Life is the search for your impossible bunny-rabbit. When I was young I couldn’t go anywhere without having my bunny-rabbit. I could stand not touching it for a while. I could not stand not knowing I could touch it when I wanted to. Not even for the smallest while. My bunny-rabbit was my anchor of tangible trust. Melt-down was always just one moment away: the moment of realizing bunny-rabbit’s absence. Wa-hoo!. My little life filled to the brim with people worrying about bunny-rabbit’s presence was a life in which trust always loomed large.
Lucky me.
Everybody will have had their bunny-rabbit but not everybody will have been quite so attached to it. Some, so I fear, will have been called weak. SHOUTING: “Grow up (or worse: “a pair”)! It is just a bunny-rabbit.” They’re the people who do not understand how a bunny-rabbit is not just a bunny-rabbit. A bunny-rabbit is a tangible, tactile – yes tacky too – reminder others have your back. You can run around leaving bunny-rabbit out of sight, but others will keep it in sight and when – Wa! – before the – hoo! – they will be there with your bunny-rabbit.
Strength is made of joining weaknesses. On that I’ll say no more.
A little explorer explores knowing its back will be had. Bunny-rabbit is the stuffed stuff whereof any exploring is made full stop You do not have to be autistic to realize this. Change requires constancy, otherwise it is chaos. When people shout STRENGTH they have forgotten their bunny-rabbit. They have been dulled into flexibility – FLEXIBILITY FOR INDIVIDUAL SURVIVAL. A word fittingly foregrounding an f ( F. it). Flitting from one fleeting certainty to another. Dull no depth. Life without a bunny-rabbit is not worth living. Even if your life’s worth is so much more $-wise, €-wise, £-wise it is only so clockwise i.e. unwise.
My bunny-rabbit is no longer a bunny-rabbit. On this I’ll need to say more.
Bunny-rabbits wear and tear. Mine lost an ear was stitched barely a multi-colored rag no eyes. I grew out of it. Some would say. Nothing of the kind. My bunny-rabbit told me to to find another bunny-rabbit. Bunny-rabbits have open minds. Anything can be a bunny-rabbit as long as it is a tangible, tactile (yes, tacky too) reminder of others having your back. So you can go out and explore. Letting go of a bunny-rabbit to find another is like the swinging of Tarzan through the forest from one bunny-rabbit to the next, but always having a bunny-rabbit in sight.
Wa-hoo! Ya-hoo! etc. & so forth. That’s life.
The process of moving from bunny-rabbit to bunny-rabbit always knowing some will have your back (this – by the way – is knowledge productive of creating bunny-rabbits for others; bunny-rabbits breed like hell; there is nothing Darwin would marvel at more than the fitness of bunny-rabbits created out of the non-competition of cooperatively having another’s back) is life. Leaving one bunny-rabbit for another bunny-rabbit is exploring a never ending finding passage through where no passage was before. Aporia Socrates would say knowing well, well, knowing, it takes at least two to do a bunny-rabbit tango passing to where no one had passed before.
Life is searching for an impossible bunny-rabbit.
When I was sixteen (many, many bunny-rabbits after my first bunny-rabbit my then bunny-rabbit being a Mr. S. Kierkegaard or other K., readers go through bunny-rabbits faster than anyone else so thank god they breed like hell also by way of books) I realized, without knowing, that I needed what I considered to be the ultimate bunny-rabbit: other people who were not yet bunny-rabbit back-havers. So I passed, painfully, from a solitary confinement to an obsession with all things social. Which I mastered.
So: Ya-hoo! you think, but, No: now I am at Wa-hoo! again. Here’s why.
Now I am a solitary person who cannot stand being alone. The ultimate bunny-rabbit is an impossible bunny-rabbit. And this is, essentially, what bunny-rabbits are if you really, really, really like your bunny-rabbit. They give you the confidence to move on until there is no moving on. There’s no point whatsoever in bunny-rabbits if you don’t move on but, moving on, there comes a time when it becomes a stretch to remain in tactile touch – a time when your bunny-rabbit is no longer tangible enough. It is that point at which you are no longer tacky too. A grown-up realizing that all this talk of bunny-rabbits is not like proper punctuation is something which can go on indefinitely.
Wa-hoo! I do not want to grow up.
And that kind of sums it up. I almost feel like I have outgrown bunny-rabbits. That there is no further bunny-rabbit to search for. That the gap between the present and the next bunny-rabbit is too wide for a Tarzan too jump – certainly when that Tarzan is too tired for having tried to jump already many bunny-rabbits beyond a point where he felt somebody could still have his back. Too far in fact to bother those still having his back, as they after all should not become mere bunny-rabbits themselves.
So – just wish me the strength to go for one more bunny-rabbit but make the wish strong enough for it to be a really impossible bunny-rabbit which keeps me busy for a while so I can have the back of those who count on me still.