A caution sign for vacuuming has raised many questions for columnist Joe Bennett. Photo / Westend61
OPINION
Sometimes life hands you a plateful.
Last week, having just written the column you may or may not have read on these pages, I went to a garden centre to fetch, well, let’s not worry about what I went to fetch.
A garden centre is a desolate place at this time of the year, its clientele shrunk to a trickle of hardy tree-pruners, snippers and propagators, spring-thinking bulb buffs and indoor-plant fanatics. This particular centre was rendered even more desolate by roadworks outside, the diggers, cones and barriers deterring all but the most committed of the garden-minded.
So when I stepped into the cavernous atrium of an early afternoon I found the place empty but for some plants and a tinkling water feature that consisted of a sensuous tangle of nymphs and cherubs shorn of genitalia.
Two employees were in attendance, one busying herself with something to do with the till, and the other, well, you will see. ‘Good afternoon,’ I said and then I stopped and I stood and I stared. Agape is the word.
Well, agape is actually two words, one English, one Greek. The Greek one, pronounced more or less ag-a-pee, means non-sexual love, and is associated with early Christianity. The English one rhymes with ape and means open-mouthed, astonished, rooted to the spot by wonder.
And that’s the one I want. It was exactly how I stood. For I beheld a sign.
Retentive readers will recall that I wrote about signs last week. Not signs as in portents, but signs as in things by the road. Now I was confronted by a sign that seemed to me both a distillation of the column I had written and an extension of it. Here was the apotheosis of signage. A wonder.
Physically it wasn’t much, just a yellow, free-standing, foldable plastic thing, a little below knee height, the sort of sign that famously warns us of the terrors of a swabbed floor. But this one went beyond swabbed floors.
Two words on it. The first was our old friend Caution. The second? Would you care to guess? Take a moment and cast a line into the waters of your imagination and see what you can hook. I’ll make a coffee and give you an ellipsis to angle in. No, two ellipses … …
And lo I am returned, coffee in hand. Have you landed anything? No? Well here’s what the sign said, on the count of three. One two three: Caution: Vacuuming.
(The colon is an act of kindness. The original had nothing by way of punctuation. As written it suggested that the hooverer was fossicking among the flower pots sucking up little pockets of nervousness, but I haven’t the heart to reproduce it thus.) Caution: Vacuuming. It’s the distillation of a sorry age.
The phrase is two-edged and both edges are infantilising. Edge the first is the implication not only that vacuuming is a threat to our wellbeing - and if vacuuming is, what isn’t? - but also that we need to have this pointed out to us.
In other words, this is a hostile world and we need help to deal with it. Rather than being autonomous, independent adults, capable of judging threats and acting in our own interests, we are hopeless blubbing infants, naked, afraid and beset by dangers. And we need Mummy to look after us. The sign is Mummy.
Edge the second is related but distinct. It lies in the garden centre’s attempt to pre-empt litigation. And that litigation stems from an infantile worldview, which is that if anything goes wrong, if anything bad happens to us such as tripping over a vacuum cleaner, it is not the result of our own stupidity, clumsiness, haste, or poor judgment, but rather it is SOMEBODY ELSE’S FAULT.
And that somebody else will be sued. It’s the American way. It is increasingly our way. But in essence, it’s the way of the toddler who assumes the world revolves around him and he is never at fault.
Thus the sign treats us simultaneously as vulnerable children who need to be protected from imaginary dangers, and as solipsistic toddlers. Behold today. And all in the atrium of a deserted garden centre in the east of Christchurch in deep midwinter.
A plateful.