Monthly Archives: December 2015

Day 108: Beetle

Having a four (very nearly five!) year-old and a psychiatrist are similar experiences in at least one (possibly only in one) respect: both of them constantly badger me to tell them stories about my childhood. The younger calls them “childhood stories.” Dr. F calls them “screen memories.” Same difference.

One particular story came up recently, and I honestly can’t remember if I told it first to the younger or to Dr. F.

I do remember, though, the context in which I told the story to the younger. The younger cannot write words other than her name, but she can make many letters fairly easily, and it pleases her to do so. Some letters, however, most notably the letter S, present a considerable challenge to her fine motor skills and cause her immense frustration. The other day she was livid at her inability to make an S, and sobbed with rage. I felt for her. I remember this particular frustration of being old enough to imagine beautiful complex things (for example: the letter S; a unicorn; a family of owls) but also being too young to make anything other than clumsy, misshapen scrawls. I remember envying older children and adults’ ability to effortlessly make letters and draw graceful lines, while all my toil yielded crooked, primitive marks on the page.

Recalling that feeling prompted me to offer help to the younger the other day, imploring her, “here, sweetheart, let me help, see, I’ll just make one and you can copy it.” But the problem was, as I should have realized, the last thing she wanted was sympathy or help from someone who knew how to makes S’s. In fact, the offer of sympathy or help from someone who already knew how to make S’s was the final indignity.

“No!’ she practically spat at me, “no, you cannot help, I don’t want to copy your S. I want to make my own S, but I can’t, all I can do is scribble scrabble,” and then she scribbled violently all over the page of attempted S’s. [1]

Later when she had calmed down I told her the story about boiling over with envy that I also recently told to Dr. F. This is the story. I was four or younger. A friend came over to play. We played the game called “Beetle,” in which you take turns rolling a die and, depending on the number you get, select a particular plastic beetle body part. The person who assembles their beetle first wins. My friend completed her beetle first. I remember looking over at her perfect, complete beetle and then looking at my unfinished headless beetle and this rage just rose with me.

Reader, I smashed and completely destroyed her beetle.

I remember both my friend and my mother being shocked and appalled at my behavior.

I described this story just now as a story about envy, but I think, upon reflection, that it’s about two more minor emotions that have nonetheless been central to my emotional life—perversely so because my life has been so very charmed in so many ways: those two emotions are resentment and indignation.

Resentment and indignation are perhaps the two emotions that I find easiest to identify with in fictional characters. I don’t know what that says about me, but vicarious indignation gives me a real buzz, so much so that I find it … really difficult to let go of. I’m going to provide two examples from two of my all time favorite entertainments: the novel Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (published 1813) and the 1953 musical film Calamity Jane, which stars Doris Day as Calam (we’re on familiar terms, I can call her that) and Howard Keel as Wild Bill Hickok.

I have enormous affection for both of these works. And part of my enjoyment, almost perversely, stems from an obstacle that I find to be built into the arc of both plots.

This is the obstacle: I simply cannot get over my resentment that both Lizzie and Calam are given the brush off by the men with whom they are originally smitten (respectively, George Wickham and Lieutenant Danny Gilmartin—who is essentially a less roguish, blander Wickham) and then, to add insult to injury, reprimanded about their liking for these men by two other frankly, much less likable men with whom they are then expected to (and in fact do) fall in love so grateful are they to have had their moral failings pointed out to them.

In both cases, the heroine comes to realize that their first love interest is shallow and they move on from their respective infatuations by maturing and recognizing the superior value of Fitzwilliam Darcy, in Lizzie’s case, and Wild Bill Hickok, in Calam’s. But in both texts, this transition, for me at least, is far too abrupt.

Essentially, I remain hung up on Wickham and the handsome lieutenant Gilmartin past the point in the narrative in which I am meant to have re-centered my narrative desire upon the more appropriate fantasy object.

I can’t help feeling that both Lizzie and Calam were slighted and this sense of injury and indignation is so strong that in both cases it prevents me from enjoying the plot’s resolution. And yet—and here’s the kicker—I enjoy feeling indignant so very much that I don’t mind it one bit! At the end I am seething and it feels fantastic. In my real life, while—believe me—I seize on every opportunity to feel indignant that comes my way, I don’t have all that much, frankly, to be resentful about.

Even at the very last scene of Calamity Jane that shows Calam getting hitched to Bill and Katie to Danny Gilmartin, I really want Lieutenant Gilmartin to come to his senses and realize that Calam is so much more kickass than Katie. And shouldn’t Lizzie at least get to kiss handsome, fickle Wickham before settling down with Fitzwilliam ugh-I-can’t-bear-that-I’m-attracted-to-this-plebeian-woman-but-we-all-have-our-cross-to-bear-Darcy? [2]

I feel that this desire, on my part, runs against the grain, as it were, of each narrative. Wickham and Gilmartin serve a clear narrative purpose, and that purpose is transitory. I guess, if I were more psychoanalytically oriented, I could even call them transitional objects: they are just dummy-love-objects, like a child’s “lovey,” and it is in the recognition of them as such and of Darcy and Bill as, by contrast, real and worthy objects of esteem that the maturing of Lizzie and Calam is supposed to inhere.

Why can’t I move beyond my indignation and resentment? I think it partly comes down to the key moment in both narratives in which the Proper Love Object proves his moral authority by shaming the heroine. Darcy shames Lizzie in the letter where he points out her family’s impropriety and Bill shames Calam in front of all of their friends by rigging a shooting contest so that Katie (who can’t shoot for shit!) appears to be a virtuoso shot.

Both the letter from Darcy and Bill’s shooting the glass are displays of their moral authority and virtuosity. This is the moment where my sympathetic identification with each heroine completely breaks down: instead of feeling ashamed—as both Lizzie and Calam feel, therefore showing their maturation, pshaw,—I feel just enraged with Darcy and Bill. Their actions of censure don’t dampen my indignation; they stoke it. It’s like someone coming over to me to offer me help making my S’s when I’m already mad.

Instead of thinking, “Oh, I am grateful for your guidance! I could not make my own S! How lucky I am to have your S to copy!” I think “fuck off I’d rather do scribble scrabble than copy your stupid S.”

My favorite moment in Calamity Jane is possibly the moment when Katie kisses Danny and Calam shoots the punch cup right out of Katie’s hand. It’s a total beetle-crushing moment.

I’m not endorsing beetle-crushing or punch-glass shooting (although I will confess a continuing fondness for scribble scrabble). Obviously, such behavior is immature and destructive. I haven’t crushed any beetles lately. I am not a sociopath. If you and I were to engage in a friendly game of Beetle these days and I lost, I would be able to refrain from crushing your beetle. I might even say, “well done!” I might even mean it!

My point is simply that one of the pleasures of fiction is not only the vicarious experience of feelings that the protagonists feel; sometimes it’s also the vicarious experience of feelings – in the case of sentimental fiction, often, more brutish feelings – that the protagonists resist. Those unrepresented feelings might be thought of as lurking in the narrative’s negative space, just waiting for bad readers to come along and give them life.

 

Notes

[1] Do other children use the term “scribble scrabble”? Both of my children use the phrase “scribble scrabble” as though it were an accepted general term—a technical term, even—used to denote the non-representational art made by toddlers.

[2] I guess that is part of the point of Helen Fielding’s re-writing of P&P in Bridget Jones’s Diary: at least Bridget gets to sleep with Daniel Cleaver before meeting Mark Darcy. As an aside, the other problem with the conclusion with Pride and Prejudice for me as a reader is that I am unmoved by real estate and furnishings. This is true in real life and it is true in fiction. I don’t get people who look through real estate listings for fun, or who read Better Homes and Gardens, or who want to browse in furniture stores, or tour old houses and ooh and ahh. All of those activities fill me with mental pain. As several of you know, I am the worst person to ask for advice about furniture or housing. It’s a failure of imagination, really. I can never imagine myself in the house or enjoying the furniture. So I just cannot relate to Lizzie’s property-gasm when she sees Pemberley. I’m just like, meh, it’s a big house, whatever, there isn’t even a gift shop or a café.

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Day 107: organs

After I got chucked out of the Royal Ballet School because of my stumpy legs I started taking classes at the London School of Classical Dance, run by the extraordinary Natasha Lisakova. Natasha was beautiful, imperious, and never tired of insisting that we could and should all have eighteen-inch waists because the spine was the only thing that took up any room in your waist region. A number of us argued with her, insisting that there were organs as well bones between your ribcage and your hips, but she would hear none of it.

I bring up the London School of Classical Dance because I had a flashback this morning to one of our dance recitals.

I was, I think, eleven (so it would have been 1985 or thereabouts), and everyone in my year was dancing in a sedate, beautiful dance based on a section of La Bayadère. [1] We were dressed in white and it was a highly orderly and symmetrical piece of choreography. After we’d performed our dance we were allowed to sit in the audience with our parents so we could watch the senior students perform. I vaguely remember that there was a modern ballet to Mozart’s Requiem, which I found quite boring and difficult to sit through.

But then, at the very end, there was the dance that all the seniors had choreographed themselves, which was to Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy.” It was a clever segue from the Mozart, because “Let’s Go Crazy” begins, you’ll recall, with that funereal sounding organ, and it’s only when the drum kicks in when Prince says, “so when you call up that shrink in Beverly Hills …” that it turns into something else.

We all sat there with our eyes wide as saucers. The dancers who had just been performing the austere dance to the Requiem were now cutting loose and dancing with wild abandon and silliness. One dancer was wearing a tutu. Another was wearing bikini. Most of the others were just wearing their ripped up footless tights and leg-warmers. They were tumbling and leaping and throwing each other around and spinning so hard they were almost toppling over. It was full on Kids-from-Fame-meets-Footloose-tastic.

Zumba started with “Let’s Go Crazy” this morning. As soon as I heard the words “Dearly beloved …” I let out a little squeal. Dancing to Prince like a whirling dervish is my kind of Sunday service.

Notes

[1] If you don’t know the ballet, this will give you an idea. Watch any part of the clip from 2:30 onwards.

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Day 106: Let’s talk about cats!

Scene: the lower bunk, this morning, quite some time before sunrise, Santa Monica.

The sensation that someone is staring at it intently awakens the duck-rabbit. The duck-rabbit opens its eyes and sees the younger sitting up next to it, beaming at it. The elder is still sleeping soundly in the top bunk.

Younger: [In stage whisper] Mom? Mom, I have a good view out the window, so I’ll tell you when it’s morning!

D-R: [Not beaming] mmmmmmm

Younger: What shall we talk about while we wait for it to be morning?

D-R: mmmmmmm

Younger: I know! Let’s talk about cats!

D-R: mmmmhmmmmm

Younger: when you have a cat you have to clean out its litter box. You have to scoop the poop out.

D-R: mmmmhmmmmm

Younger: do you scoop the pee out too or just the poop?

D-R: [Yawning] uhhhhhh …. I dunno really … I guess just the poop? [Turns over.]

Younger: some cats like to drink water out of the toilet.

D-R: do they?

Younger: yes, Leah’s cat does that.

D-R: who is Leah?

Younger: [incredulous at this question] you know, Leah. My friend, Leah.

D-R [realizing she means SJ’s daughter, whom the younger has met once in her life, nearly two years ago. The younger has never met Leah’s cat] Oh, right. Yeah [in tone of surprise upon realizing that the younger’s assertion is in fact true; the D-R has met said cat and has observed described behavior], yeah, actually, her cat does do that, I’ve seen it.

Younger: [Peering through the blinds] It’s still not morning, Mom. What shall we talk about now?

D-R: [Sighing] how bout you tell me a story?

Younger: about what?

D-R: you decide.

Younger: no, you decide.

D-R. fine. A little girl goes on an adventure.

Younger: once upon a time there was a little girl who had never …. gone hiking before and so she decided to go hiking. So she packed up her hiking stick and her hiking boots and – what else should she bring, Mom?

D-R: snack

Younger: and her snack and her water bottle and she set off on her hike. And when she got to the hiking place she met a tiger. And he said, “what brings you here?” [D-R smiles silently in the darkness at this phrase] And then he said, “would you like a cup of tea?” And she said “yes please!”

D-R: [Interrupting] I would like hiking a lot more if there was a nice tiger who would make me a cup of tea while I was on my hike.

Younger: And then he said, “come down to my attic for a party!” and so she did and the tiger made her lemonade and cake. And then she left and she always saw him whenever she wanted. [Pause] What shall we do now?

D-R: mmmmmmmm

Younger: I know! Let’s pretend to be a family of moles! You be the Mama mole and I’ll be the baby mole. [She lifts the sheet over our heads to make a little tent.] OK, what shall we do?

D-R: go to sleep?

Younger: OK. [Briefest of pauses.] OK, now it’s morning. What’s for breakfast?

D-R: hmmm. What do moles eat? bugs?

Younger: [Makes lip-smacking sound] that was me slurping up some worms; moles eat worms.

D-R: yuck. Dude, there is no way I could eat a worm; could you?

Younger: do you know some people for real eat bugs that have been cooked?

D-R: yeah, maybe I could do that, but I couldn’t eat a live bug, it would be all squiggling while you chewed it.

Younger: do you know that in China some people eat live octopus?

[Pause while D-R wonders if this is offensive racist stereotype or interesting culinary fact.] [1]

D-R: [Doubtfully] do they?

Younger: [Confidently] yup, they definitely do.

D-R: Well I don’t know if that’s true but I don’t think I would enjoy eating a live octopus. I am hungry for real. Do you want some breakfast?

Younger: [With pitch-perfect English accent and cadence] can I have some straw-berry yogurt, Mummy?

D-R: [Laughing] Oh, my God, you are the worst! You are so mean! You just mock my accent all the time!

Younger: [Slightly abashed] Sor-ry.

D-R: No, it’s all right, I like it, it’s funny, say it again!

She does and the duck-rabbit gets up to make breakfast, laughing.

***

Later this morning when I’m riding my bike back from therapy, I find myself singing the following over and over to the tune of Salt-N-Pepa’s “Let’s Talk About Sex”:

Let’s talk about cats ba-by

Let’s talk about you and me

Let’s talk about all the good things and the bad things that may be

Let’s talk aboouuuut cats. Let’s talk about cats.

Let’s talk aboouuuut cats. Let’s talk about cats!

 

Notes

[1] I do vaguely remember one of those classic Jonathan Gold articles in which he talks about eating a live octopus. But I think it was a Korean restaurant.

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Day 105: Cry it out

Sometimes I am unsure what to do about feelings. I suppose the mental health establishment is unsure too: should feelings be drawn out or left in? Should they be lanced and bled? Should they be swaddled in cotton, and bound very tightly? What is it that they need?

When I saw Dr. F yesterday and she asked why I was crying I said because it was hard to talk about my Dad. I went on to observe, and there was an edge in my voice that surprised myself, that when she makes me talk about my father, it feels like she’s poking a tender wound. It is painful and wearying.

She understood, I think. She lost her father at the same age as I lost mine. In fact, she was a little younger, I believe. She explained that she thought that I had never let myself grieve sufficiently for his death. She observed, indisputably, that there would be—indeed, there were already—many more endings to be grieved during my life, whether the end of a marriage, of a friendship, or some other loss. If I didn’t learn to grieve now, she explained, all those wounds would remain raw; they would never heal.

The duck believes her but the rabbit doesn’t. The duck’s motto is “let it go,” like the song from Frozen. [1] The rabbit’s motto is: repress, repress, and, if in doubt, repress.

I believe that I have gained a lot from therapy including the ability to recognize ongoing and endlessly repeated behavioral patterns, and the ability to carefully tease out (odd that a literature professor has to be taught this) and hold up to the light the various stories I’ve told myself over the years about who I am. But have I been healing myself or dissecting myself like an anatomist? I am not sure.

Last night I wanted to cry and cry. While the children ate their dessert and watched television, I shut myself in the bathroom and sobbed. I didn’t want to be like this in front of them; in fact I told myself that I really shouldn’t be like this in front of them. It would upset them, I thought. So I took a Lorazepam, prescribed by Dr. F for moments such as these. And slowly it worked its magic, a feeling of calmness seeping slowly across my body.

Later I talked to several friends, all women, all parents, about my fear of crying in front of my children. They all suggested to me, gently, kindly, that perhaps it was all right to cry in front of them.

I realized that this had truly not occurred to me as an option. I wondered why and thought back to times I remembered my parents crying.

I could only remember two. The first time was a few months before my father’s death. We were on holiday in Spain. A family dinner turned dark quickly and unexpectedly. I had made some silly joke when my father had said something about my mother; my joke was along the lines of, “Oh, I think you must be thinking of your other wife, ha ha”; ha ha because my mother was my father’s first and only wife, or so I thought. “Well I was married before!” my father said jovially, laughing. I actually laughed out loud, the idea was so preposterous – not the idea that he had been married before, but the idea that he had been married before and never mentioned it in all the eighteen years I’d been alive. My mother wasn’t laughing. She said my father’s name gently, sadly, as if saying, “are you sure you want to do this?”

The details don’t matter and it’s not my story to tell. The point is that I remember, as my father told me the details, that he was crying. And I remember feeling angry that he was crying because I was already angry with him and seeing him cry made me feel sorry for him too but I didn’t want to have to feel sorry for him.

The memory of my mother crying is from just two months later, after my father died. What I remember most clearly is that I felt not grief or compassion but anger that I had to be the one to comfort and look after her, combined with deep shame at my anger.

When I reflect on these memories today, something comes into focus that wasn’t there yesterday. I thought, yesterday, that I couldn’t cry in front of my children because I remembered how angry I’d been when I saw my parents crying. But I think, now, that I was mistaken about why I was angry. It wasn’t witnessing my parents crying that made me angry: I was angry that my father had kept a secret from me; I was angry that my mother’s grief was so overwhelming that there was no room for my own.

This morning when I woke up my left eyelid felt heavy. It was a blocked tear duct; I’ve had it before. Treat it with warm compresses, the internet says, and the blockage should right itself.

Is a blocked tear duct the universe’s way of telling me that God is a Freudian, I wondered? You know, if you repress the feelings, you’ll create a blockage, geddit?

Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if God were a Freudian. There have been signs.

But if that IS what it means, if God IS trying to tell me not to bottle up my feelings, all I have to say is, why are you such a fucking literalist, God? I mean, think of some of the other options that were available to you: perhaps a clogged pipe? Well, frankly, I’m thankful you didn’t go that route. A wine bottle that wouldn’t open? Actually, I’m also grateful you didn’t go that route. But what about a nice swollen cloud pregnant with rain? That would have been pretty at least.

But no. You give me a blocked tear duct as a heavy-handed way of telling me that I’ve just gotta cry, cry, cry, cry, cry, I’ve gotta cry it out, cry it out, as either Taylor Swift or Dr. Richard Ferber, or possibly both will surely put it one of these days.

Notes

[1] The duck loves that film. It makes him cry. The rabbit just rolls her eyes and murmurs, “I don’t get what the big deal is, it’s just Sense and Sensibility with snow,” and, I must say, I think she has a point.

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Day 104: off with her head

On Monday morning, after I had asked the younger to get dressed for preschool, I winced to hear the following words come out of my mouth when she wandered, fully clothed, into the kitchen:

“Is that what you’re wearing?”

No. Noooooooooooo! I can’t believe I am that mother!

What’s more, she was wearing a totally kick-ass outfit: a wonder-woman T-shirt and pink pajama bottoms. But somehow my inner sartorial curmudgeon briefly took possession of my body to ask that most barbed of seemingly innocent enquiries.

That being said, the younger is herself quite the fashion critic. On Sunday I was lying on my bed flipping through Vogue. The younger came over and peered over my shoulder at the page:

“Do you like what she’s wearing, Mom?” she asked incredulously.

I considered the outfit, which was so heinously ugly that not even the lovely Gigi Hadid, who was modeling it, could truly be said to be pulling it off.

“No, not really.”

The younger agreed. “None of it matches!” she exclaimed, at which I had to suppress a smirk.

“She is out of the game!” the younger declared exuberantly. We went through the whole magazine, the younger declaring every person pictured either “in” or “out of” “the game.”

Angelina Jolie was the winner, in the younger’s estimation.

“Oh, she’s beautiful! And she’s brave!” (To be clear, the younger deemed Angelina brave not for her work for the UN, or her Times Op-Eds, but because she was standing in a wet silk slip dress in the middle of the ocean, as you do.)

Later that afternoon, the level of the younger’s commitment to her aesthetic principles became ominously clear.

Phineas was over for a play date.

I was sitting on the sofa.

The younger came up to me, putting her face very close to mine and scrutinizing my face.

“Mom, can you put your contacts on?”

“Uh, no.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t feel like it.”

“But you look better with them on!”

“Sorry! I don’t feel like putting them on.”

Phineas, overhearing the argument, came over to join the younger in inspecting my face.

“Can I see what you look like without your glasses?” he asked.

I sighed and took off my glasses.

He stared at me for a few seconds.

“You do look better without your glasses,” he declared.

That ended the debate so far as the younger was concerned.

“Mom, PLEASE put them on!” she begged.

Here’s the thing. As I’ve said before, I believe that almost everyone looks better without glasses, and that anyone who tells you otherwise is insulting your face. But I was sitting on my sofa on a Sunday afternoon supervising a play date between two four-year olds. I believed that I look good enough for the situation I was in.

The younger would not give up. “Please, Mom!” she pleaded.

“Why?” I responded. “I don’t get it. Why do you want me to put my contacts on?

“So you can look better!” she replied cheerfully.

I sighed. “And what if I don’t want to look better?”

The younger slowly drew her hand slowly across her throat and made a squelchy throat-slitting noise.

Bloody hell, little Ms Queen of Hearts.

I know you’re not supposed to negotiate with terrorists but we were able to work out a compromise, as I explained to Phineas’s Dad, when he texted a few minutes later to check to see how we were doing.

“Doing well,” I texted back, “they are giving me a new ‘hairstyle.’”

“Oh. Dear. God,” he texted back.

When they were done with me, I was “all over pins,” like the White Queen in Through the Looking-Glass. For the rest of the day, everywhere I walked I left a trail of hairpins in my wake. But at least I kept my head.

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Day 103: on being disappointed and, also, crushed

This morning I discovered a flagrant case of plagiarism, and it had nothing to do with grading.

A guy on OKCupid (pilot; profile name “smoothlandings”; nuff said) had blatantly stolen my answer to one of the several inane questions that you are supposed to answer as part of your profile.

I was simultaneously outraged and flattered. I am quite vain about my OKCupid profile. Here was proof that it was so good that other people would shamelessly steal it. Smoothlandings had pretty much copied and pasted my entire answer, word for word, without making any attempt to disguise it.

Now that’s smooooooth.

I contacted him, accusing him of profile pilfering. He immediately copped to it.

“Guilty. I have read thousands of these profiles but never anything as clever as that. The sincerest form of flattery,” he wrote.

In response to this barefaced fawning, I felt the urge rise inside me to murmur coyly, “oh, you flatter me, sir! Thousands you say? Never anything so clever?”

However, I refrained from replying at all in order to maintain my dignity.

When I went back and looked more closely at his profile, I felt disappointment as well as flattery.

I was disappointed because I would like to have discovered that the person who thought my profile was witty shared my sense of humor. Sadly this was not the case, and this led to me spiraling into a mini-crisis in which I wondered,“if he deems my wit funny enough to incorporate into his, and I deem his wit lame, ipso facto, is my wit also lame?”

Smoothlandings’ profile is a relentless stream of one-liners, doubtless plagiarized from all the women’s profiles he looks at and thinks, “hmm … that person sounds funny! She’s not dateable, obviously, but don’t mind if I do help myself to a few of her choicer bon mots!”

Some of his profile is funny, but mostly it’s just exhausting in the way that a self-styled joker will passive-aggressively hog the floor under the guise of entertaining the room.

Yes, I’m being uncharitable. But he stole my sodding profile, I’m allowed to be uncharitable. And yes, of course I sympathize with the urge to make one’s profile funny. In my case, though, my profile errs more on the side of funny peculiar than funny ha ha.

I’ll give you an example. Here is what smoothlandings lists (this is NOT the part he stole from me) under the “I spend a lot of time thinking about” heading:

I spend a lot of time thinking about:

  1. Why the word “abbreviation” is so long (five syllables) that it has its own dictionary abbreviation: “abbr”.
  2. How elevators know how to close their doors when you come running.
  3. Why the shower fixtures in every hotel are different.
  4. How Japanese restaurants get those little towels hot enough to give you third degree burns without having them catch fire.
  5. Why you’ll be with someone in a restaurant and they’ll say “Eww! This tastes DISGUSTING!” And then they’ll add “Here, try it.”

And here is mine:

 I spend a lot of time thinking about:

  1. The fact that I resent being commanded to “think outside the box” by a dating-website-profile-template. Why don’t YOU think outside the box, OKCupid algorithm? Didn’t see that one coming, did you?
  2. If an enormous plumed helmet fell out of the sky killing a person minding their own business below it, would that person really be “dashed to pieces,” as Horace Walpole expresses the fatal effect of such an event in his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto? A china cup might be “dashed to pieces”; a rock might be dashed to pieces. But wouldn’t a person, more properly speaking, be squashed, crushed, or sliced?
  3.  David Hume.
  4.  Whether I am a “new spinster” or just an old spinster.

I’m sorry smoothlandings, but I think your list is derivative subpar Seinfeld-esque observational humor. Yes, mine is smartarsey and not necessarily everyone’s cup of tea, but I don’t think I am everyone’s cup of tea, so I might as well be upfront about it.

Regarding item 2, I’ve become perhaps unhealthily preoccupied with the finer points of this conundrum recently. While I kindly spare potential suitors further meditations on this topic, I will not be so sparing of you, indulgent readers.

I’ve harbored, for a while, certain doubts about this whole death-by-enormous-helmet scenario.

Allow me to refresh your memory of the scene:

“ … what a sight for a father’s eyes! — he beheld his child dashed to pieces, and almost buried under an enormous helmet, an hundred times more large than any casque ever made for human being, and shaded with a proportionable quantity of black feathers.”

My doubts were twofold. (I use the past tense here, because I will be proposing, shortly, a solution to these doubts.) First of all, aerodynamically speaking, it seemed unlikely to me that an enormous helmet would land right side up. [1]

Second of all, as opposed to, say, if a meteor, grand piano, or the foot of Cupid [2] landed upon you, if an enormous helmet were to fall from the sky, right side up, there would actually be a pretty good chance that you wouldn’t be crushed by it, right? Because if it did happen to fall directly on top of you, right side up, then you might well be protected by the “casque” like dome. Moreover, in the case of this particular feather-adorned helmet, mightn’t the plumage on the top of the helmet have a speed-retarding and impact-softening effect?

There was only one thing to do in a situation such as this: ask a local physicist. So I did. And, he being an experimentalist by training, I should have predicted his answer, which was: “test it!”

And so I did.

Now, obviously this test was not strictly scientific nor can the results be necessarily extrapolated and applied to the imaginary helmet described in The Castle of Otranto because the materials, circumstances, etc. were all significantly different.

First of all, the helmet I used (borrowed from my children, natch) was plastic, not steel (as we are told the helmet in the novel is) and lacking in plumage. Secondly, it was not dropped from the heavens, but was dropped by me from various heights onto various surfaces. I dropped it a total of ten times. The first four times I dropped it from a distance of about five feet onto a wooden surface. Each time it landed wrong side up, that is to say, on its dome. It didn’t matter which way up I held it when I dropped it.

The fifth and sixth times, I dropped it from a greater height, about eight feet, onto dirt. For this portion of the experiment, the neighbor’s cat was my witness. She was riveted but also completely unhelpful. The fifth time it again fell wrong side up. But the sixth time, to my genuine surprise and delight, it landed right side up.

For the final portion of the experiment, I stepped things up a notch. I co-opted a Playmobil figure into playing the role of Conrad. I dropped the helmet from a height of about twenty feet onto a concrete surface, a surface upon which I had placed, in a standing position, my innocent victim. The first three times I dropped it from this height, not only did it land (after bouncing) wrong side up, but also I couldn’t get it to land remotely near Conrad, let alone hit him. But, AMAZINGLY, on my tenth and final attempt, this is what happened: I dropped the helmet; it landed directly, wrong side up, on Conrad, felling him immediately, and then came to rest right side up next to him. Here are some photographs showing the results of the final drop:

experiment 3

The fallen prince. R.I.P., Conrad.

experiment 2

The fallen prince in the foreground, with the ominous instrument of his death gleaming in the background.

In conclusion, judging from my experiments, I would guess that if you are hit by a falling enormous helmet, the helmet will land on you dome side up, immediately and fatally crushing you, before coming to rest, possibly but not necessarily right side up, in the near vicinity. And that scenario is quite consistent with Walpole’s description in the novel so maybe he conducted similar experiments with a papier-mâché helmet from the ramparts at Strawberry Hill, and came to the same conclusion.

Readers, I know what you’re thinking: “you should totally apply for a major grant so that you can test this out with an accurately sized custom-made helmet!!!”

Who wants to be my co PI?

Notes

[1] Now, I’m not sure that it’s stated explicitly that the helmet is right-side up, but it is implicitly the case (because the feathers are described twitching on the top of the helmet) and the few early illustrations I’ve found of this scene also depict it landing right side up.

helmet 1

This is from an 1824 edition of the novel.

helmet2

Not sure of the date of this image.

[2] For the foot of Cupid, see the Monty Python opening credits.

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Day 102: duck-rabbit and the three Priuses

The other morning when we left the house to go to preschool I was not exactly sure where the car was.

He-Who-Must-Be-Preserved had parked it somewhere on my block the night before.

“Is that it?” I murmured to myself, upon spotting the distinctive sloping profile of a car near the end of the block.

That was the younger’s cue:

“Mom, can you please tell the story of the three green Priuses?”

I am not making this up: those are actual words that sprang from the younger’s lips. The tale of the three green Priuses has now become an established fixture in my repertoire of stories. Frankly, it’s not the most dramatic tale. But it struck me as I retold it to her as we drove to preschool that perhaps she likes it because of its distinctively fairytale structure. Judge for yourself. I’ll do my best to add a bit of suspense.

Duck-rabbit and the three Priuses: a bourgeois fairytale

One bright sunny morning, a pensive duck-rabbit walked from its psychiatrist’s office back to its car, which it had parked on a nearby side street. The duck-rabbit could not remember exactly where on the block it had parked the car, but to its relief it soon spotted the distinctive silvery-green hue and gentle slope of its noble Prius.

But when it went to open the driver’s door, the duck-rabbit gasped: the door opened easily to its touch but the electronic key did not make its usual cheery beep-beep upon the door opening.

“Oh shit!” exclaimed the duck-rabbit to itself, “I forgot to lock the door!” It sighed and shook its head at its own absent-mindedness and climbed into the car.

But, as soon as the duck-rabbit sat down, it realized that something was very wrong. Because a duck-rabbit’s eyes are placed conveniently on either side of its elegant head, it could quite easily spy a large straw hat on the back passenger seat.

There had been no large straw hat on the back passenger seat when the duck-rabbit left the car.

The duck-rabbit gasped! Clearly, a thief had broken into car, leaving behind (whether deliberately, as a whimsical, pastoral calling card, or accidentally, in the haste of the crime) a large, straw, wide-brimmed hat!

But wait. Wait a moment. No no no. Hang on.

“That makes no bloody sense,” thought the duck-rabbit to itself.

The cogs in the duck-rabbit’s bird-hare-brain turned slowly as it sat there frowning. [1] All of a sudden the truth dawned on it. This was NOT the duck-rabbit’s car! This was somebody else’s green Prius! Someone who owned a large straw hat and who had forgotten to lock the door! If anyone was a thief, it was the duck-rabbit, who had blithely gotten into a stranger’s car, which said stranger might discover at any moment, upon realizing, perhaps, now that the morning fog had cleared, that she needed her straw hat, after all, on this sunny day.

The duck-rabbit exited the car with all due haste, slammed the door, and walked ahead very quickly as un-suspiciously as possible.

To its immense relief it spotted its actual car, its own dear, sweet green Prius, just a few cars further up the street. “Oh, silly duck-rabbit!” the duck-rabbit thought to itself, consolingly. “It was just the wrong car!

The duck-rabbit opened the door, or tried to, but the door remained stubbornly shut and the keys made no reassuring beep-beep.

“OK, what the fuck?” exclaimed the duck-rabbit, now thoroughly flummoxed. It tried the door again.

“OK. OK, so my keys really aren’t working,” the duck-rabbit inferred, completely wrongly, as it turned out, its powers of reason now utterly fucked. “Or. Or wait. Wait. I have the wrong keys?”

Again, the cogs turned ever so slowly in the duck-rabbit’s brain. In all fairness to the duck-rabbit, it had just come from therapy; all that head-shrinking can sap a duck-rabbit’s analytical powers.

The duck-rabbit tried the door one more time before peering inside and, upon failing to see the parking permit that should have been hanging from the rearview mirror, realized that, indeed, yet again, this was the Wrong. Green. Prius. Moreover, yet again, the only thief was the duck-rabbit, who was repeatedly and aggressively trying to open somebody else’s car.

With a feeling that can only be described as uncanny, which is to say, as that other great Dr. F once put it, with a feeling evocative of “the sense of helplessness experienced in some dream-states,” the duck-rabbit stumbled onwards. There, once again, was another green Prius a few cars ahead. The duck-rabbit almost daren’t try the door. But it did, oh-so-gingerly. Finally the door opened and the keys beep-beeped. There was the parking permit, hanging from the rearview mirror. There was the backseat, completely devoid of all hats, straw or otherwise. With a sigh of relief the duck-rabbit climbed in.

This Prius was just right.

What is the moral of this fable, you may ask?

I think it’s very plain. Stirring the boiling cauldron of the unconscious casts a spell, one that will have you lost and searching one, two, three times, for a way back home. Don’t believe me? Remember dear Sigmund’s confusion in the shady quarter of that unnamed provincial town in Italy populated by “painted women”?

“ … I hastened to leave the narrow street at the next turning. But after having wandered about for a time without enquiring my way, I suddenly found myself back in the same street, where my presence was now beginning to excite attention. I hurried away once more, only to arrive by another detour at the same place yet a third time. Now, however, a feeling overcame me which I can only describe as uncanny, and I was glad enough to find myself back at the piazza I had left a short while before, without any further voyages of discovery.”[2]

The uncanny lurks too in plain sight on the broad boulevards of Santa Monica, where strange, silent Priuses haunt the streets.

Notes

[1] This, to me, dear readers, is actually the entertaining aspect of this story: simply the fact that the duck-rabbit’s brain immediately formed the hypothesis of the whimsical thief in trying to make sense of what it saw. This is not the first time the duck-rabbit has formed such a hypothesis. A few weeks ago I got home from work and froze when I saw on the kitchen counter a plastic container of pink liquid. The plastic container had previously contained those addictive bright pink pickled turnips that you sometimes get with falafel (or, in LA, at Zankou Chicken). Anyway. The point is, I had bought this container of pickled turnips the previous day at the farmers’ market, and while I had been tempted to eat them all in one sitting, I had exercised great restraint and refrained from doing so. In fact, I had only eaten just a scant few of the turnip slices filling the sixteen-ounce container. My heart thumping, I examined the rest of the apartment. Everything else was as I had left it. The conclusion was obvious: a whimsical turnip-eating thief had broken into my apartment, flagrantly eaten all my pickled turnips, and left the empty plastic container on the counter in a shameless act of defiance. Or else, and this was my next hypothesis, I had earlier, myself, in some kind of somnambulant trance, eaten all of the turnips. Both possibilities were equally disturbing. (It turned out that the elder had let himself in to the apartment on his way back from school, eaten all the pickled turnips, and then left and gone to his father’s house.)

[2] Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” Trans. Strachey, James. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Ed. Strachey, James. Vol. 17. 24 vols. London:Hogarth Press, 1955. 217–52. 237.

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