Briar Rose 20
Not true; though, true, it's what she's best at, feelings and perceptions the very gestures of her intimate art, the foolish passions of the world-beguiled what best she can get her iron teeth into. But the prison of the flesh is not her only theater, the wheel of sensuous agony and delight not her one and only turn. She is also, in her waggish way, a devotee of the higher learning, an interpreter and illuminator, concerned with truth and goodness and, above all, beauty, the mind her stories' true domain, body merely their comic relief. Though reputed to carry a sack of black cats on her back and to delight in slitting open the tums of indolent girls and stuffing them up with scurf and rubble, she prefers in fact to provision their desolate heads, ravaged by ignorance and sentiment, and what she carries on her back, alas, is the weight of eternity, heavy as a cartload of cowshit. A mere hundred years? It's nothing, you ninny, she replies to the sniveling dreamer, really you are one of the lucky ones. And she tells her the story of the princess chained to a rock thousands of years ago (it seems like only yesterday!) and guarded by a fire-breathing sea monster, who could never understand why this wailing creature, so ruinously chafed by wind and tide, should be thrust upon him like some kind of unanswerable riddle. Well, nothing to do but eat the bony little thing, he supposed, compelled less by appetite than by the mythical proprieties, and he was just tucking dutifully in when a prince turned up intent on rescue, so the dragon asked him in effect the question you have asked. He, too, had no sequential memory, knew only that he was born, so they said, of chaos, she of love, and thus they were cosmological cousins of a sort, and should bear no grudge against one another, so how had they arrived at this moment of mortal encounter, which seemed more theoretical in nature than practical? The prince, well schooled, was interested in this question, touching as it did on the sources of the heroic quest, about which he too sometimes had his misgivings, but the dragon's breath was so hot and noxious all he could do was gasp that it not only always comes down to a family story in the end, but it's always the same one. The monster gaped his jaws in awe of this wisdom and the prince fired a fatal arrow down his throat and into his doubting heart. And they lived happily ever after? How could they, the dragon was dead. No, I mean the princess and the--Oh, who can say? The prince had other tasks and maidens to attend to, making a name for himself as he was, for all I know, my dear, that one's chained there still.