The Wisdom of the Skin Horse
part 1
In the classic children’s book “The Velveteen Rabbit,” Margery Williams writes profoundly about what she calls being real. William Nicholson beautifully illustrates this classic story published in 1922 by Double Day and Company, Inc. Garden City, New York. Williams tackles the identity of a small stuffed toy rabbit and his search for self worth. The rabbit encounters the old skin horse, a sort of patriarchal figure who has lived his best years in the little boy’s nursery observing the lives of all the other toys in their own personal identity struggles. When the little rabbit struggles to find purpose, he asks the skin horse if he understands what the term real actually means.
This is a very profound question in deed seeing that most people find their worth in what they do as opposed to who they actually are. In the story of the velveteen rabbit, we find the same dynamic at work within a small group of nursery toys and discover how the wisdom of the skin horse helps guide the little rabbit into a place of self acceptance and then ultimately into becoming a real rabbit. The velveteen rabbit early in the classic story encounters two individual toys who attempt to find fault with him in indirect ways. While the more mechanical toys find hope in their superiority and internal “modernistic” ways, the toy boat boasts of his exterior rigging apparatus’ in an attempt to belittle the rabbits plain exterior. Timothy the jointed wooden lion boasts about his being made by the local disabled soldiers and therefore claimed connections to the government. The rabbit then begins a process of in-looking in search for his own significance.
We like Timothy the jointed lion like to lay claim to pretend notions of grandeur in an attempt to mask what we believe to be a plain (in) or (ex)-terior. Our significance therefore does not lay in who we are, but in what we do or more importantly what we believe people expect us to be. Like the mechanical toys, we delve into modernistic ideologies and post-modern notions in an attempt to shed the shell of the boring human condition. This is a most unwise and destructible path to tread. When we focus on the exteriors we miss the most important place of all…the interior.
The value of anything is always internal. That’s why we paint particleboard and stain oak. When we believe we lack on the inside, we prop up our exterior in an attempt to mask what we believe to be an unimportant reality internally. Our post modern culture with its quest to decipher the human experience and break it down into very unimportant pieces such as carbon and zinc, weather conscious or unconsciously, are making the profound plain. Although this ideology has been a around and in force for about five decades now, the effects on human behavior are being readily seen around us. School shootings, child (baby) sex trafficking and the process of unapologetically abandoning any form of traditional values as plain, ignorant and stupid are a stark and grizzly reality of what we as a society have become.
The abandonment of all internal aspects thus breaks down the “Traditional Line” in our attitudes and values, which is responsible for our worldview. The “Theoretical Line,” which measures our cognitive ability, surpasses the “Traditional Line” and therefore brings us out of a position of simplicity and into a position of that of the little toy boat in the Velveteen Rabbit who makes up for his chipped and missing paint by referring to himself in technical terms. This point of reference just points to his inability to negotiate what he perceives to be a problem. A problem develops when there is a gap between where we are and where we want to be; this is what I call the “intra-personal gap.”
The size of the gap becomes the size of the problem. In the instance of the model boat, his living through two seasons and his semi-worn out condition become a gap between him and the new stuffed rabbit that arrives on Christmas morning. This perceived gap causes the model boat to change his external perception of himself and actually make up new methods of presenting himself. The new presentation is actually fueled by the model boats ability to tell itself rational lies about what his capabilities really are. These lies become self evidentiary truths and therefore the boat never misses an opportunity to lay claim to his new found image that has been brought on by the perceived intra-personal gap between himself and the new toy rabbit. The simple fact is that the model boat just has a poor self image. Timothy the jointed lion also gets in on the act of dissimulation. The lion uses an entirely different approach to his problem. The lion uses the process of association. He looks for an opportunity to associate with what he perceives will be a respectable party and then attempts to align himself with the character of his new found associates. When people have no character of their own, they will identify with those whom they believe to have the acceptable character, and through a process of identification will name-drop and reference the party thus taking on the character of the identified through personification.