Gleaning the edges of normality

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, phenomenology

Four-eared cats, two-headed snakes and three-legged men are but one genre of fascinating things found in Ripley's Believe It or Not: Seeing is Believing by the editors at Ripley Publishing. This isn't a book one usually reads from cover to cover (though that is what I intend to do). It is a warehouse of interesting things to be plumbed, to be wandered through.

Ripley was a realist. Fortean speculation was not for him; Charles Fort sought paranormal explanations for unusual phenomena, while Ripley sought the unlikely and rare, but explainable, that dwell at the limits of normalcy. The 4-eared cat Yoda is considered to have a genetic mutation that happens to be visible, but neither harmful nor helpful; the extra ears are just there.

In a world of 6.5 billion people and trillions of animals and plants, a few are bound to be "one in a billion" in some way or other that we find fascinating. Just at random, without glandular disorders, a couple of quite ordinary size (1.75m or 5'-9" for a man and 1.6m or 5'-3" for a woman) might produce a child who grows to seven feet (2.1m), or who never exceeds four feet (1.2m). This is rare enough to be a marvel. It takes glandular problems to produce humans taller than eight feet or shorter than three, and it is these that are chronicled in Guinness and other record books.

Of quite another order of interest, we find the unusual feats, not of daring or danger, but of art and quixotic caring, such as the women who decided to knit a tree a sweater in Yellow Springs, OH. You can't slip a sweater over the branches, so the sweater has to be knitted in place, as we see here.

This tree-hugging garment reminds me, on its intimate scale, of Christo's landscape-wrapping artworks (one of my brothers participated in erecting one of them). I like it better than I like putting sweaters on one's pets. It is a warmly human thing to do, which probably does neither good nor harm to the tree, but rather creates a community, at least temporarily, of those women (have any knitting men added their bits?) who choose to add their knits and purls to a growing project. It is a social act.

I have by no means read all of the Ripley book yet, nor even any major part of it. It is fodder for my "between-times" reading, so I'll likely return to it in future posts, as it piques my interest.