STOCK ELEY WILLIAMS
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• ‘If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.’
• ‘When the child was a child, it didn't know that it was a child, everything was soulful, and all souls were one.’
• ‘I couldn't say who I am, I haven't the remotest notion of myself; I am someone without antecedents, without a history, without a country, and on that I insist!’
—Peter Handke (various)
Once upon a time is a stock phrase used to introduce a narrative of past events, typically in fairy- or folk-tales.
It signals the start of a story, it is a stock phrase
a stock expression,
stock as in: a broth made by steeping bones, Fee Fi Fo Fum,
expression as in metoposcopy, a form of divination by which one attempts to predict personality, character, and destiny based on the pattern of lines on a subject's forehead. When you look at my face sometimes, for example, when I raise my eyebrows, one-two, there is the capital letter I fallen on its side. When I frown, the letter W. If I lie on my side and frown, this letter W is a topsy-turvy capital E. You make me frown on my side and spell this out, the I, the WE. The practice of metoposcopy was banned by Pope Sixtus V 1586.
Stock expression as in this joke shared between me and you: I have heard the market crashed today and I said, uh oh, I’d better go check on my stocks so I head to the back yard where the banker says please, please let me out of these stocks and I say, firmly, frowning, NO. You do not start jokes with ‘Once upon a time’.
A set phrase to set a story, then, is once upon a time, a SET PHRASE in English as in J’AI SEPT FRAISES – I have seven strawberries in French.
I have seven daughters, seven brides for seven sons with seven pairs of out of your league boots in league-cahoots with the old woman who lived in a shoe, a woman who shouldn’t throw glass slippers nor red capped shoes even if they are as red as seven red strawberries, dwarfed and swarthy and dwarved and halved and heavy as one thousand and three bears’ bare-cupboard mattresses all propped on a pea, frog-green and kissed unto cinders in the East Riding hood with a carpenter or a woodsman and the fact that I’m a real boy once above a time, spun out and in like a preposition in the here and now, spun out in text and textile, spindly and needle-pricked, sows before pearls, snow before gold, goats before bridges, tolls before trolls all in red-hot shoes, and once upon a time when the stars were hot, best beloved, now cold, they glinted wish-warm in our blue blue sky, flagging only a little, and they were not too hot nor too cold, the stars were just right, and as a class we threw the jack of hearts and clubbed together and declined hopscotch as a noun, hopsketch hepscat, we hotcorched in the snow once upon a time, before the ovened candyhouse deep in the woods, before the pieces of eight, before the dwarves were dwarved and elves were found to be elfin and finalized, before form itself when the thumbprick in the forest timed us out, upon and beside ourselves. In English, the set phrase is traditionally once upon a time. In Albanian, once there was. In classical Arabic, there was (oh there was, or wasn’t) in the oldest of days and ages and times. In Armenian, there was and there was not. In Bengali either once there lived a king or in some country, there was. In Catalan there was a time and my best beloved I would hold these seven strawberries out for you for as long as the stars cool seven leagues above us while seven leagues across the seven seizures, you or I and we in our safe hammock of this caesura, breaking the line on my forehead, in Chinese stories start a very very long time ago and in Croatian there was a and in Czech there was and there was not, beyond seven mountain ranges, beyond seven rivers, while children in Esperanto are told in a time already long past, when it was still of use to cast a spell and in Estonian behind seven lands and seas there lived a Filipino stock phrase that ran through a clearing and it ran at the beginning of time while in Finnish they begin with once there was; the Brothers Grimm said es war einmal; in den Zeiten, als das Wünschen noch geholfen hat. Who told the brothers Grimm bedtime stories, I wonder, as they lay young in their bunks, their foreheads spelling out I or WE and recalling third person narrations. In modern Greek the set phrase is that this is an old story, while in Hungarian once there was where there wasn’t; Serbian stories begin, traditionally, there once was one, and we learn that nothings once for once singly or so long ago belong and long to be belonging to reach for what’s lost, the clasps of a fede or gimmel ring closing hands, one upon the other, taking strength and taking stock, and as we crane our heads to catch the story, cup our hands to catch, like burrs on wool, we follow the breadcrumbs, release the four and twenty blackbirds but count them as if they were magpies, counting down in our counting house, losing or loosing the thread of our pronouns – spinning – weaving – woven – text of textiles as a thousand nights drawn in to the chest, drawn apart like the curtains, drawn like the well, drawn like my face, cast like your play, cast like dice, like a spell, like bronze or something as light as a story on your breath – and every night the wolves were wolving and huffing and puffing, and the dwarves were in sheep’s plurals, and I cried wolf as wolves were wolving and calves were carving with a dish and a spoon and dwarves were dwarving and fairies falved in the far room in the starlight, in the bedtime, in the bookheft, in the love-lorne soft-lawned bed-borne boom-time of a stoved breath, stowed away, my stock phrase a changeling whisper that if a nation loses its storytellers it loosens, and that a nation will then tighten its grip on other books and ears, yours or mine, and time can only be onced so often, winced at or winched in so often, if you only care to listen, best beloved, when you and I swap stories in the moonlight, in the soft light, in the sweet nothings and held somethings and the hope that you and I leave together, not as one but not yet parted, and other stock phrases.