Responce.

Many years ago my girlfriend and I took a class of Downs syndrome kids to the zoo. She took a group photo of her and her class. Seeing it afterwards I was struck by how I responded to her looking the odd one out. I seemed to have a natural mechanism for singling out and focusing on the odd even in this case where the tables were turned. In a similar way why don’t I see an elephant as grotesque? I mean what’s with the trunk? Is it some giant mutant anteater? Arg arg arg! No it’s an elephant, calm down. I imagine organising a blind date on the phone. She sounds pleasant, amusing, I look forward to it. She appears and is disfigured in some way. I am captivated, and not in a good way, by this one element of her. It is a primitive reaction regenerated every time I look. I can’t see anything without focusing back to the blemish, like seeing a sleek shiny new car in a showroom with a single scratch on the bonnet. ‘It is not as it should be’ screams in my ear. No amount of platitudinous overspeak can overcome this visceral response. I see myself struggling for niceties for, well for anything that doesn’t exhibit my captivation, which I perceive as an ugliness in myself that I don’t want to be seen. In some way my captivation chimes with the internal captivation of my date; that she has become the captive of her disfigurement by a million such encounters. Veins of “I am not as I should be” run deep through her meat. Whether it be by humour, ridicule, niceties or platitudes I have an instinctive wish to distance myself from the different, from the what I perceive as ‘not as it should be.’ It’s as if I, who have average looks, know well this ‘not as it should be’ about myself, and in compensation for my awareness of my own ‘disfigurement’ take comfort in not being as ‘bad’ as you.

Yet a young child might just say, “You’re different”, or as I remember once, “Why has that man got a big lump on his neck mummy?” And we in our adult wisdom said, “Don’t say that sweetheart, it’s not nice.” I can only say what those wiser than me know, that everything is as it should be. It is a sentiment we would do well to share.

I mean should we just remember Einstein for having the worst hairdo in the history?