The Lotus Eater

A dear friend of mine recently confided to me her deep and unexplainable love for those animals that natural selection saw fit to make caricatures of themselves. She adores predators that can’t be trusted (as every good predator must be), builders that build only by the dictate of uninspired instinct, and all those other animals Dame Natura has carelessly mutated to the point where ordinary human eyes fail to make a connection between visage and utility.

In fact, this extraordinary young woman’s passion for the absurdities that are the necessary result of our Creator’s concept of infinite variety has taken her beyond a state of appreciation for the world’s oddities. She has become something of a naturalist. She is a collector of ecological unlikelihoods. And like every good naturalist, she has specialized; she has narrowed her field of focus. As of late, she has taken a great deal of interest in dental irregularity. A wide interest, I must say: beavers (those builders spoken of), sharks (and those great, unanswered ichthyological questions: Why so many teeth? And why so many sets of them?), and crocodiliians (whose mouths appear almost too primitively ferocious to make it in this, our diplomatic age).

I have learned, however, that she has begun to feel her collection, at least toothwise, is complete. It is like watching a driftwood artist moving into coral sculpture–I anticipate eagerly her new direction without completely comprehending how she will travel from point A to point B.

And so, with a certain, admitted amount of ignorance regarding the modus operandi of her lovely madness, I am going to open my impudent mouth and speak on what I feel may be a valuable tangent. I have always believed that, no matter how briefly lines of thought may intersect, each follows an interesting, and sometimes significant direction.

The premise of my commentary (or the starting point of my questionable digression, if you prefer) rests on a foundation of antithesis. That is to say, I have considered the particular category of creatures my naturalist friend has investigated and have tried to create its inverse. She has concentrated on absurdities arising from the surplus of characteristics evolution has bestowed on some members of the animal kingdom. She has not proceeded without reason–she can communicate, more ably than anyone else of my acquaintance, the endearing aesthetic of the grotesquely gifted. Her adoration of ungainly beauty, untainted by any malice, deserves nothing but the highest recommendation.

However, I spoke of opposites. I am always inclined to do so, whether or not it seems a worthwhile endeavor. In this case, I hope, my somersault approach to investigation is not in vain. When I realized that natural surfeit was the guiding principle of my colleague’s course of study, I sought, in my thinking, for its mirror image, its negative. And I came to the idea of absence. Of course, I quickly apprehended that one hundred and one forgettable poets have passed their lives moaning about that which is not there but plagues them nevertheless (indeed, this kind of muddled thinking betrays their disbelief in the reality of ideas: these men exist on a plane that requires physical presence to justify their metaphorical expeditions). It was not absence I was looking for, but paradoxical absence. I suppose what I mean is that I was reaching for those types of absurdities that arise from a lack of something essential; instances where nothingness, where the non-existence of necessary characteristics makes one of God’s creations complete. I was looking for a failure even greater than the Basset Hound.

I don’t know if the good Dr. __ has collected in the North Pole the kind of exquisite artifacts she has found in the South.

•••••

To tell the truth, I found it hard to think of concrete examples of absurd poverty, and it has always seemed to me that absurd wealth is the norm. My brain, in tight situations, always finds recourse and solace in the replaying of memories older than its critical eye. It is an involuntary reaction of mine, and, though it has sometimes provided me with insight, any knowledge I gain during the episode is a product of grace rather than intention. Blessed be then, my mind’s tolerance of free association! For in my quest to find a handicapped monster, I turned to pop culture. I do not pretend to be a trendsetter or an arbiter of what is fashionable, but, like every American-born human, I possess a great store of incidental information. I thank god my mother made me watch PBS because, otherwise, my ruminations would be far less instructive.

Nothing makes this more evident than the example I have found for my Benign Monster–that great Wooly Mammoth without tusks– Snuffleupagus. Yes, yes, I realize that he is a fictional character. His flesh-and-bone antecedents were mightily equipped, and the skills of the daring mammoth-hunter were rightly celebrated in Neolithic times. But Snuffy, man-made as he was, had none of these powerful attributes. Had he wanted to, he could not gore Bob or Gordon or Maria–he was without weapons, without teeth. In fact, this defanged pachyderm, for all his great size and bearing, was rendered so unimportant by his harmless nature, the denizens of Sesame Street did not believe in his existence. Sure, he is the elephant in the room, but he is an elephant without consquence.

Snuffleupagus brings to mind the state of oppression and victimhood that have hitherto marked the majority of the human race (blessed are the meek?). Violence has a tendency to actively forget its own violations and regard its unrecorded history in unspoken discomfort. I believe Snuffy is a particularly American incarnation of this process. With his luminous eyes and lispy lashes, I see him as an enlarged, betrunked water buffalo, alike to those that were slaughtered indiscriminately in the jungles of Southeast Asia during the Vietnam era. He is a ghost of the repressed memories of that American genocide. He is the personification of great crimes we fervently attempt to dismiss, and, who, through our dissembling, we completely disarm, only to add magnitude to his bizarrely effete spectre. I believe that Snuffy gained weight, but never corporeal presence, as the show went on.

It never occured to me, as a toddler, to distrust a program like Sesame Street. Later on, of course, the inevitable loss of innocence experienced by all the adolescents of our species made me suspicious and paranoid, even when retroactively regarding the assumptions of my childhood. I will not condemn Sesame Street. But I will tell you, I believe the show traverses along slippery ideological grounds.

Sesame Street was brave simply for treating Snuffleupagus as subject of discussion. At the same time, he is a subject within a tightly controlled frame. The program makes sure that this monster is powerless to upset the social bonds that hold its community together. Somehow the acceptance of Snuffy is too dangerous to the Street; he must be depicted as the product of a series of halluncinations experienced by an already grotesque canary (working, no doubt in the far-flung mines of the Left Wing) . It also may be of note to remark that in de-tusking him, he was not only unable to respond to any violence done to him, but lost any hope of being a sexual mammoth as well. Without status markers, he could never be considered a good mate. For all intents and purposes, Snuffleupagus does not exist because his physiological incompleteness makes him an impossibility. And that is why I feel he is worthy of my attention and love. I have always been an advocate for the dentally challenged.

••••

Imagine, dear reader, an impoverished leprechaun or a smokeless dragon. Weak, cuddly monsters made so by the bathos of their bereft conditions. Nature too, has real-life correspondences. I can think of nothing more adorable than the dodo bird or the many other small and foolish prey that went extinct due to their complete ignorance of predators. These creatures are not merely ill-equipped (like chickens and the pekingese)–all aspects of their physiology are in direct conflict with the necessities of survival.

And so, if I could be so bold, I would suggest to my colleague, so well versed in the absurdity of over-manifestation, she might explore the absurdity of absence.