It was a short Muppet sequence, a take-off on cooking shows. An excitable Italian cook was waving his wooden spoon over a pile of spaghetti on a plate. Carried away, he pounded the spaghetti with his spoon. The spaghetti, not liking this, began to sneak off. The cook noticed, grabbed the spaghetti and threw it back onto the plate. But he forgot and whacked it with the spoon again. The spaghetti tried to leave again. This sequence happened several times. Finally the spaghetti “lost it” and, enraged, grabbed the chef by the throat.
Why was it so easy for us to know how the spaghetti felt? Why could we think, “Well, that spaghetti’s reaction was entirely understandable.” Spaghetti is just noodles, right? But somehow humans “throw” emotions and motives into inanimate objects. Why else would a hot-tempered person trip on a chair, blame it, and smash it to bits?
I could imagine a puppet sequence between two rocks, maybe one a sassy little bit of edgy quartz and the other a big grim smooth hunk of granite. Some YouTuber could create that scene this afternoon. I could imagine a pretty funny routine between a yam and a sweet potato, one declaring “I yam what I yam,” and the other saying, “Well, you’re certainly no sweet potato!” Then what happens? A fight or a love affair?
The Blackfeet organized their language into three categories, marked by subtle prefixes, suffixes and changes in the word itself. One category was for the highly significant and portentous things that would impress most cultures, like sundogs when the sun shone through high ice. One category was stuff that was just stuff -- stayed there and did nothing. But the great majority of objects and phenomomena were “living” in some sense and could even speak. Not every culture divvied up the territory in just this way, but every culture allows for significance and meaning and metaphors and suggestiveness -- however you want to describe it. Human-ities.
So far as I know, no scientist has yet put a puppeteer in an fMRI to see what’s happening in the brain that makes creating imaginary beings different from what’s measurable in the “actual” world. But I read something the other day that asked what happened in the anthro brain (including those of neanderthals) that suddenly they began to bury their dead with a blanket of flowers and to paint animals on the walls of caves. Which little bit of brain connected where and how? Where did “art” come from and what’s the difference between evocative but abstract shapes, colors, or sounds and representatives of real things? Why is it that we all loved abstract expressionism so much? How is it that we can look at super-real Andrew Wyeth paintings and see far more than what is depicted? Why is it that we can be so pleased by Paul Winter including real wolf howls in his music?
I have no answers, but I like thinking about it, partly because -- aside from spontaneous and uninformed delight -- there’s a therapeutic dimension. “The Piggle” is a book about art therapy with a child too young to talk. (Her father called her “the Piggle.”). The therapist was D.W. Winnicott and the issue was murderous jealousy triggered by the birth of a second child. Using stuffed animals, one of which leaked sawdust, and a cobalt blue glass “eye cup” for washing out eyes, both of which had developed some kind of symbolism for Piggle, deciphered and manipulated by Winnicott, the Piggle became reconciled to her sibling and the possibility of more.
Why does almost everyone react to the “special” quality of cobalt blue glass? I have a collection of cobalt blue medicine bottles on a windowsill and there is an amazing tree on the Pacific coast where some woman has attached her collection as thickly as leaves. I watch for movies that use that color on set walls. It says something to us.
I’m off-topic again. My first puppet was a papier mache hand puppet I made in the fourth grade: an orange cat with a striped body, not cat stripes but a remnant from a striped blouse. At about the same time someone gave me a rubbery hand-puppet of a gnome or Punch who had a pointy felt hat. Much later I bought myself a cleverly carved wooden fox with tufts of real white fur. In the early years with Bob I got into his taxidermy papier mache, which was FAR nicer to work with, and stole some of his taxidermy eyes to make a whole series of characters, one of which was Sik-et-soo-aki, “Dark and Pretty,” a Blackfeet maiden with a white flannel “buckskin” dress -- very lumpily beaded by yours truly. The most remarkable puppet was “Reddy Kilowatt,” who was an echo of that first rubbery gnome, except that he had a pointy head and was covered with fluttering bits of bright red satin, velvet and sequins. The trouble was that these papier mache heads were so heavy that neither I nor my students could make them move. Today I’d give them styrofoam cores, like Muppets.
Another early experiment (high school) was a marionette, meant to be controlled from above by strings. Using a library book as a resource, I sewed a stuffed puppet with lead weights in its feet so they would stay down. There was only one figure, a “Petrouchka” figure in a turquoise clown suit. He had yellow yarn hair and a face drawn on with liquid embroidery fluid -- very sad. So many of my little figures were sad and lonely. Romantically, like Anne of Green Gables. I never did put control strings on this little figure, but I kept him around a long time. He keyed into my interest in Commedia dell Arte, which I fed with trips to the Reed College library. Tying melancholy to literature and history was a good way to manage it. The Japanese have always done so.
In the freedom years that I keep calling the Aquarian Revolution, Bread and Roses made huge political puppets to use in pageants and processions. I only saw them -- or their relatives -- "live" once, when Jimmy Carter came to Portland as part of campaigning, and the anti-nuclear people showed up with ten-foot puppets of death, skulls in cloaks and mushroom clouds. In many ways those people and their ideals live on in such organizations as Portland’s Tears of Joy puppet troupe. There’s another puppet company in Missoula as well as “children’s” acting troupes that use masks and simple dances as they tour the state. Cinematheque is in this tradition, though video images are far more fluid and suggestive than physical puppets.
So much of the last eight years has been about the death or suppression of imagination. I wouldn’t be surprised if Obama’s tolerance, even though he’s not an excitable man, allowed our puppet-loving brains to bloom again. I can’t imagine Obama beating up the spaghetti, provoking retaliation.
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