Are we sitting comfortably?
Tuesday, July 21st, 2009
A recent episode of the radio programme This American Life featured an item about a guy who had the misfortune to watch the movie The Shining at age 6. The film, also about a young boy he could all too readily identify with, terrified him so much that he internalised the drama and spent the next two years fearing everybody and everything, particularly unshaven Jack Nicholson types I imagine.
While I didn’t quite suffer from two long years of Shining related nightmares, I did endure my own minor fiction-related trauma as a child thanks to the school librarian.
I still remember the very moment, at aged 5 or 6, sitting crosslegged on the itchy green carpet of our primary school library, anxiously waiting for our weekly storytelling session to begin. Usually, the tales were nice stories about happy children, mischevious koalas and helpful elves so I was full of anticipation and excitment – perhaps we might hear more about the exciting adventures of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie this week! Sadly, I was to be disappointed.
Instead the teacher decided to tell, perhaps she would say, a more ‘mature’ story – the Greek myth of Medusa, the beautiful, but nasty woman who had writhing vicious snakes for hair, turned innocent people into stone if they even dared glance in her direction and had winged horses and giants leaping from her bloody neck after she was decapitated.
Our school librarian didn’t bother to illustrate this tale with glossy large-format pictures of Greek beauties cursed by bad hair, and she didn’t need to – my imagination was more than adequate. For months after my nights were overrun by women who, from a distance looked like they had ordinary curly hair, but upon closer inspection turned out to have heads more reminiscent of reptile houses. And of course, just at the moment I’d discover this, I could feel my body slowly turning into stone. First my toes, then my feet, legs, knees… arghhhhh…
I’d like to think that the whole class was effected in this way, but sadly not. It was me and me alone. I found this out 20 years later when talking with my mother. She informed me that after I had failed to sleep easily for too many nights running and had been found drenched in sweat one too many times, she had finally prised the trauma that was Medusa out of me. After my parents’ reassurances that ‘it was just a story’ (yeah, right) failed to soothe, my mother actually went to see my teacher about the problem. Apparently no one else had been in the least bit fazed by Medusa. Clearly I was a freak (the teacher didn’t say that, but I bet she was thinking it).
I eventually got over the Medusa-inspired nightmares, but the fear still lingers. In university I had a text book which a clearly insane cover designer had decided to decorate with Rubens’ depiction of Medusa* – I always had to keep the book face down. And I still would.
*you can google that one yourselves. I’m not.
