Welcome to Yard Dragon where I write about earth + ether and everything in between.
Ugh, I had the dumbest, most inopportune migraine last night. My first event as Executive Director; I got all dressed up, prepared to say a few words, and about an hour into the festivities...bam! Migraine. Not just any migraine, either. A real head splitter. I probably shouldn’t have driven home because I was definitely weaving as I walked to my car.
If I’m being honest, I probably ignored the signs. The extreme dry mouth, the stuffy nose [Oliver Sacks says this, “...careful questioning of patients will reveal that at least a quarter of them develop some ‘stuffiness’ of the nose in the course of an attack.”], the yawning, the bodily stress, the confusion.
I still, after 42 years of this shit, feel a profound sense of guilt any time I get a migraine that causes a disruption to anyone outside myself. Which is a bunch of hogwash, I know, but...
I keep waiting to be a real boy.
Which brings me to Pinocchio.
My grandmother used to tell me what I always assumed was “the Italian version” of Pinocchio. It was the story of a little puppet who wants nothing more than to be a real boy. Geppetto sends Pinocchio out one day to bring a basket of eggs to his grandmother who lives up in the mountains. Of course, Pinocchio gets himself into some adventures, and doesn’t bring the eggs to his nonna. He then lies to Geppetto about this, says that of course he brought the eggs to Nonna...and that’s where my memory ends. But I remember it was a kind story in its telling, Disney-gentle. Geppetto loved Pinocchio like a real son.
There was, though, some lesson in there about how you can’t be a real boy if you tell lies.
I went looking recently to suss out the real story of Pinocchio, and what did I find but Carlo Collodi’s sadistic novel, published as a serial in the Giornale dei Bambini (newspaper for kids) in the late eighteen hundreds.
Pinocchio in this original story is a shitty boy, and according to this 2011 Slate article, so were all the other boys in the story. Boys [kids in general?] are shitty seems to be the main theme, and all sorts of sadistic physical and psychological torture ensues.
Here’s Nathaniel Rich from that article:
“Pinocchio’s bad behavior is not intended to be charming or endearing. It is meant to serve as a warning. Collodi originally intended the story, which was first published in 1881, to be a tragedy. It concluded with the puppet’s execution. Pinocchio’s enemies, the Fox and the Cat, bind his arms, pass a noose around his throat, and hang him from the branch of an oak tree...”
What. The. Fuck.
But I digress. I was originally thinking of Pinocchio’s desire to be a real boy in relation to Barbie. This transformation from automaton to human, the inborn desire to be human, the assumption that to be human is the pinnacle of experience.
The most interesting part of the Barbie movie, for me, was that moment when Barbie wakes up in the morning in her pink-everything dream house, all the other Barbies within shouting distance, and she asks if anyone else has thought about death.
Crickets.
From that moment on, things start going wrong in a very human way. Burnt toast, flat feet, those nagging thoughts of death.
Even the pitfalls of being a real person in the real world are better than being a doll, right? Barbie wants the full breadth of human experience——even death, one presumes——not some plastic facsimile thereof.
[Side note: It’s amazing how much I love being alive despite the utter shite of being alive. In fact, I’d live forever in this migraine-ridden, often depressed and anxious body if given the chance. If you love being alive as much as I do and are also an artist, you are probably required to think an inordinate amount about death.]
Is it better to be human than, say, a plant or a dog or a whale or a rock? Probably not. Likely, they are much better at just being without all this inane metacognition around being alive. And they experience time much differently, more slowly, is my guess.
Back when I was playing with Barbies, I named them things like Patricia and Mimi. I used a spare built-in bookshelf as the Barbie high rise where they lived their lives when I was away. My Barbies liked to get their hair brushed and change outfits sixteen times a day and swap Ken around between them.
The room they lived in within the house I lived in was haunted. I’m pretty certain of this.
I wonder if the ghosts played with Barbies or if the Barbies held seances in their high rise.
Much love to you from my Nurtec-migraine hangover,
Lex
PS. I did not cut Patricia’s hair. I made the mistake of leaving my Barbies with my sister when I went to college. Note, too, that Patricia is the only one left.
Del Toro's version of Pinnochio was pretty great, I thought.
https://randallhayes.substack.com/p/jauntily-macabre
Also, watching the 60 Minutes interview of Greta Gurweig on the Barbie movie with an all-male crowd in DC last Sunday was an odd experience.