Faeries, come take me out of this dull world,
For I would ride with you
upon the wind,
Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,
And dance
upon the mountains like a flame.
William Butler Yeats, The Land of Heart’s Desire
“Sometimes if you let people do things to you, you’re really doing it to them,” Amma said, pulling another Blow Pop from her pocket. Cherry. “Know what I mean? If someone wants to do fucked-up things to you, and you let them, you’re making them more fucked up. Then you have the control. As long as you don’t go crazy.”
Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects
“When young children, especially girls, wake from an evening’s slumber with tangles and snarls in their hair, mothers with a tradition of fairy folklore might whisper to their daughters that they had caught fairy locks or elf-locks. Faeries, they say, tangled and knotted the hairs of the sleeping children as they played in and out of their hair at night.”
High in the mountains along the Amalfi coast of Italy is a hidden valley with a beautiful waterfall. There, in a tiny hermit’s house with moorish domed roof, lives Vali: beautiful, way-out, painted like Paupin, dressed like a gypsy, with the wisdom of a shaman or a witch. Her Celtic heritage shows in her flaming red hair and green eyes, transposed with an Australian accent. An intense, free child of nature, she is followed by a pack of dogs like Artemis or Diana while roaming the steep cliffs of the valley, hunting for berries and herbs, tattooing in the sunlight a young girl dressed in goat-skin pants who lives in a nearby cave, and making amulets for a love-sick girl who finds her way up the mountain. Weaving dreams, casting spells, Vali is magic.
Write up on the back of Witch of Positano (1965), directed by Sheldon and Diane Rochlin