An Inner Rabbit

When stories tell the tale of an inanimate toy becoming alive because a living being infuses them with love and hope, we probably don’t often think that we ourselves are the reluctant hero of the piece.

We probably at first connect with the character who is already alive, for the simple reason that we consider ourselves to be already fully alive and therefore in no need of some divine wind to kindle the spark of life in us. In the story “Pinocchio, Geppetto is a carpenter who creates a wooden marionette in which he invests his longing for a child. He is the main character of the story, at least until Pinocchio picks up his bed and walks out the door on his own volition. Then we have the stuff of a Disney movie. But while it’s just a man and his lifeless creation, the reader has no one but the carpenter on whom to hang their allegiance and their own aspirations for a new life.

What about “The Velveteen Rabbit”? The velveteen rabbit is not an assembly of wood and string lying inert on a bench with only the mute longing of an aging carpenter to pull him toward a larger life. The stuffed rabbit is from the start part of a community of toys that includes a mentor, The Skin Horse, who shares that love is the currency which brings inanimate toys to life, as happened for him through the love of the boy’s uncle.

We could debate the fine points of whose perspective becomes the viewpoint character in any work of fiction and how that creates the magic of turning words into the illusion of living beings–but I’d like to take a different approach. If we treat these stories as more than whimsical fiction, more than the harnessing of non-human surrogates to represent the shadow side of humanity (such as the animals in “Wind in the Willows” and “Animal Farm” or the outsize and miniature bipeds in “Gulliver’s Travels”); then perhaps they offer a creative exploration of a path to transformation, to waking-up, to standing up from our couch and going forth into the world.

If such stories give a key to the magical transformation of life out of wood and velveteen–like the springing of water to the desert surface from the striking of a staff–then it has to be us who are transformed, not a stuffed toy or a hinged wooden marionette who can only dance when an operator pulls its strings. It is we who are lying on the carpenter’s bench; it is we who have been dumped onto a trash heap in the back yard, sentenced to the flames because we may carry a virus the almost killed our boy.

It feels worthwhile to ask why we respond with feeling to stories that tell about situations and events that seem completely unlike the daily routines of our own lives. Are we escaping from those routines into fantasies of a more exciting life than the one to which we must soon return? Are we putting off facing the fact that our own lives are counting down and that we don’t believe we will ever rise from the trash heap of wasted opportunities, because we don’t know how? Or is there something in us that pauses and wonders: is there a wind of love and a spirit of resolve silently listening to me now? If I could only give it a voice, would it tell me to rise and take a breath, to crack open the wooden casing around my heart so that the fairy of new beginnings can find a life in me?