LITTLE LOVES

I named him Wittgenstein because he looked probing, intelligent, and uncomfortably embodied. I found him in a teddy bear store in a street deep downtown in Brighton England, a teddy bear store.

Deprived of toys in a time of toy abundance, my parents unschooled in the small joys of such foolish yet treasurable joys, I grew up meekly traumatized by that loss. That followed me to gadget attractions and, ultimately to Wittgentstein and then a small flurry of more teddy bear searches and finds (Paris, Venice, Ironbridge UK, online).

This seems like collecting Pokémon figures or American Girl dolls or Barbie dolls or trading cards, each one representing a needed connection and a managed fantasy, each an individually endowed representation with a singular emotionality.  

But teddy bears tend to outlive the parameters of childhood. A vast world of teddy bear devotees exist, locatable on social media, organized in networks, available on many formats. Teddy bears have induced a reliantly faithful and fulfilling relationship with sustaining inanimate beings, partly anthropomorphized and partly re-imagined.

Which had me stare into the mirror of my soul aimed with a psychoscope.

First I found a hint of mild, yet unrecognized distrust in the fidelity of real relationships.  The teddy bear, like a living pet animal, never judges or repudiates. Unlike a pet, the teddy bear assumes whatever character he is imbued with and accepts and owns it. People reveal and sometimes revel in the character they become, the person they are, and resist others’ efforts to change that. Teddy bears are a delight of total acceptance and can offer no resistance.

But the picture in my mirror also revealed that quirky, self-presenting, immutably other, varyingly personable and impersonal, and randomly capricious.

So it is a relief from the botherings of the self to have a teddy bear of which one soon ceases to be enough and seeks another, of the same categorical family, who’s whimsey and invented character will provide a different set of soothing qualities. Thus grows the collection of teddy bears, each with a role and character and sense of soft affirmation. In time teddy bears establish a universal dominion of wishful, wistful and fulfilled longing.

In the face of great disaster and devastation, a child will reach for the one object of comfort and reassurance. Their teddy bear.

That’s why we keep them.