The Shard in the Eye: On the Birth of Cruelty

Hans Christian Andersen imagined the birth of cruelty as a demon who put a mirror of ugliness in the sky. Whoever looked in the mirror would only see ugliness. His mirror shattered into the earth and the shards scattered into the eyes and hearts of humans. The boy Kay only began to see ugliness rather than love. Kay found the Snow Queen, her coldness a refuge for love, and place where cruelty felt safe. He leaves his friend Gerda and retreats further into cruelty and ice while she goes searching for him, never giving up that under the frost is the warmth of love. 

The ice in Kay’s eyes feels like a birthplace of cruelty. The moment when the shard passes in a glance between each other when we forget how to love. 

My own shard

Cruelty is not only in fairy tales, I have this shard in my own eye and heart. I notice it most when my daughter refuses to clean her room or do her homework. When my lover chooses his own life over what I want. I wrestle with this shard, making me want him to hurt as I do. It rises before the gentle tendrils of tenderness can take root. 

When I am tired, I find I chose the wisdom of Kay over Gerda. I chose to retreat into a castle made of ice. My face is still as if composure can protect me from life itself. But under there is a girl that  loves roses and summer, but she has patience for me to navigate this path of the ice shard. 

The worlds shard

The cruelty of this shard lies within our history. Here in Ireland, I see how cruelty scales. My ancestors fled this land, as beef and butter were sent to the British and they starved. The British, did not see the Irish as human. The British, themselves long conquered, also carried this shard in their eyes. They could remain indifferent while the Irish starved. Slavery and the crimes of the Congo all speak of this shard- this inner cruelty that would allow a person to whip another to death. To cut the hands off children, to mutilate. I see Kay here, entranced with  Snow Queen safety. She is cold. Secure. Heartless. 

Perhaps the demon of cruelty was the demon born from the moment the god stopped to see the goddess as sacred as a power of her own. When Mary was denied her role in the holy trinity, and the tenderness of the feminine became a ghost. Then tenderness became a weakness and submission became the norm. 

The shard in them lives within me. When I am cold and dismiss another’s pain- I am kin to the conquerers. 

The Snow Queen

Andersen offered an answer. He gave us Gerda,  who walked barefoot over the ice. Her compassion melted the hearts of animals and strangers. When she reached Kay, her tears washed the shard from his eye. When he wept, he was free from the shard that had strangled his life. 

The cruelty and coldness are part of our nature. We are both the demon and Gerda. We scatter shards ,and then must learn to melt them.

The ice is always there, whispering cruelty. The work is not to deny it, but to notice the shard before it hardens in our gaze — and to let the tears melt it back to tenderness.