Frazz by Jef Mallett for June 04, 2015

I remember an incident at school: in Gym we had, on a time, to run an obstacle course; you know the sort of thing climbing up ropes and across bars and the like, and at one stage we were required to jump from a beam to a rope and then shimmy down the rope and off to points unremembered (for reasons which will probably emerge shortly).

Our story being set in those halcyon days of child safety, when nothing was expected to hurt us but the cane (not even those fascinating blobs of mercury we were always playing with on the physics lab benches), the beam was of course set well above head height; something that would never be allowed in the more cynical and lawyerly times of today. … So …

So we boys proceeded along the beam indian file (not that we had much choice in that really) prompted towards simulacrum of alacrity by our mad sports master.

Now I have always had a bit of a tendency to be rather more enthusiastic than good at sports; and so maybe I was following a bit too closely on the guy in front of me, or perhaps I had annoyed him so that he pulled the rope a bit more than necessary as he left it, or it was just that a two inch wide climbing rope was just beyond my visual acuity, but as I launched myself from that beam I was aiming for a point that was at the end of the up-swing of the rope and as I approached it, it was moving away from me and we never did meet.

Have you ever watched those, I think they are traditionally Saturday morning, cartoons? The ones where, say, a coyote runs off a cliff? How, amusingly, he runs straight out legs a-spinning, gravity defying; then suddenly noticing some slight difference in his situation he looks down and immediately realising the untenability of his position he makes an instantaneous right-angled turn downwards, ignoring inertia just as completely as he had earlier ignored gravity? Have you seen that? Well whoever it was first started that convention must have had the most brilliant psychological insight—-well either that or had actually done exactly what I did.

So, to get back to our story having left me hanging in the air and just about to miss my rope for the last few seconds, that was exactly how it felt. My perceptions of the event were exactly the coyote’s: that I went straight out hung for a moment with my hands flapping about vainly for a rope that had left me and moved on with its life; and then, because I foolishly glanced below, I dropped straight down to the hard hardwood floor, where I broke both wrists and sprained an elbow.

My brain being somewhat faster than my body, somewhere on the way down I had assessed the situation and had what I like to think of as the ‘coyote syndrome’ firmly fixed in my mind so that I was laughing heartily by the time I hit and continued to do so—-though perhaps it would be more accurate to say the laughter was hysterical rather than hearty by then. Because of that it took absolute ages for me to convince the rest of the class that I was actually somewhat in need of a visit to the emergency department.

The point of this sad little story? The essential psychological truth of cartoon conventions: and not only in motion—-why MY eyes always do stand out on stalks when I see a pretty girl; and at least psychologically I do have six fingers, three on each hand, though I’m not convinced about the floppy white gloves and big round ears.