Sunday, August 21, 2011

Dora

Once upon a time there was a mountain cave. It was deep and dark, as dark as outer space, and inside the cave was treasure. Slaves worked day and night to mount up more treasure.They enlarged the cave with their bare hands, scooping the netrails of the earth, toiling on pain of death, out of sight of sun and moon, so that for them time was measured in hunger and fatigue. They were beaten and hanged, they died of starvation and disease, they lived with the treasure and they slept alongside it in that dank subterranean world. And although they were dirty, the treasure was clean. The cruel masters called the treasure Vengeance. All this happened in a land not so very far away, the land of Goethe and the Brothers Grimm. The cave was called Dora. The name means "gold."

Meanwhile, in the world outside the mountain cave, a great battle raged. The evil masters were defeated; the good masters discovered the cave, liberated the slaves and claimed the treasure. So that none would associate the treasure with the impurities of the cave where it had been born, with the suffering of the slaves who had fashioned it, with the cruelty of the masters who had abused the earth and her gifts in order to possess it, the new masters took the treasure to their own home and made it cleaner still. They took some of the evil masters, too, and cleaned them as well. But they took no slaves, since nothing could make them clean. They called the treasure Apollo, after the sun god. Nothing to do with the earth at all. Earth was written out of the story.
She may have become angry about this.

-Ann-Marie MacDonald, The Way the Crow Flies.

    

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