these tasks are revelatory:

Fed their poultry, sat and sew’d;
Talk’d as modest maidens should:
Lizzie with an open heart,
Laura in an absent dream,
One content, one sick in part;
One warbling for the mere bright day’s delight,
One longing for the night.

There have been studies in recent years that seems to show a sort of brain lag effect: when you’re reading immersively, then put the book down, your brain continues “reading” for several days afterwards. Apparently the same sort of thing happens when you log off the internet. But we don’t need researchers to tell us something we readily observe in our own experience: the ‘absent dream’ state one gets in when one is preoccupied with any kind of disembodied thought.

Getting lost in fairyland, not being able to log off, and getting stuck inside our own heads are the same category of thing, and keep us from being able to be fully awake to the world. In contrast to Laura’s absent longing, we’re shown a state of joyous wakefulness, in the image of Lizzie as songbird.

This may seem like a sideways observation, but in The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist shows us that before we are language-speaking, tool-using creatures, we are music makers. This is actually how the brain develops! I’ve been observing this process in my youngest this past year, and it’s true— her communication efforts began tonally, with musical inflections and expressions. She’s now saying a bunch of words, but the truth is she’s been speaking “musically” for quite a while.

The foundation of our ability to relate to one another is musical, not textual. And this ability to relate, this musical relating, is one of the first things Laura loses. Her loss is our gain, however, because we can learn to examine our relationship with music and use it as a diagnostic tool for our right relating.

But isn’t there a ton of music on the internet? Doesn’t that disprove this thesis?

This puzzled me for a minute, too, until I realized that “music on the internet” indicates two completely different ways of engaging. The first is in the making and sharing of music, and the second is in consuming content. The trouble with this distinction is that it entirely depends on the posture of the receiver: whether they choose to be a participant or a consumer.

Was music the first victim of technology? Maybe. Prior to recordings, music was largely a social experience, whether one was attending a performance, yowling folk songs at a bar, or singing along at church. I think the universal drive to relate to others through music is part of why video shorts are so beguiling, too— it’s so natural to want to share music with people with whom we are relating. “Hey, check out this dance!” or even, “Let’s learn this one together.”

So here’s the interesting tool to pack in our adventure preparation: We need to ask ourselves about how we relate to music. Are we just consuming content? Can we actively share the music we enjoy with the people around us? This knot is a tricky one, because we’ve been marketed to our whole lives about how our “likes” and “dislikes” in music are part of our personal identity, that we should fit our relationships to our interests in a unidirectional manner, that people who don’t “get” “my music” also do not understand “me”. Thus a medium that is made entirely for relating becomes instead a barrier to relationship, because personal preference is placed on a pedestal.

This is not the only corrupted way of relating to music, for sure. I suspect that when people start to relate to music as if it is “the soundtrack” to their lives, this centering of the self as the star of the movie is a fundamentally selfish, maladaptive posturing of relating. It’s another clue about an area of vulnerability— the prioritizing of the presentation of the self is a significant barrier to authentic being.

If we are relating to music only in a content-consuming way, it indicates that we need to examine what else we are consuming, and subsequently figure out how to move away from that posture. This may be as simple as sitting together with a real live person and watching “content” together— I have noticed in my own life that when people do this, it changes the dynamic. Even if they are only belting out a chorus and dissolving in giggles, the way they engage with the video short is entirely different than when they sit in a dark room by themselves and scroll. Context matters.

Photo by Aditya Chinchure on Unsplash

In the next stanza of the poem, Laura suffers a common human quandary: she cannot repeat her previous experience of ecstasy at will.

“Listening ever, but not catching
The customary cry,
“Come buy, come buy,”
With its iterated jingle
Of sugar-baited words:
Not for all her watching
Once discerning even one goblin
Racing, whisking, tumbling, hobbling…”

In the language of pop-psychology (itself a deeply flawed model), Laura is undergoing a decreased dopamine response to repeated stimuli. She cannot recreate the way she wants to feel. She is seeking, but cannot find. And to make matters even worse,

“...Lizzie urged, “O Laura, come;
I hear the fruit-call but I dare not look:
You should not loiter longer at this brook:
Come with me home.”

Her sister can still hear it! And not only can she still hear it, she doesn’t even want it. And not only does she not want it, she scolds Laura with the normative, “should”!

Telling Laura that she shouldn’t want the thing that she wants does not work to protect her-- and this may be Lizzie’s biggest mistake, her fundamental character flaw. In fact, her judgment serves only to drive a wedge between the sisters that makes Laura all the more vulnerable. I don’t know about you, but I have never encountered a circumstance where telling someone they are wrong about something causes them to change their minds, repent from their errors, and do things the way I think they should. In fact, my extended family often jokes that the surest way to get us to do something is to tell us not to do it, or vice versa.

This is why preaching about “the evils of the internet” or talking about the Church Fathers warning us “against vain imaginings” and subsequently condemning things like RPG’s or fantasy stories, or even panicking about demons or fairies or ghosts or AI misses the point, and actually drives a wedge further between people. Moral superiority feels good when you’re on the giving end, but is fundamentally the wrong kind of posture for relating well to the spiritual realm. (Luckily, Lizzie realizes her error-- but we’ll talk about that in the next essay…) Laura, on the receiving end or moral superiority, is not persuaded to repent and get back to fetching honey:

“Laura turn’d cold as stone
To find her sister heard that cry alone,
That goblin cry,
“Come buy our fruits, come buy.”

Envy has entered the chat.

As we mentioned last time, in true malicious fashion, it spills like acid over everything in Laura’s world, poisoning her relationships with resentment, eating away at her very sense of self. The judgment of her sister is lighter fluid on that campfire. I want to look at that full stanza again:

“Day after day, night after night,
Laura kept watch in vain
In sullen silence of exceeding pain.
She never caught again the goblin cry:
“Come buy, come buy;”--
She never spied the goblin men
Hawking their fruits along the glen:
But when the noon wax’d bright
Her hair grew thin and grey;
She swindled, as the fair full moon doth turn
To swift decay and burn
Her fire away.”

This is not a drill, friends. Envy will kill us.

The next few stanzas of the poem show us that this kind of dying is not a stagnant state, but rather an active descent into greater levels of dysfunction.

One of the curious things Laura did in the goblin market was to steal away a kernel stone, or a fruit pit. A seed. This indicates that she has the intention of using her experience in fairyland as a kind of impetus for creative growth— she means to grow something elvish, herself. So after her realization that she cannot easily replicate her first experience of the goblin market, Laura tries to cultivate her own magic:

“One day remembering her kernel-stone
She set it by a wall that faced the south;
Dew’d it with tears, hoped for a root.
Watch’d for a waxing shoot,
But there came non;
It never saw the sun,
It never felt the trickling moisture run:”

Doesn’t this capture some of the frustration we often feel when we turn to the internet for inspiration? Too often, I’ll attempt some kind of creative endeavor, look to the internet for a tutorial, and come away with nothing more than lost time and a sense of failure. That’s not to say that great resources aren’t out there-- they most certainly are, and I’ve used some-- but it’s far too easy to get sidetracked by yet another voice promising outsized benefits, particularly anything that guarantees progress that sidesteps necessary steps of drill and practice.

Again, this is why the right relating to the physical world comes first, before venturing into fairyland. If I remember the rules of physical reality, I know that watching any number of videos on watercolor painting or harp playing will not produce, in my own fingers, the responses that come from hours and hours of practice. But video and tutorial watching is compelling, right? It feels like the onerous task of real learning, when really, it’s only the making of a beginning. (Side note: discerning real learning from institutionalized learning experiences is a whole side quest, and part of why my co-author Lisa Rose and I wrote Patterns for Life.) To take this a little further, this is my major gripe about the audio realm of the internet: its penchant for turning five minutes worth of material into two hour conversations, producing the illusion in listeners that they have done two hours worth of work.

All of this confusion of mental effort with physical effort has a logical progression. The next thing that happens to Laura is that she is overcome with sloth. Not only can she not pursue her creative endeavors, she doesn’t want to do chores and she ultimately stops eating. In the Orthodox tradition, one is more likely to come across the word acedia rather than sloth, and in this case, the alternate term is illuminating. Acedia is not only laziness, not only boredom, but also a giving in to despondency and hopelessness. Everything is hard and dumb, so why try? This is resignation in the face of energetic death, devolving into spiritual death, and is why Laura ages so rapidly-- her body reflects the state of her energies and ultimately her soul.

So how does one overcome acedia? How does one muster the energy to even want to come alive again? My Therapy of Spiritual Illnesses by Jean Claude Larchet acknowledges that this one is particularly tricky, because acedia will simultaneously rouse all of the rest of the passions. It’s a blitz attack and needs a blitz defense in response. Among other listed therapies, the Church Fathers referenced here mention the absolute necessity of manual labor and prayer. In other words, restoring right relationship with the physical world and the spiritual world will help scaffold the restoration of right relationship with the energetic world.

This feels upside down in a society where we laud mental achievement so highly, doesn’t it? Our entire educations consist of emphasizing the mental over the relational. We read our Substacks, but neglect learning to love each other, pass up on cleaning the toilet because we’re doing something “more important.” Of course, part of the reason we’re in this position is because societies in the past made the opposite errors of enforcing conformity and not scaffolding individual human creative pursuit. But as in so many cases, there's likely a middle path that honors both individual flourishing and communal wisdom, though discovering it requires the kind of patient discernment we need to cultivate.

Photo by Phạm Trần Hoàn Thịnh on Unsplash

Alright, this is actually a great place to pause. Next time I’ll finish up the series by showing how Lizzie saves Laura, not by holding herself aloof, but by descending into hell with her sister, suffering with and for her, and bringing her dear friend hope, knowledge and experience of restoration.