Fantasy as Antifantasy: 7 Peter’s Ignorance and Mysterious Wisdom continued

“And you could darn our clothes, and make pockets for us”, he continues, and he’s like an experienced philanderer who knows all about women’s hearts. The inexplicable cunning of the supposedly innocent children is seen in these scenes, where Peter behaves skillfully as a seducer, and also in the Darling children who are seduced by Peter in a scene that follows. When Wendy succumbs to Peter’s temptation and wakes up her brothers, Peter senses something is wrong around him and calls for the children’s attention. The state of the children at that time is depicted as follows.

Their faces assumed the awful craftiness of children listening for sounds from the grown-up world. All was still as salt. Then everything was right. No, stop! Everything was wrong. Nana, who had been barking distressfully all the evening, was quiet now. It was her silence they had heard.


In this way, children exhibit a peculiar cunning when adults are not looking, and their ears can hear even silence. Peter is the brilliant embodiment of those eerie attributes of children.
Here’s the way he teaches the children how to fly.

“You just think lovely wonderful thoughts”, Peter explained, “and they lift you up in the air.”


He says that when you only think of nice and fun things, those feelings make your body float in the air. This is a profound spiritual secret that only children can perform freely, and adults can never accomplish. This is because adults have an uncontrollable gravity called “melancholy” in their hearts. Ironically, the only people who know how to free themselves from melancholy are children who don’t know it yet. In fact, this concept of melancholy is an important indicator of the secret of Peter’s existence. I will touch on this in more detail later, but for now, I will say that Hook, the antithesis of Peter’s existence, embodies exactly this melancholy. (note)

note:
This subject will be fully discussed in the 9th chapter of this study as the most important theme of this fairytale, under the title of “Goodform and Reflection: Captain Hook’s Melancholia”.


Peter is always really sloppy. As I mentioned earlier, what Peter says is not always reliable. The narrator also corrects Peter’s words he said to Wendy and her brothers about the route to Neverland, saying:

“Second to the right, and straight on till morning.”
That, Peter had told Wendy, was the way to the Neverland; but even birds, carrying maps and consulting them at windy corners, could not have sighted it with these instructions. Peter, you see, just said anything that came into his head.


“Second to the right, and straight on till morning.” Peter says, that is the route to Neverland. It is an enigmatic phrase that reminds us of the fairyland’s location, “East of the sun, west of the moon,” as told by the folklore fairy tale (Volks Marchen), which was the source of imagination of the fairy tale written by the German Romantics (Kunst Marchen). But the narrator says that even the birds that fly freely in the sky would not be able to understand such a direction. Is Peter irresponsibly telling an unreliable remark, or does he hold a mysterious secret that even the birds can’t understand?
As mentioned earlier, Peter doesn’t know what “eating” is. The way Peter had taught the children on the way to Neverland how they should procure food, was extremely suspicious, as Wendy feared.

But Wendy noticed with gentle concern that Peter did not seem to know that this was rather an odd way of getting bread and butter, nor even there are other ways.


Peter doesn’t seem to know how to get food other than to steal crumbs from the birds. This is a fatal flaw of inability to live, but at the same time, it is a superior ability that transcends the limitations of life, because he does not know hunger. Peter always exhibits this kind of dichotomy.
Flying freely in the sky, Peter even converses with the stars.

He could come down laughing over something fearfully funny he had been saying to a star, but he had already forgotten what it was...


It is Peter who exhibits such a mysterious ability and quickly forgets the content of what he was talking about with the stars. Peter's forgetfulness is such that he hardly remembers their faces anymore when he sees them again after leaving the Darling children behind and flying into the sky.
When they finally reached their destination, where they could see Neverland, Peter quietly announced, “There it is… Where all the arrows are pointing.”

Indeed a million golden arrows were pointing out the island to the children all directed by their friend the sun, who wanted them to be sure of their way before leaving them for the night.


The children have already become friends of the sun thanks to being with Peter. It is Peter’s power to be able to communicate with the sun and the stars, feeling the pulses of the earth and the sky.