Goldilocks Makes A Whoopsie
Once upon a time, there was a girl walking through the woods. The woods were what you-might-call ‘standard-issue,’ your typical mix of trees and birds and dirt and atmospherics, as was the girl walking through them. I.e., she was pretty, blond, indeterminately aged, but probably around twelve or something, and wearing a frilly apron or smock or petticoat (we can all pretend we know what that is). In any case, at this particular moment, the girl happened to be humming. Of course, in these circumstances – ‘these circumstances’ being fairy-tale ones, as signified by the various fairy-tale signifiers – what this really means is that the entire forest was humming, that leaves twirled and danced alongside her while birds sang in counterpoint and little wood mice squeaked out sweet harmonies. And so and so forth. You get the point: it was a very one-with-nature, cosmic-soul-y sort of thing. You could go far with it, too, say the girl wasn’t really humming, it was all just a metaphor. Maybe she was never there at all, maybe nothing ever happened, was ever happening. Or whatever.
What did definitely happen, however, was a thought in the mind of the girl – at least judging by the sudden way she furrowed her brow. That is, she quickly acquired that knowable look of someone trying to decide whether the whole birds being sing-song-y thing reminded her of Snow White, or, no, wait, was that Hansel and Gretel? Yeah that’s the one, wait nevermind, no it’s not, that’s that one with the breadcrumbs, Snow White is the one with the whole animal thing, right? – at which point she turned to check behind her for breadcrumbs, and noticed instead (in a jejune, poorly approximated 19th century english-american apostrophic vernacular) something rather strange:
“Oh goodness, Goldilocks, where have your all footsteps gotten off?”
OK pause: yes, a little explaining to do. First, yes the girl is Goldilocks, though by no means is it clear what sort of relation she has to the original. She chose the name, so we’re just going to have to roll with it. Second: no, ‘footsteps’ is not a typo, nor a mistranslation. Of course, it is certainly reasonable to question it, to wonder why Goldilocks’ would use it instead of the more sensible ‘footprints,’ but there is no doubt that it was the word she meant. It was very much her ‘footsteps’ she felt she was missing.
But what does this mean exactly? Goldilocks herself was somewhat unsure. As a naturally enterprising young woman, however, she did not sit around waiting for the answer to present itself: She snapped a sturdy twig off a nearby tree, and began to list the various facts of the case before her in the dusty path:
- There are no footprints behind me.
- There are no footprints before me.
- This means one of two things.
- I have been walking very softly – or
- I have not been walking.
She stood up and, brushing the dust off her knees, took a moment to appreciate her handiwork. Despite the overwhelming feeling of existential alienation that had recently overtaken her, she was quite pleased with the results, with the almost-eerily perfect way she had formed her letters. Very neat, she thought.
She then read and reread what she had written, this time committing her attention not to aesthetic qualities, but to the inherent logic of her statements. In a flash of scientific inspiration, she realized that statement 4: “I have been walking very softly” was in fact a positive hypothesis, and one which she could test quite easily. Accordingly, she took a few steps forward, and, without warning, turned on her heels to inspect the evidence (without warning because, while walking, it had occurred to her that maybe someone was following behind her with some crafty instrument of erasure – perhaps a broom – and she wanted to eliminate this hypothesis as well). But lo and behold:
“My oh my, would you look at that: footprints and all.”
And she was right. There, imprinted like the letters in the dust were several, adolescent-shoe-sized footprints. She returned to the drawing board, crossing off each bullet until only one was left:
- I have not been walking.
She stood for a moment, thinking. She did not quite know what to make of this. It begged questions which did not seem answerable in the dust path. It did, however, seem to make some sense of her rather strange word-choice. That is, Goldilocks realized now that what she had meant by “footsteps” was something along the lines of: I have no memory of where I have been, or even of having been at all. I feel as though I were the subject of a dream disconnected from its dreamer, this world only a deja vu of the last. She nodded to herself, pleased. She liked that, thought it sounded pretty cool, pretty jaded and poetic and metaphorical and all, and it made her feel a little better to say. In fact, she almost considered thinking of herself as being in a simulation, but then thought better of it. Goldilocks hated those people. She wouldn’t be like everyone else.
As she said this, however, or rather imagined herself as having considered saying it, a second wave of sadness blasted Goldilocks – for suddenly she became aware that she did not even know what she meant by ‘everyone.’ She had presumed that ‘everyone’ meant other people like her, but now, looking around at the forest – solely occupied by gestural, parodic references to birds and squirrels and trees – she was unsure who exactly people ‘like her’ were.
She took solace, of course, in the fact that her very conception of ‘people like her’ suggested that, at least in some sense, they must exist – for how else could she think of them? – but this solace was nevertheless undermined by the obvious fact that she was alone. She also feared, secretly, that her notion of ‘everybody’ was not derived from some forgotten memory of relation, but rather a fundamental biological predisposition towards anthropocentrism, anthropomorphism and a cache of other anthropo-tendencies. That is: Was she simply imposing her own experience as a social being on a world which was neither social nor, perhaps, even a ‘world’ at all, at least insofar as the concept itself of a world would seem to presuppose, and therein, impose, human agency? Was any utterance necessarily a sort of apostrophic imposition?
Suddenly Goldilocks was silent. No thoughts, nothing. A blank slate. She began walking down the path, eyes ahead, her face unreadable. Minutes passed, then hours, then days, all the while the landscape unchanging, as if it were an endlessly iterating forest. Soon even the measurements of time themselves seemed to become obsolete, as if Goldilocks and her fairy-tale woods were nothing more than panels on one of those old motion-picture zoetropes, the same scenes spinning over and over again, the end starting the start and the start starting the end. Then, just as it began to get unbearable, just as we (your humble narrator, but also you) began to think it was time to do something, at last she spoke, and with a strange, knowing flatness in her voice:
“My oh my. It sure is getting late. I do hope there’s some sort of storybook cottage nearby.”
Yes, you are right to be suspicious. Something is off. What does time suddenly mean to Goldilocks, and why is she so pointedly expressing her wish for shelter, a cottage of all things? We ask ourselves: Has Goldilocks surmised that the world is, if not her own construction, at least constructed with her in mind, and has therein undertaken an experiment in suggestive engineering, wherein the very act of implication translates to realization? The implications of this are frightening, for it threatens to peripheralize us, to make us interpreters of what Goldilocks is saying, interpreters of what Goldilocks means when she says (taking a left at an unforeseen fork, kicking up dust as she starts to skip beneath the trees which, stony and vascular in the twilight, arch overhead like the vaulted ribs of a cathedral):
“My oh my, would you look at that!”
And now you – or we? Is this a we now? – don’t know what Goldilocks is referencing, do you? It could be nothing. It might be nothing. In a meaningful way, it might not exist except as some potentiality which we, in our attempt to interpret and to understand, are ever-enabling. It may be that we are being used to realize what does not exist except for us.
“My oh my, look there a cottage, white with purple trim and potted plants, in grove of pines. How picturesque.”
Yes, yes, now we simply must go along, must simply follow her down the stone path and up the little flight of wooden stairs which lead to the front door which, aftwe are forced to assume is open because suddenly she is saying:
“My oh my, what an empty house this is! And with dinner at the table!”
And so, alas, you can’t tell Goldilocks not to as she sits down and eats out of a right-sized bowl a right-sized portion of soup, right-sized being a relative term pertaining specifically to Goldilocks particular proportions.
“My oh my, wouldn’t you know, everything is just right!”
And neither can you tell her not to as she starts walking up the stairs, saying things like “My oh my, wouldn’t it wonderful if there were a right-sized bed?,” nor can you tell her that maybe it’s not quite as simple as she’s seeing it, that it might be a poor idea of her to get into said right-sized bed and decide “My oh my, aren’t I sleepy, I can almost feel the beginning of a dream.”