On Prince Charming, the Beautiful Princess and Immigrations
Elia Min and the author. Photo by Felicity Stone in Central Park December 19, 2021
In the Disney fairy tale, Prince Charming is a white man in shining armor and the wide-eyed princess looks beautiful in her pink prom dress. I once had a lover who declared, when he looked up from fixing his car, “I need you. I want to be your prince in shining armor but my armor is tarnished.” I was, of course immediately enchanted and stuck with him off and on for another thirty fraught years. There’s the problem with fairy tales. They are beautiful. They usually supersede the complexities of reality.
I often chat on the phone with operators while making an appointment. I often start the conversation with something like, “the world is going to hell in a handbasket.” This past week the person on the other end confided that she and her husband hold opposite political points of view which made a difficult relationship.
I guessed, “he’s Republican and you aren’t?”
She groaned and said, “I can’t understand it.”
I said, “I can explain it.”
“Please do.”
“There’s the fairy tale of the prince on a white horse and the beautiful princess in a pink prom dress.”
“Yes, that was exactly how it was with us.”
“Well, Trump presented himself as the prince on a white horse to save us. There’s no arguing with that fairy tale. It is too powerful.” Sometimes it isn’t complicated at all.
“I get that. You helped me today.”
Now there is another fairy tale, of a Promised Land, where it will all be better. Alternately, that the fairy tale is that we all are born in place and inhabit that place forever. It is our land, our place. Anyone new is an interloper. Curiously, white supremacists invoke that mantra for everyone except themselves, who brutally evicted Native Americans from their land and snatched black Africans from their own Land.
As immigrants freeze to death in Polish forests, migrations have become the norm at every level for living populations. Most of us are in search of greener pastures, safer, prettier more hopeful. The seductive fairy tale is that it will be a simple hop skip and jump to the new land. Or even a halting and painful hop and a long skip and a dangerous jump but in the end persistence will prevail. Well, anyone with eyes and half a heart knows it’s the last part that is the fairy tale. Yes, for some the end will be happy. Not so for many. But the fairy tale is always irresistible.
I have been working virtually with my intern from California, Elia Min for almost a year. Today we will meet in person for brunch and then head to Central Park to join my project manager, Felicity Stone, who just got home from the UK to work on my project for Legal Graffiti, using NFTs to fight for trees and environmental justice. I'm very anxious about the work, despite their support because I can see 1000 ways I could fail to do something useful. Just a few minutes ago, I wrote a letter of recommendation for a job in Singapore for my former intern, Ayaka Fujii and tomorrow I meet with my new intern, Angelica Aranda, who just came in from Copenhagen. All these (young) people are inspired to make a more sustainable world and see the role of art in that effort. I find it astonishing and humbling how we all manage these migrations, flitting from virtual to located reality, from continent to continent, ready and adequate or not, blurring demographics and communities, human and non-human as we somehow all strive together for something greater than ourselves or just to adapt and survive. Failure or success for all of us, all species, runs the spectrum from hopeless to inspirational. My little team is just a microcosm of how it could all happen as a collaborative project.
Publishing the book, "EcoART in Action" was a triumph of collaborative work despite many challenge over five years of effort. Sometimes we can succeed despite ourselves. Sometimes fairy tales carry us through.
Today’s task in Central Park will include a number of trees that don’t “belong” to this land, such as a stand of Yoshino cherry trees, gifts from Japan in 1912. They didn’t migrate here on their own, though it is not unusual for plant species to migrate, thanks to the excrement of birds and ground animals. That is a wonderful collaboration between species but does it challenge our fairy tale presumptions about what belongs where? There is a great debate in restoration circles about Indigenous vs “exotic” species. Some people think the battles to save and protect native species is hopeless, pointless and simply wrong-headed. They ask instead, “what is the function in the ecosystem?” In Central Park, the Yoshinos function as a source of great beauty. In the spring they are all decked out in their fragrant virginal pink and white flowery prom dresses. Are they our beautiful princesses? Are we the Prince Charmings saving them or the intruders messing with whom owns what why when & where? Today our task is simply to show up and witness their winter naked beauty.