Sepia Memory #1: ’Once the Game is over, the King and Pawn go back in the same box’
When I was a little girl, I developed a secret method – a game – which helped me to ‘dismantle’ scary people. Towering above me, I needed to bring them down to my level.
With tyrannical teachers, I would zoom in on their faces and set their features free: eyebrows would animate into caterpillars and crawl off across foreheads, lips would inflate into dinghies, teeth flashed like ivory piano keys. Moles had furry animals crawling out of them, noses grew longer and arched, furrowed brows became arid fields, cheeks got whiskers. Eyes saucered into spaceships…
If this didn’t work, he or she would go down to the next level in the game. This involved peeling away some of their layers – like seeking out a pip from a fruit – and then imagining them doing something very ordinary, very mundane, like brushing their teeth. Or, in extreme cases, on the loo - doing poo. In a mechanism of defence, my imagination too, was going back to the very basics.
In my early twenties, I was intimidated by a customs official in a US airport who near strip-searched me and then flicked, page-by-page, through my notebook and diary. It felt like an intrusive and unnecessary violation - and my cheeks burned in the process. So, in my mind’s eye, I 'strip-searched' him and imagined him not just brushing his teeth but also on the loo and yep, doing poo. He is – so my thinking ran – just like me, no worse, no better, not scary: just a man, just a human, just like me. And – he goes to the loo AND he does poo.
Sometimes I think we see people at their best, when they are asleep. It is a privilege to be near to somebody soundly sleeping, we are implicitly invited in to share an intimacy: with them at their most vulnerable, most ‘open’. Children asleep are the obvious advertisements for this, but adults too reclaim their innocence, their childhood, in sleep. To witness this redemptive 'reset' also inspires a fierce protective and nurturing instinct in me - and I suspect it does in most of us too. As though my only task in this world now and forevermore, is to protect this sleepy being - in all of their serenity and purity.
Curiously enough, when playing poker with tyrants or protector with slumbering loved ones, my thoughts amble off down the same path. In this giant game that we also call Life, perhaps we humans are all by turn Kings, by turn Pawns.
We all rise with the sun, sink with it setting.
We all climb out of the same box, we all climb back into the same box (to fully max out the ol' chess metaphor here!)
And - we all do poo.
(The original of this - which I've tweaked above - was written in 2011. The title is taken from an Italian proverb, which I liked - whilst also doubting that it was an Italian proverb!)
