For those familiar with him but might need a reminder, and for those who do not know or just aren’t sure, Edward Gorey was an illustrator known for his macabre black and white illustrations and quirky books, posters, and prints. Most people know his work, although they may not know they do, if they are familiar with the animated opening of Masterpiece Mystery on PBS.
Along with his illustrations and other print works, Gorey also wrote, produced, and acted in his own theatrical productions, won a Tony for his set, costume, and prop design for Dracula on Broadway, and for his “Entertainments”, puppet shows he gave most often as part of a larger event performed with puppets whose bodies he sewed himself.
While watching television, his three favorite shows being X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and The Golden Girls, he would sew soft sculpture creatures he named “Figbash”.
These stubby bodied creatures with a 12 inch arm span were hand sewn, filled with Uncle Ben’s Rice, because during Gorey’s life-time the rice came in boxes with a convenient pour spout, and could be twisted in such a way that between the arms, the torso, and stubby legs the Figbash could form every letter of the alphabet. Only so many of these could be made, and Edward Gorey would give them to friends, or would donate them, along with his illustration of the letters of the alphabet formed with them, for auctions at charitable events where they went for very high donations. Because they are limited in number and handmade, they have a great value to anyone who owns one.
Edward Gorey was an avid reader who fell in love with books by age four, and when he died he had accumulated 26,000 books in his Yarmouth Port home, having probably given away other books over his lifetime, so owning a Figbash that for a child who would love, cuddle, “feed”, take to bed, and use as a security blanket just as with a teddy bear, it might be an effective means for a child to learn the alphabet through an object that would have an emotional attachment with a good chance of passing on to a child Gorey’s love of reading.
During his lifetime he refused to have the Figbash mass produced because being able to buy one at a place like Walmart would reduce the value of the ones bought at a charity auction or given to someone by Gorey himself. He chose the intrinsic value for the sake of their owners over the millions of dollars he could have made for himself and for the organizations that are now supported in part by his charitable trust.
Whenever the board of directors of the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust are approached about manufacturing the Figbash for use in preschool settings where the children could fall in love with it and by extension reading, and where each year the school would have to buy news ones since you certainly would not collect them at the end of the year and redistribute the used, dirty, slobbered on items to the next class, but would purchase new ones which means more money for the charitable trust, the objection is that any existing Figbash was hand sewn by Gorey, is filled with rice, and has value based on charity and/or a connection with Edward Gorey, a value it would lose if anyone could buy one anywhere.
However, when the simple solution is suggested, i.e. machine sewn vs hand sewn, the difference is noticeable, filling them with a similar stuffing like, but not, rice, using specific colors whereas Gorey used whatever cloth he had, and stamping Edward Gorey Charitable Trust on one of the creatures stubby legs making the differences obvious, the objection becomes weaker with a mumbled, “Edward wouldn’t go along with it.”
Gorey has been dead for over 18 years. If there is an afterlife, he is certainly more involved in taking in the beatific vision of God than interested in what is being sold in the Edward Gorey House Museum gift shop, and if there is no afterlife, he is unaware of everything, even his having ever existed.
It becomes obvious that there is no real acceptable objection, but more reasons to make the Figbash available to anyone who wants one, especially children who might learn to love reading, but, rather, a refusal based on the simple premise that they realize they had not thought of alternatives that would have removed any objections to manufacturing, and the board just does not want to admit that their original decision was based on tunnel vision and a lack of imagination on their part.
The objection is no longer based on preserving something sacred, but on not having to admit their insistence on their original objection was a bad decision.
Hence my use of “figbashing”, the insistence on staying with a bad decision even after being shown it was a bad decision and could be replaced with a more effective one based on new, or previously unknown alternatives, solely to avoid the admission by changing that the original decision or course of action, although seeming to have been the only course at the time, may have been the least effective one.
People who figbash annoy me especially if they sacrifice the goal they have been attempting to reach with one approach by willingly losing it by insisting on rejecting the more effective one. They sacrifice the end in protecting the means to it that they had chosen.
While people in Massachusetts want various towns and the whole state to be a Safe Community and state, and are promoting a new piece of legislation to that end, when presented with the law passed in 1843 that has already done that, rather than consider insisting we follow that law, they push it aside because of all the work they have already done on the new law, and don’t want to, at this point, admit they already have what they want in favor of seeing their fight for redundancy completed.
With the opening line,
“ All persons within the commonwealth, regardless of sex, race, color, creed or national origin, shall have, except as is otherwise provided or permitted by law, the same rights enjoyed by white male citizens”
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women in Massachusetts had the right to vote in the state 77 years before “women got the vote”.
The GLBT community should not have had to fight for any rights and have their lives discussed and politically demonized by some.
Women should have been able to get bank loans and mortgages without having it cosigned by a male relative.
And the Irish could have always applied.
Instead of fighting to get what was already theirs, women, the GLBT community, and every person or group that thought they had to fight to get the rights they already had should have been suing those who denied them the rights a white man had that they were being denied.
Recently I attended a presentation whose subject was local abolition history, and the topic of Sanctuary Cities was brought up by one of the people on the panel of historians and attorneys. The panelist, an attorney, related what progress was being made in that regard and what opposition was being encountered, and when I brought up the 1843 law, she admitted that she was not familiar with it, but then authoritatively stated that because it was written in 1843 and was followed by the Civil War, it was no longer in effect as the Fourteenth Amendment replaced the state need to protect fugitive slaves, totally dismissing that while the Massachusetts law made no reference to slaves, fugitive or otherwise, it did address “All persons within the commonwealth, regardless of sex, race, color, creed or national origin”.
And without so much as expressing a desire to discuss it more, or even acknowledging the need to give it more thought, she returned to her explanation of what her organization was doing and their hopes for its success.
This is “figbashing”, and in my over forty plus years of political, labor. and GLBT Rights activism, I have seen unnecessary battles lost and rights assumed dead, when they actually weren’t.
Worse, I have seen activists regroup to renew their fight for something which too often meant modifying the original failed approach while ignoring the different approach of which they had been made aware.
The battle seems of more value than the objective.