Don’t think of elephants. Or bananas. Or willies. Or boa constrictors.
Don’t think of elephants. Particularly don’t think of a grey elephant with wrinkly knees reaching up to a banana tree with her mouth open and trunk extended. Because you’re not thinking of elephants, you’ll be able to not think of boa constrictors. I’m the one who’s thinking of boa constrictors, because every time I don’t think of elephants, I think of elephants, and then I think of an elephant from the inside of a boa constrictor, because this is how The Little Prince begins, and it’s one of my most beloved books.
Did you know that boa constrictor males had two willies? Well, it’s only sensible. I mean, if you’d just digested a small elephant and were feeling too full to pivot along your axis, you’d want a backup option when it came to aligning yourself with your mate.
Stop thinking about willies. Let me tell you a story about stories and about bananas, and about why, when your brain does that rapid-fire domino cascade of associating meaning to words, objects and verbal and visual cues, that’s sometimes a very good thing. It’ll explain why I’m always going on about boa constrictors, too.
So, here’s a short story about bananas. I’m writing this from Bulgaria, which is in Eastern Europe, which, until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, was part of the Soviet Union. Yes, Communism. But I’m not from here; I’m from England, which had Thatcher and all sorts of crazies in charge when I was little (plus ça change). The other thing it had was a free market. Although we, personally, were not very well off, we regularly had access to imported food. Nuts, oranges, pineapples, and even that rather good Ritter Sport chocolate that my grandparents favoured. On the way home from school I bought one and two penny sweets with my friends, whenever I wanted. We had (apart from the quintessentially English Bernard Matthews turkey burgers,) Italian spaghetti and yes, bananas for pudding.
Picture my surprise when, during a Bulgarian lesson recently, my teacher Boris and I have this exchange (I’m translating; you’ll have to imagine how this sounds in the musical yet impenetrably strange register of this Slavic tongue):
- Do you eat lunch every day?
- Yes, I eat lunch every day.
- What do you eat for lunch?
- For lunch we eat soup, bread, sandwiches or salad. What do you eat for lunch?
[Pauses. Lights a cigarette]
- Well, I don’t eat much because of all the cigarettes. But I do eat bananas.
- Bananas?
- Yes, about a kilogram of bananas every day.
- A kilogram?? Are you a monkey?
- Do you want to know why I eat a kilo of bananas every day?
- Yes, please.
He eats a kilo of bananas every day. Wow. But imagine being eight or nine and being trapped inside a regime whose ultimate aim is to control the beliefs, thoughts, actions, diet and output of its prisoners in a misguided attempt to impose artificial utopia. Imagine only being allowed to eat bananas once a year: at New Year. Imagine your parents queueing to buy this expensive treat, (no more than a kilo per adult, mind you) hiding them away so you wouldn’t gobble them in one sitting. Not touching a single bite themselves, saving them for you, the children, as far as bananas can be saved at all.
No impulsive grabbing, peeling and scoffing on a jaunt through the kitchen. No surprises. No making banana cake with the bananas which have been left sitting around to go black. Like Charlie and his single bar of chocolate, eating a banana would be a sacred ritual.
What do you do when you spend your childhood longing for something you know is off limits?
You make it a part of your internal shorthand; your bag of signs, symbols, meaningful ideas. Boris tells me this:
- When I was a kid, I told myself that when I grew up, I would be able to eat bananas every single day. So, for years, I have. A kilo, more or less. Every day.
Wow, I say. In fact, I don’t say that, because I don’t know what ‘wow’ is in Bulgarian. I ask him if he’s ever made banana ice cream. It’s nice, I say.
- Ah, no. In that respect, I’m still very much Bulgarian. You know we think ice cream is something dangerous, harmful! (laughs)
I laugh too. Fuck, I think. Frozen banana mixed with cocoa powder is really amazing. But yes, here I’ve been on the receiving end of enough reproachful stares from waitresses asking me if I’m REALLY going to give my child COLD water, wouldn’t I like it warmed up?, that I recognise this response as a reflex — just as my own feet would still settle into the grooved path worn by daily shortcuts to the sweet shop to buy sherbet, should I come across it today.
When so much of our lives these days has shifted scope into the online, vast space of the web, how do we anchor ourselves to meaning and sanity? How do we prevent ourselves from becoming utterly lost? Hundreds of years ago, when we lived in small communities and never strayed far, we would have had a small circle of friends, all of whom shared a common set of meaningful markers, words, beliefs and anecdotes. I live in a small village today, and I’m very, very grateful that I’m not limited to also thinking and working in it, as nice as it is. But now? Where to now, comrades?
I don’t think that, as humans, we can process information nearly as rationally as we like to think we can. I think we’re all mad, emotional primates in jeans.
So I reckon that as we grow up, we hoard signs, symbols, words and meaningful memories in order to make our own internal toolkit for navigating our way though this terrain called Knowing What To Do. We stake a claim to these symbols in our friendships, work and play.
Think of bananas: that’s you, Boris. Think of boa constrictors: that’s me. I grew up identifying with the pilot in the Little Prince who puts away his pencils and does something sensible, but keeps his drawing of a boa constrictor swallowing an elephant (from the outside) just in case he meets anybody in life who can decode it.
Code is the word I’m looking for here. We’re all code busters. When I had a brief fling with screenprinting, I created a print based on a curious anecdote from the town I was in at the time. In Nelson, New Zealand, there was a Tuesday night ritual at the local supermarket. Fellow students told me that anybody who was ‘on the pull’ would pilot an empty trolley around SuperValue. Empty, that is, except for a single bunch of bananas. That was the code. Bananas = available.
Smart or loony? Possibly both. But codes are vital tools for making decisions about who we are and where we’re going. Which is why it’s a good thing to spend some time excavating yours. What were you besotted by when you were eight? What internal ideal still stays with you, no matter how folded up and tucked away it may be?
What matters to you defines your mattering, as John Green said.
So…do you want to talk about primeval forests, and stars and, and…boa constrictors?
Oh good.
