The Bait
Do you know the feeling you get when you realize that someone has completely bamboozled you? There’s a proverb in Finnish that we use for this action: “They pulled you at the nose.” I’m embarrassed to admit that I’m not familiar with the background of this saying, but maybe that would have been different if I had actually finished those damn university studies. But I didn’t, because certain bozos pulled me at the nose a bit too many times. Kind of.
It is one of the most humiliating situations you can find yourself in: you just sit there in disbelief, completely awestruck with the reality; that they really fooled you so fucking good, and you were none the wiser. The level of anguish and physical pain that I remember myself feeling at those moments in indescribable in any of the languages I know and speak.
Do you know where the English word ‘gullible’ comes from? It’s a derivative of the name of the main protagonist in a Western literary classic titled “Gulliver’s Travels”. It’s written by Jonathan Smith, first published in 1726. I read the novel for the first time for my very first Western literature classic exam back in 2019, as a university freshman. The exam had 15 literary works as the material, novels and plays and short stories and poems. “Gulliver’s Travels” was one of the first ones I read, and I remember enjoying it quite a lot. The narration was interesting, the fantasy setting of the story was creative and out of this world, but still at the same time, it reflected a lot on the pathological nature of the human condition; how easy it is for us to turn against one another, take everything we read and see as gospel, be in completely awe of the supposed good deeds someone is doing for us, and lacking the critical thinking skills to figure out a way out of it before it is all too late. The novel has had such an impact on Western society that there is another name originally seen in the book that has found its way to the postmodern world: Yahoo. Yahoos were the human creatures in the novel, animalistic and disgusting, unhygienic, slaved by the intelligent horsekind called Houyhnhnms. I think it’s pretty ironic that the name of this human species that knows absolutely nothing about anything was chosen as the name for a search engine.
jacket, part 2.
Back to Gulliver. He is a sailor, a voyager, traveling across the seven seas, until he ends up being stranded on one of these voyages. He finds himself on the island of Lilliput. He meets up with the residents of the island, the little humankind, and they end up encouraging Gulliver to go ahead with his travels, to visit several other remote islands not known to the regular English lad like himself. These other islands and their fucked-up societies with slavery and exploitation, otherworldly understanding of the value of human life, and what it even means to be human. Gulliver believes everything that he is told, he is so enamored by the things he is witnessing of the islands of Laputa, Brobdingnag, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, and Glubbdubdrib that he does not realize that the most highly intelligent species and their leader is slowly manipulating him into believing in the societal structures where humans have no value and are worse than the maggots living in the soil. So Gulliver ends up becoming a complete misantrope, harboring a deep hatred for the human kind that once he returns back home to England from his voyages, he cuts himself off from his family, relatives, and friends, forever isolating himself because of how disgusted he is with himself for being a human being and all the other human beings, Yahoos, living around him, not aware of the kind of vitriol they cause him to feel.
“Gulliver’s Travels” was one of the books I read for the exam that really left a mark on the constellation of my memories. Gulliver’s character was both extremely frustrating and extremely relatable, which I think was the reason why I ended up hating him so much. But now, looking back on the novel and its complex metaphors of the horrors of mere existence as a human being in this corrupt world, I think I can say I don’t hate the guy as much anymore.
The Kid was just like Gulliver: way too curious for her own good, willing to try to understand those who wished nothing but harm upon her, wanting to relate to someone so badly that she ended up losing herself in the process, and finally at the end, resenting herself, the Pain, and me, because we are the ones that caused all of this to happen to her.
But that was not the reality. The reality, you see, was that the far more intelligent Friends of mine were able to manipulate me so effortlessly, without me being aware of it in the slightest, to abuse me so much that in the end, I would bow down at the feet of the Houyhnhnms, idolize and glorify them, while kicking my own battered body and resenting my whole existence because I was NOT LIKE THEM.
Because I was just another disgusting Yahoo, crawling in the dirt festering with maggots and cockroaches. All because I thought she really meant it when she said the jacket looked good on me.
Pondering,
ichigonya