Catching a glimpse of one of the toys as it fell out of the bag, I was caught by a twinge of excited nostalgia. Amongst the assortment was something I remembered fondly from my own childhood. A simple stacking toy, originally made by Fisher Price: a rocking plastic base with a rainbow of shrinking doughnuts spiked on a pole.
It's amazing that so simple a toy can leave so vivid an impression – and one so pregnant with emotional resonance. I have hazy memories of looking up at this great tower from below, worshiping beneath the spectrum of yonis impaled on the mighty lingham. I remember the taste of the plastic rings, the exact texture as my gums roamed their surface, seeking the invisible edges left by the die. These hours of devotion no doubt sowed the seeds for my fetishistic craving of doughnuts and curious obsession with deck quoits.
A closer inspection, however, revealed that this was not in fact the same toy. The rocking base had been replaced by something more 'interesting' – following the mythic theme, the yoni–lingham duality was now borne on the back of a giant blue and yellow turtle. The doughnuts too had been adapted for easy comprehension by a generation primed for TV – pure RGB offset by a coarse yellow; not the soft hues of my memory. The bulb of the lingham was inset with a glowing orange power jewel. Worse than all of these – the coup de grace detonation after the firecracker-string of disappointments – was the discovery of a compartment for batteries and a switch. Flick it to the left, the lingham throbs and plays jangly greeting card music. Flick it to the right and baby is rewarded for each correctly stacked doughnut by a robotic voice barking out a number. Also the lingham flashes and plays a tune.
This discovery had the effect of a Stalinesque erasure on the mystery of my childhood. It waved a revisionist wand over the memories of my past and redacted all references to magic and wonder. All the spaces forged by my developing consciousness, the bloom of imagination, were subsumed by industrialisation, criss-crossed with superhighways and choked with fumes from the plastics factory.
Worse still was the vision of my son's future, in many respects too terrible to speak (for I fear that it may well be true). A future of flashing lights and barked instructions, where simple tasks performed correctly are rewarded with an insipid tune. A future in which all symbols have lost their potency. A future in which everyone is happy because they are unable to mourn the absence of an imagination they never developed.
Somehow this toy expressed to me everything that is wrong with our contemporary civilisation: the absolutely mindless drive towards the black curtain of the future, fuelled by prosaic economic considerations. This model of progress resists genuine innovation in favour of repackaged improvements of market-proven products. This kind of progress is best represented conceptually by the fractal, Koch's snowflake.
Koch's snowflake begins with an equilateral triangle, the points of which can be constrained within a circle – in this instance representing an initial concept, an idea in its simplest form. Half-size equilateral triangles are then added to the three sides of the original triangle. Then quarter-size triangles are added to the exposed edges of the half-size triangles and so on. The significance of Koch's snowflake in this context is that although it never exceeds its original area (as defined by the circle), its length is infinite. Likewise, the same products can be endlessly repackaged and resold, accreting unnecessary and ultimately detrimental 'improvements', onwards down to infinity.
And what effect does this have on us?
Our greatest single asset is our imagination. It is the source of every genuinely great development, invention, idea or innovation since the dawn of humankind. But it needs space to grow and, like a muscle, it needs to be flexed. It needs to be encouraged in our children and, more importantly, should not expire as we mature. Our society should aim to cultivate imagination, to nurture, respect and reward it - not repress, restrict and restrain it.
Without our imagination we are a civilisation in decline, collapsing into banality and the infinite uncharted minutiae of the consumer Koch fractal.
