Looking back on my childhood, I realize that one of the greatest influences on my early years was Marx.
No, not that Marx:
No, not this Marx either:
The Marx I’m talking about is the Marx Plastics Company, makers of little toy plastic dinosaurs.
My brother and I would spend hours in the basement playing with these dinosaurs, making up stories, going on adventures, exploring new undiscovered lands.
All the dinosaurs had their genus name embossed on them somewhere, Tyrannasaurus, Stegasaurus, Triceratops. But my favourite was the biggest dinosaur of them all – the Brontosaurus, a word which translates to “Thunder Lizard”.
When I was older, I found out that scientists had determined that there was actually no such thing as a Brontosaurus. Apparently somebody had stuck the wrong head on a fossil skeleton of an Apatosaurus, and had mistakenly labeled it as a new genus.
And that’s when I realized that the Brontosaurus was even more extinct than the other dinosaurs. Which of course made me love it all the more.
Long before Philip K. Dick cornered the market on this kind of thing, Lewis Carroll raised similar questions when he had the Gryphon hang out with the Mock Turtle (shown here with Alice in an illustration by John Tenniel).
Sure, the Gryphon is nonexistent, being a mythical beast. But the Mock Turtle is even more nonexistent, since “Mock Turtle” is really a reference to “mock turtle soup”, the euphemismistic term for the cheap soup given to poor children in nineteenth century London. The soup was actually made from the discarded brains and organs of slaughtered cows.
I find myself mourning for the poor sad Mock Turtle, whose hold upon reality is so tenuous that he is not even quite a mythical beast (although he arguably had it better than those cows).
Is it wrong of me, some sort of misplaced nostalgia, to mourn for the Brontosaurus and the Mock Turtle? And is it even being nostalgic to look back with fondness on things that never were?
Your last comment is one of the “metaphysical” questions of the Spanish movie “Princesas”. Can you be nostalgic of something that you never had, something that did not happen yet, something that might never happen? Well, eventually in the movie, the principal character decides that yes, it can be called nostalgy after all because it induces the same kind of feelings…
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0434292/
I keep trying to find the same edition of “A General History of Labyrinths” by Silas Haslam that my father had when I was a child. It was lost in the same fire as Moriarty’s book about the binomial theorem (which discussed negative dimensional objects, only recently rediscovered by Mandelbrot) and the complete works of S. Morgenstern…
you ask: “Is it wrong of me, some sort of misplaced nostalgia, to mourn for the Brontosaurus and the Mock Turtle? And is it even being nostalgic to look back with fondness on things that never were?”
I reply: Of course it isn’t wrong. Maybe the Brontosaurus… (btw before learning about the head thing it made perfect sense to me that that was your favorite even though i cannot articulate why. It just resonated in this “oh yes, of course that was Ken’s favorite” truth.) er, anyway…Maybe the Brontosaurus and the Mock Turtle represent the idea of possibility that we have –not when we are younger, necessarily–but when we are without the knowledge– that changes forms as we learn what is and isn’t. We still have possiblity in infinite other ways, but not in the way that we do when we don’t know specific “knowns” about things.
Anyway, when you knew of the B and the MT, they were knowns to you. In the case of the B, they were knows to all of science at the time…
The wit knows that his place is at the tail of a procession.