A Gargoyle in Two Acts: Act I
Belief, the near-extinction of tinker bell, and why haters will say it’s fake
I.
All this talk about extinction, and not enough talk about gargoyles.
In our forsaken dimension, any creature is liable to blink out of existence at any moment in time, so you’ve just got to keep a close eye. Personally, I’m doomed to sit this sort of vigil, one sneaker stuck in the future, preparing for a time when we will have to look the children in their eyes and say, “When I was your age, this village was filled with gargoyles, creatures long since gone from this land. They crouched as sentinel protectors upon the eaves of our hospitals...our bodegas...our little blue houses…”
Early modern European cartographers used to paint dragons and sea serpents squirming in the margins of the charted universe. But, as The Atlantic has soberly pointed out, “Google Maps does not have dragons.” Ok?? Thanks for that.
Taking in the increasingly secular world & wielding the stinging of my coffee like a dagger, I am bothered that the dragons and the sirens and the dryads have been gentrified out of their ancestral homes and expatriated into the fiction section of a megamall Barnes & Noble. This, to me, seems at best bigoted and at worst absolutely uncool. It’s a no from me, dawg.
Last week the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) declared 23 species extinct after having not been seen in the wild for decades. These include the largest American woodpecker, a small venomous catfish, eight species of freshwater mussels, and a Hawaiian flowering plant in the mint family.
(The taxonomic word “family.” Doesn’t it break your heart? To think of all the other mints all over the world left to mourn their sister mint, left thinking: she didn’t even say goodbye…)
Mythical and biological exterminations have much in common, a topic I’ve written about in the past. Like the art and iconography that depicts the wondrous creatures of lore, more than a few extinct species have actually been identified post-mortem via 19th century paintings.
Both “fictional” and “extinct” are just kosher ways of saying “not here” in the same way that “historical” can be deployed to cover up sinister—often political—insinuations of “irrelevance.” And when something sinks below or beyond our capacity to witness it, almost always, it begins the slow act of fading away.
When Peter Pan opened in December of 1904, during Tink’s death scene, playwright J.M. Barrie instructed the orchestra to lay down their instruments and clap when the actress playing Peter begged of the audience, “If you believe in fairies, wave your handkerchiefs and clap your hands!” So deafening was the response that it brought tears to the eyes of the cast.
(In all my days, rarely have I seen a hanky waved in such a roar.)
Scholars came to understand this phenomena as the Tinkerbell effect, a breed of “consensus reality” positing that the more people invest belief in something, the more existent it becomes. It only took two animated children to bring dragons flapping from the nursery walls (Dragon Tales) and one to summon fairy godparents from out of a fish bowl (The Fairly OddParents). Guys. The mere twinkle in Judy Garland’s teenage eye lifted like half the state of Kansas up in a f***ing tornado (do I really even have to cite this one). Just imagine what some extra horsepower could accomplish.
There was a time when ours was a world of believers; a world that’s since traveled along what I’ve come to think of as a steady course of “mystic erosion.” It is not so much a matter of religion, but it is a matter of belief. That our capacity for belief has become systemic and reductive. That we’ve come to think of possibility itself as something to be disproved or necessarily qualified in some way. Re: “The possibility of thwarting environmental catastrophe paling against the material logistics of such an endeavor…”
There have been moments when I have squashed the fairy. More moments than I care to admit. I throw my tantrums in which TLDR no one is doing anything about anything and everything is very doomed and very over!!!!
But then I have a sip of water or a nice phone call with a friend and do my best to redact. Because a lot of people are doing something about something. A lot of hard-won, grassroots, tooth-and-nail activism participates in the Tinkerbell effect because of a collective belief in the possibility of a better world, a world more likely to exist because of that belief. To say otherwise is to discount these people and their sweat and their sacrificial labor. I am trying hard not to make that mistake again.
Let me be clear: clapping one’s hands together & waving handkerchiefs for the ivory-billed woodpecker will not resurrect it from the dead (I’ve tried). Belief cannot always win in hand-to-hand PVP combat with extinction. But when wielded against apathy, against the lazy act of forgetting and the even lazier act of skepticism, belief becomes a door that we can walk through together, leading elsewhere.
The first morning back from my Hurricane Ida evac, I rushed to the window and beheld: my neighborhood gargoyles, which have been my loyal companions for some odd months now, remained steadfast despite the feral storm. True, their numbers have dwindled significantly over the last thirteen millennia, but for now they continue to climb their chimneys and growl in defiance at tired old moon.
Because these gargoyles have beat the odds. In their refusal to go extinct, they’ve put all us neighbors in a position. “Bear witness to us,” they seem to snarl, “You see us. You see us and so you must believe.”