U is for Unicorns

  I’ll bet you didn’t see this one coming, eh?  Actually, because of kitsch culture, so many literary symbols have become Cracker Barrel gift shop fodder.  Years ago, I made the mistake of saying out loud that I liked rabbits.  (I even had a live rabbit for a short time, but he eventually went “to live on a farm”–or at least that’s what my parents claimed.)  I have accumulated several lovely glass or china rabbits.  Meanwhile, I have been given some of the most cartoonish, unoriginal ones ever.

My mother like unicorns–same story.  As hard as it may be to find a unicorn in the real world (particularly in comparison to rabbits), they are everywhere in little knick-knack stores.  That poor child in Glass Menagerie could have replaced the broken one with no trouble nowadays.

Where is the line between art that establishes the beauty of a symbol and the commercialism that runs it into the ground (and out onto the markdown table)?  I have no definitive answer, but I can tell then difference when I see it.

Unicorns, though, most often evoke one of my favorite passages from one of my all-time favorite books, T. H. White’s The Once and Future King. If I had my favorite dog-eared paperback copy, it would probably flop right open to the passages in which the four nephews of Arthur go hunting for a unicorn in a futile attempt to get their mother to notice them.  Boys being boys, their plan goes somewhat askew.  As anyone then knew, it takes a virgin to capture a unicorn, so they conscript a young kitchen maid. Then, one way or another, they end up not with a live unicorn, but with the head of a formerly living creature.  It looked a bit worse for the wear–and their mother didn’t even notice.

You don’t get stories like that these days, and certainly not from tacky trinket shops.

I won’t even start on Watership Down and rabbits.