Once upon a time there was a boy named Jack, who was no better than he ought to be.
You’ll have heard about the beanstalk, and maybe that story where he took on a few more giants, and even I’ve told the one about how he beat the devil. What I haven’t managed to tell, just yet, is the story about Jack and me.
Now if there are two men who hold my heart, then one of them is Jack. I’ve talked about Jack before, though not always by name, and I’ve told stories where he is the missing piece at the center. But for all that I try to be honest and vulnerable in these columns – or, at least, to tell a tale that holds together under scrutiny – there are some things that shift and change and dance at the corner of my eye too fast for me to catch them up in words. Discernment’s all well and good, but it turns out that folks are more complicated than I like to give them credit for – and I’m including myself in that number. No explanation I tried, no opening paragraph I penned, set me down the right road to tell a story I didn’t understand as I was living through it. So I told the pieces I could get hold of.
I started telling Jack tales at the tender age of 20, inspired by a folklore class that used Jack in Two Worlds as one of its organizing texts. The book drew straight from Appalachian storytellers, right down to the tones of their voices, but the Jack I started telling about felt personal. A quintessential everyman, Jack was a hero to have adventures and make discoveries that I wasn’t quite ready to bring out of fiction and into my life just yet. Even better, he came with a tradition so thick, a character so well defined that it felt, at times, like the story was writing itself.
This was about the same time I came into Paganism so, of course, I had a healthy sense of curiosity about that. I didn’t want to take anyone for granted – but Paganism was about the gods, wasn’t it? I had a million other questions, and a life to live, and for one reason or another figuring out exactly where Jack fit slipped off of my radar. He was just a character, a companion more constant than almost any other factor in my life. It was never important to ask about the spiritual alchemy that made that possible. It was never a priority to keep track of where I ended and the myth began.
Which, and I want to make this clear, was a blessing. In periods of my life where nothing was certain, when relationships ended and the money was tight, when I couldn’t even figure out myself, I could always tell a story about Jack. That was a solid, grounding fact and remains so to this day. What complicates the matter some is that, through a series of events that are neither the point of this tale nor entirely mine to tell, I eventually thought to take a look at the spiritual side of the matter and found someone, separate and entire, familiar and strange, staring back at me.
Reflections in the rain [Pixabay]
The moment I can point to as a bright and defining before and after was while I was drafting my oath. As processes go, this was a long one, with months of writing and editing, but when this story occurs I was just about to the end of the whole thing and feeling pretty good about where I’d landed. It wasn’t on the top of my mind when I had some friends over for drinks and divination. That night was one of my first times hosting, after all. I had more than enough to focus on, just finding everyone a place to sit.
Which is why, when the decks came out, I wasn’t in any big hurry to get a reading. It was one of my pals who grabbed my attention, jerking his head over toward the corner. “Who’s over there?”
I followed where he was pointing and saw the bookshelf where I kept a few small items in amongst my ever growing collection of folklore volumes, comics, and self-published novels about Jack. “Who wants to know?” I asked, amused, pausing in my duties as a host.
He gestured at the spread he had laid out on the table while I was bustling back and forth. “They want to know if you’re going to leave them behind, when you oath.”
I had been standing, and then I was sitting, looking from the cards to the reader to the small – call a spade a spade – altar, and then back. “Sorry?”
My friend shrugged. “I get the feeling they want in on the oath. Like they want to be included.”
I had a dozen half-formed questions, each loaded with over a decade’s worth of idle speculation. All that I could manage to get out was a somewhat hoarse, “What?”
My friend gave me a long look. “Yeaaaaah – let’s draw some more cards, shall we?”
We did a reading. I did another. I got someone to confirm without knowing the question. I followed up with every form of discernment I’d learned. I talked to my partner. I talked to my therapist. They were all clear that this made sense, this was right, this was just the correct time for a move that had been building up for ages.
The one person I didn’t talk to much was Jack. I didn’t know how. I had thought of us in the same breath for so long that it was a shock and a trial to suddenly see him as someone separate, a spirit with his own godsdamned altar right in my house bold as brass. If I reframed everything I thought I knew about myself – what made me up, how I worked, where my limits fell – then I could understand what was happening. My paradigm already had space for spirits that collaborate with people, either grown from stories or inspiring them. What I couldn’t wrap my mind and heart around was how to relate to someone who, until the day before, I had thought was part of me.
What I knew, beyond a doubt, was that I wouldn’t be leaving him behind. I bought him buttermilk and horehound candy, in hopes that he would like them, and sat down to rewrite my oath again.
Two travelers on a sunlit forest path [Nowaja, Pixabay]
Here’s a thing to know about Jack of Tales, Jack of All Trades, the Man Jack, Jack in the Green – it’s hard to get a straight answer out of him. No storyteller will find that in the least surprising. Every Jack tale features truths told craftily or lies that stand up alright so long as you don’t look too close. But for those first few months I found myself bewildered more often than not. I was used to being in on it, a writer with big plans and clever tricks that I’d see play out in my stories through Jack’s careful words and seemingly boundless luck. Now, still reeling from my heel-turn, face-to-face with a man whose eyes I’d only ever seen in the mirror, he was bigger and had more secrets than I knew how to deal with.
I am, in some ways, a predictable beast. When facing some great hurt or unexpected twist, my first instinct will always be to understand it. If I can render something into its pieces and logic through the way they work then, I reassure myself, any emotions I am having will be soothed. So, reeling from the shift of the world beneath my feet and flooded with emotions about what felt like the greatest con in the legacy of a conman I’d known for my entire life, I tried to reason through it.
The question that I settled on, the one that seemed as though I could at least tackle it directly, was “who are you?” Which was answered before I even began – I knew him, I’d been researching him my entire adult life, I’d written him in a million moods, I could rattle on about Jack until even my most indulgent friends began to look vague. That, at least, was a basis to start from. Ignoring the many other questions that it begged (then who am I?) I went right down the list of investigative questions that I’d learned in third grade and settled on “what.”
“What are you?” proved trickier. Folklorists have argued that some of the earliest Jack tales may have been Proto Indo-European, which would make them more than 6000 years old. That seemed too old to be a pop culture spirit, no matter that he was so tied up in stories and storytelling. There are reasons that stories travel from culture to culture, but Jack has always been something of an anomaly in how widespread and yet contiguous his stories are. He may be from Cornwall, Germany, or North Carolina in a given story, but his character is recognizable and the story is more than likely the same. Folklorists might understand this through the consistency of human experience, but as I reviewed it through my own spirituality it gestured toward someone broadly traveled and specific, a man of the people who was well known in times when other stories died out. There was something important in the act of telling stories, that much was clear. There was something relational to it – not just for me, but for many other people who told stories about him.
That was about where the trail ended. It was clear he wasn’t a god. In every version of Jack I have ever seen he is importantly and unwaveringly human. I played with calling him a hero, comparing him with Odysseus and the Hellenic cults of the mighty dead. I wondered if he was an alfar, or one of the Good Folk with their many origins and natures. But nothing really seemed to fit.
Which was fine, I told myself. I’d never really bought into the taxonomy of spirits. What if I settled, instead, on “how do you work?”
I set about to use the many tools and skills I had built for relating to spirits, turning them to this new task, but all of my attempts at pulling from other parts of my practice seemed poorly suited. Tools for communication, skills of discernment, approaches to offerings – none of them failed entirely, but they all seemed to be met with grace and no more than middling interest. Here was one more way I did not understand what was happening.
I couldn’t logic out of this one. The world spun and I scrambled, grasping my own oath for stability and reassurance. My attempts to understand were failing, but I would figure it out. I was here because I was wanted. This wasn’t new; it was a new take on something that I’d been doing my whole life. The way I felt betrayed was a red herring. The confusion was temporary. This was just a logic puzzle with a key I hadn’t located yet. I would figure it out. I would figure it out.
Silhouettes at sunset [StockSnap, Pixabay]
I didn’t figure a damn thing out. Theo did. They’re one of the people who knows me best, and most of our friendship has been built around writing. They have seen me write Jack through breakups and marriages – his and my own – and have written with me longer and more consistently than I can really fathom. If you measured out our relationship it would be miles and miles of the written word, narratives spread across messaging systems that no longer exist.
I was terrified of telling them. I could not figure out a way to explain that the character I wrote, who reflected so much of me, was separate from but related to someone much bigger and more mythic. I couldn’t find a way to tell the story that didn’t sound ridiculous or unbelievable. I was afraid that it would reveal a piece of the maelstrom I could not navigate and would shatter another thing I considered steady and immovable.
When I finally worked up the nerve, the story came out much like this. I was shaken but determined, logical right up until the point where I couldn’t be. “I don’t know what to do,” I told them. “I don’t know – what he wants, or how to do this? I love him, but he doesn’t work any of the ways I expect, and I can’t figure out-”
“Have you asked him?” Theo interrupted. Seeing my blank look, they snorted. “You married the man. Marriage is a partnership, right?”
“Not married, it’s more like-”
“So did you ask him?” they charged ahead, ignoring my logic. “You’ve been doing all this work trying to figure out tools. Have you considered just – being in a relationship?” I didn’t answer, and after a moment they sighed and pulled me into a hug. “You two have a lot in common. You’re both fools.”
“Huh,” I said, and let myself be held.
The next day, I sat down and had a conversation with Jack that was as simple and as effortless as breathing. A good deal more contentious, in parts, but what couple doesn’t have their ups and downs?
It is not the first time I have found myself building a relationship without a map. The man who holds my heart is a stranger as familiar to me as myself. He is honest as a day’s hard work and crooked as a crabapple branch, older than I understand and forever young. We can’t figure out how to communicate. My whole life has been a conversation with him.
We’ll figure it out.
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