Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Neurotic Stick

(Here's one of the 'Wee Man' stories I wrote about 20 years ago and forgot about. The resurrection of this one is occasioned by this report in The Guardian about talking benches.)

The wee man felt somewhat baffled by beauty. Not by his own good looks or lack of them, but because of something he had incidentally observed. It seemed to him that the expression on the faces of beautiful people was no happier than that upon the faces of less attractive folk. Exacerbating this perception was the fact that he had no idea what expression played across his own face. This was due to an unusual accident in his childhood.

He had been taken by an aunt to a variety show during the course of which he, along with several other children, had been hypnotised by a conjurer. Some of the children found themselves impersonating chickens when the conjuror said a certain word, others found certain vegetables to be too hot to touch. He had found himself unable to see his own reflection in a mirror. A sudden disturbance caused by a boy pecking out the conjuror’s left eye meant that some children were never deprogrammed. Of course the adults who had taken them to the show in the first place did not believe in hypnosis, and so these traits were allowed to remain.

So it was he had no idea how attractive or ugly he was.

This gave him an unusual perspective on people’s beauty problems. He was therefore able to discover the First Principle of General Beauty. This is when people conform absolutely to a social ideal, so they come to resemble marble covered in skin, or bones with magazine covers stretched across them. Such people were often thought dumb or heartless, but, he discovered, it was merely that they felt lost in a meaningless sink of beauty, in the great approximation to a standard. It was not that they failed to reach an ideal, but that, having reached it, they recoiled, baffled by simplicity.

His intuition that such people were as miserable as those who had failed in some detail to be beautiful, led him on to formulate the Second Principle of General Beauty. This was basically the revelation that the language of beauty has not been deciphered. It is possible to talk about beauty, but you cannot be sure of anything you say in it. Those who looked on a beautiful face as a sentence composed of eyebrows and lips were bound to be deluded. They were like those children who were forever doomed to impersonate a chicken on the pronunciation of one innocent word.

When he saw the intolerable suffering on the faces he passed in the street, the wee man resolved to do something to help humanity. Both men and women, he reasoned, were rendered powerless by their own appearance, and many of their difficulties seemed compounded by looking at members of the opposite sex. He remembered the fairy tale of Snow White and the mirror which spoke to the Evil Queen. Because of his own post-hypnotic problem, he was only able to conceive of the mirror as a piece of talking wood. Nonetheless, he found the notion of a therapeutic explicator, a kind of translator from Beautyese into normal speech, to be immensely helpful.

He began experimenting with tape recorders cunningly embedded in pieces of wood. These would be activated by pressure on their handles, and would then inform the person who had picked them up about the two principles of general beauty. However, because he had not understood the purpose of a mirror, he found that few if any individuals actually picked these devices up. He took to leaving them in public places, leaning against park benches and jutting from restaurant tables.

This brought him marginal success, but, again because of his failure to understand the nature of mirrors, he found people complained about the apparent irrelevance of messages thus received. Park attendants and waiters, though naturally concerned with questions of personal beauty, did not find they had much time to consider the issues raised by the pieces of wood during a normal working day.

He realised that the intellectual gap between seeing a piece of wood and thinking about beauty was too large. Obviously the principle behind the fairy tale would have to be updated for the modern sensibility. It was at this point that he conceived of the neurotic stick.

Theorizing that people might prefer to empathize with the piece of wood for its own sake, rather than be lectured to, he tried giving the stick a short monologue of complaints about its own personal beauty. Then he stood it in its own space, like a tree or lamppost. The voice was activated by pressure pads beneath the surrounding paving stones. Soon large groups of people could be found clustered around his sticks, listening sympathetically to their complaints about being too long, too thin, about having a coarse grain or too dark a varnish.

These neurotic sticks became so popular that the wee man devised a hand held version, based on his original design. People simply held on to it when they felt any anxiety about their appearance; tapes could be personalised to suit the individual’s particular beauty problems (translated, of course, into the stick’s terms). Within five years the concept of the neurotic stick had become such a commonplace that he was able to dispense with the tapes: people had begun to identify with their own sticks.

Paradoxically, this brought about an enormous focus on the appearance of the sticks themselves, which became the subject of an aesthetic cult, complete with magazines announcing seasonal choices and articles from tree surgeons about rare timbers. People’s attitudes towards their own appearances became lackadaisical, whilst aspects of traditional festivals like the Maypole, the Yule log, and, most importantly, the Christmas tree, took on an entirely new significance. Christians became obsessed with obtaining sticks fashioned from the Original Cross, and the use of wood for anything but neurotic sticks was frowned upon. Extremists would descend upon items of furniture, tear them limb from limb, then declare them “liberated”.

The printed word became an endangered concept.

All of these developments deeply saddened the wee man, who had hoped to free people from their sufferings. Now it looked as though as though large proportions of poor people might be dehoused in the massive reforestation programmes set up by private industries producing pirate sticks. It was at this point he remembered the conjuror’s trick from his childhood.

He began to secretly reintroduce tapes into his neurotic sticks. Instead of discussing anxieties these tapes broadcast subliminal messages about temperature, along the lines of “I’m such a hot tomato!” or “I’m a courgette that will burn your fingers!” He hoped this would cause people to drop the sticks, like the poor children who were still afraid of certain vegetables. But he had made one miscalculation.

People by now so identified with their neurotic sticks that they received these statements as messages about their personal identities. At the same time their image of themselves had so atrophied that they no longer knew whether they were beautiful or not, they just accepted the word of their sticks. So these announcements, because they contained a level of innuendo of which the wee man had been entirely unaware, in fact led to a massive increase in sexual behaviour of all kinds. The streets were filled with drab gray couplings and the apparently excited mutterings of countless neurotic sticks.

At this point the massive risk of disease finally caused governments to act. The wee man was hauled before commission after commission, and put on trial for his invention. The neurotic sticks were banned, which gave black marketeers total control of the industry, and the wee man was declared criminally insane and imprisoned. He ended up in a cell with an older man who had one eye and who seemed strangely familiar. This man, who had been imprisoned for many years and couldn’t understand all this fuss about pieces of wood, found the wee man so attractive that he fell deeply in love with him.

The wee man felt that there was some small detail he had overlooked in his life that if he could just recapture he would be able to solve the mess he had gotten everyone into. His admirer suggested he allowed himself to be hypnotised, to see if such a detail could be recovered. Whilst he was in a trance the incident of the botched hypnotism came out and the conjurer (for it was he) was able to finish his ancient act.

The wee man was now able to contemplate his image in the mirror for the first time with a sense that it related to himself. He found the experience intensely disturbing. His features seemed average, neither conventionally beautiful, nor conventionally ugly. But whilst he had never had any sensation of expression whatever, and had therefore supposed his face to be immobile, he found that it was actually extremely fluid, registering every nuance of emotion with painful intensity. He felt naked and ashamed. It was (he thought) only too clear why the judges had found him insane.

As he stared into the mirror, aghast, his companion gave him a supportive hug, and instantly the Third Principle of General Beauty came to him. This is the message that he smuggled out to his supporters in the forests, the message inserted into thousands of neurotic sticks, and infiltrated through the hundreds of thousands of illegal sticks. This is the message that finally brought nations to their senses, and made people everywhere look on the world around them with new vision and new hope, as though awakened from an ugly nightmare by a single phrase.

Recently there have been detractors who have claimed that the subterfuge necessary to get the message out resulted in it being accidentally edited. These sceptics claim that the Third Principle is actually nothing more than an old cliché. But until the wee man and his companion are released, the world will continue to engrave this message on its neurotic stick and in its heart:

“BEAUTY IS IN THE HOLDER”.

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