A Season In The Doll World

Awesome poem, John. Dolls have always given me the creeps for some reason, and this poem brought them to life....

My only hesitancy is that I am commenting too soon. I will return to this brilliance after my mind has adjusted to the glow.

Wow John
Why is there a cold shiver running down my back? Is it Ibsen coming back to haunt me or is it those highly automated dolls that seem to be invading the idyllic world of the young?

Definately the stuff of bad dreams and worse movies. The transition from innocent baby dolls to Barbies to robotic screams builds the tension to the frightful ending. Move over, Amy!

Thanks for stopping by and reading this, Cheryl. It is a creepy poem, you´re right, I suppose I read too much Heine in my youth, plus doesn´t the Xmas shopping season now start right after Halloween?

Thanks for catching another use of the ´doll house´metaphor in Ibsen, Fred. He was thinking of the trap of conventional marriage, but what I am contemplating here is an addition to the family of a different sort of sinister kind.

Umar, I glow in the light of your comment.

Amy, I remember that Twilight Zone show. There´s also this great English movie that has the scariest ventriloquist doll I´ve ever seen in my life. And of course Goldman´s Magic. That´s just for starters, we go back to Shaw´s Pygmalion when we think of dolls. Heine wrote a lot of really great weird stories of dolls come to life.

It sounds like you liked the scary effect of the poem´s scenario, Faith. Thank you for stopping by.

I have to laugh out loud at myself for the following correction. When I said Heine I was actually referring to the great early horror and fantasy writer, E.T.A. Hoffman (1776-1822.) Many of his tales deal with madness, possession, dolls and doppelgangers. For me, he ranks with Edgar Allan Poe.

The progression from the tenderest playthings to teethy carnivorous machines placed with the context of our lust, greed, and trivializations is Orwellian in impact.

Maybe doll is the idol only without the I?

The title seems innocent (like a TV announcement) until the reader grasps its portentous message.
Each stanza concludes with a thriller diller killer sentence.
I stand in silent wonder to applaud this well crafted warning of a potential future.

Beginning benign to macabre horrifine
Sweet soft comfort to teeth crunching attack
Forbearance on fire from insatiable desire
I want my Raggedy Ann back!

John, this poem is a stunner! I love what you've done in the finished version here, having seen an earlier draft, which was brilliant as it was! This valley of the dolls snaps us unwillingly into a self-appraisal, however painful, of our own case-history and complicity in the false worlds of our imagination and pleasure-seeking rockets. It reads so powerfully fluid, the language is really striking. I could go on and on, but I'd rather go back and just read it again. There's a lot to mine here. Can't wait!

Umar, consider this poem in some ways an updating of the apocalyptic theme of social change heralded in William Butler Yeats SLOUCHING TOWARD BETHLEHEM, with a little of the Chuckie doll horror movie series and H.R. Geiger´s technopredatory imagery thrown in for good measure.

Jan, I love the verse you dashed out here, and your comment on the poem´s structure. Like a lot of my work, it´s thought out dramatically like a play, and then I start getting the feel of what kind of language range I want to get across scenes and moments and images that are clear and disturbing, to make the reader see the possibilities. Since this poem is about the mass marketing (and detailed customisation as mass culture becomes alt culture) I chose to mix in business terms with sensory details and fantasy imaginings. Thank you for reading me with care and interest always!

John - This is a chilling poem, reminding us that we all to often see ourselves as reflections in life's accessories, a condition that twists us up at first, but now we hardly even know it's there. The paradox of more purchase power equating to less control is a nightmare unfolding, as we ironically foster future evolution of gadgetry, the very same that silently sucks our souls dry. until we glorify this siege as a deity itself. With that final, ultimate disconnect, we truly are obsolete.

John, your poem was an incremental journey that seemed harmless enough. Moving from mindless play and fun until the thrill of manually manipulating something limp is gone, for good. Enjoyment was dependent and limited by imagination. Too labor intense.

Fun evolved into conspicuous consumption, but at least the love object was hard enough to stand on its own, along with its fashion conscious clones. Less imagination needed but ultimately boring, sickeningly and payback is torture and destruction.

Mirroring the devaluation of life, the reality of too many, and obsession with simulation, the newest play object requires no senses, no nothing and promises the extinction of boredom. The progression was strange and violent but not illogical.


The poem knocked me for a loop and made me recall an historic but troublesome dream sequence. I also recalled playing with plastic soldiers as a boy and graduating to plastic replicas of weapons replaced by cold steel. It too was a strange and violent but not illogical progresssion.

Another visionary observation, John. Pealing away layers of meaning, not in the poem, but meanings upon meaning of the "metauniverse" for which "Ubo" serves as icon.
It is a troubling yet enlightning verse that challenges me to think deeply about my choices and their meanings as I examine how my giving shapes the children in my life now as the holidays approach. Thank you my dear friend.

there was a Radiohead t-shirt in circulation a few years ago, with squiggly line drawings of ominous looking toys with bared teeth, little bears much like you describe here. The lettering read, "The toys rise up and destroy the parents. But the children are safe. Until they spurn the toys."
Your poem brought it back to mind.

you do great job of springing the levels of reality on us, the creaky bucollic first section giving way the suddenly acid reality of the second and then the terrifying hyper-reality of the third.

I was very struck by rythmicaly technical line, "Self-correcting its bottom-up circuitry stealthily, Ubu learns by moving"
that's the description of a powerful foe, like the profile of a macro virus.

But does ubu have a tie-in cartoon series and video game?


Much here to see and admire.

Merdre! This is good.

Our own creations are reflections of ourselves, our social morality. So what does it say about humanity when our icons are assembly-line sweatshop strumpets (damned lead-painted recall ladies) dressed in classy Armani virtue from plastic Princess to plastic President (Vote for Barbie!)?

The annual Holiday toy frenzy befits Jarry's opening night riot.

Your use of Ubu, the grotesque amoral absurd- the "self-discovering" "self-correcting" puppet, twists us, the readers- humanity, into the marionettes: controlled morally by our own products and stunted intellectually by the growing "intellect" of our machines (who needs to learn math when you have a calculator).

Truly Horrifying reflection.

"What more is possible? After us the Savage God" -Yeats

John, if you had any doubt at all about how powerfully your poem affects people, that is dispelled by this point in the comments. It pulled me in just as swiftly, and now I find myself thinking about your prophetic voice, noting the reference to the metaverse in the midst of all the rest of this look at the future. Who else out there is paying attention to the barbification of culture?

I feel like you're making the point that all these things are going somewhere, much more than we realize as we participate in supporting commercial simulation of life. Involution theory says that a cultural pattern, once established, tends to turn inward upon itself, in an inner-tightening spiral, until all its possibilities are exhausted. The only way to avoid being part of that crash, might be to step outside of the pattern altogether. But it's questionable whether we could really get away, and thus the chilling nature of this.

I have been self-resonating in this poem for a day now. It's sheer brilliance has had me mesmerized. The language is methodical but softly coercive in luring you inside. One follows the film like investigation with anticipation and enraptured wonder, trusting the poet to guide them to some revelation of something newly translated from the secret world of the doll. There is mischievous and purposeful intent to almost play word sorcerer, to puppet you into the vision just as we puppet the doll into ours. The use of "you" is carried throughout all three stanzas, allowing no escape from the invite and the poetry is so captivating, you never really would wish to leave early.

The affirmative in the fist line "surely exists" proffers the entry as unquestionable and as I read it, I go, "Uh-huh" and I'm in. I read the first two line several times and smile at the light sarcasm that has tricked its way in already with "shiny bauble" and "cherished mirror" and I realize that I want to resist its charms a bit, not own the tale about to be constructed but be watchful and attentive as to how it applies to "others".

I am relieved with the line, "At first you feel your very life force ebb into their small frames," because I hated dolls, so this gives me a bit of personal distance. Then I realize I don't want to step outside and I join the subjective for the ride. I am seduced by the icon of the doll…..I allow the obsession, give it my power to activate any fantasy I choose to enhance my world with. The reflection is one of an abstracted power that comes also with a sense of loss. I hated dolls because I wanted the attentions of my mother and siblings and friends that kept their distance. I hated the loneliness that was supposed to be replaced by the "stare" of a plastic, non-emotive displacement. I always cut off their hair and when they grew to be life size dolls, as my mother saw my displeasure with the small ones, I took off their clothes and dressed my baby brother in them. He developed a liking for dolls, took them on as mysterious friends that he activated into very elaborate dramas to objectify his silenced needs. They later even turned into 'invisible' embodiments so Mom could run them over in the car and we could be sent on searches for them in the dark.

There is an early warning in the poem…of time, ghastly time that threatens to mature every childish amusement. Time that wears thin and time that gets neutralized to repetitive thrills….it is not time…..time is "us" and the way we process our involvements with the physical world. The cold hard truth of the doll being an immobile (actually they do now have batteries to seem more "real") and needing us to direct the play, mirrors the
accountable intent into every exchange, every change of clothes, every tea party's gossip.
"Is each one made just for you, the tender part of you staring back' is riveting and for some reason, I imagine an Alfred Hitchcock mock smile behind the words. "Plastic and furry smiles" immediately reward my testing of a perverted pleasure snaking through this
shady hall of mirrors that now contort any reflection of me into a reviled mockery. The "rattle of trunks" reminds me of my fear of being alone in the darkness, and the activated shadows and sounds that did bring horrific visions to life for me. I always put dolls and animals in the closet where they could not disturb with any moonlit madness. I had to have the closets checked, several times, because I would imagine what was going on behind the door and fear that as well. The "clickety-clack" would be their imagined voices within me, my teeth chattering my inner disturbance.

In the second stanza, the "met averse" reference updates and contemporizes the thrill of engaging "selves" in activated dramas that can morph fantasy into 'realistic' self-dictated play-acting with any whim or manipulation available instantly with a click to interract with other media marionettes to test animations and plots that would most likely never be enacted in the 'real world". But Barbies still reign and eat up the funds and the quieted people exchanges that never seem to follow hoped for directives. love the 'hunters" reference, which is truly what shopping has become, especially at the holidays. In reality, some have even died in competition for the latest arrivals of video games and "stations" where the digital train must first sound its whistle. The mothballed Pinocchio gets replaced much earlier now as three year olds now master the computer's keys and witness hormonal displays emitted from their TV babysitters to start wondering "when the time will be right" and guessing that 'erectile dysfunction" has nothing to do with their erector set. The sexuality that is so dominant in the media themes is well evidenced in the hourly upgraded costumes of Barbie and her friends into the latest, most revealing, most provocative and flashy excess. The 'gift-wrapped" line-up becomes more than enacted fantasy and easily warps into an obsession and in some an addiction for the theatrical thrill that slowly wends its way into the spirit and sociopathically connects the "I" with
the "eyes" of any directed desire.

The drunken parents scenario, again hit home a bit too closely and I shivered. I have seen art displays of mangled dolls and even tried my hand at a few sculpture projects that involved taking them apart and mixing up limbs into reassembled mockeries. The idealizing that warps every girl's vision of what becoming a woman truly means into a fixation on measurements and sultry poses, if owned by so many who have been practically tortured trying to become some living enactment of the Barbie syndrome (most have been exposed to one woman who gets televised regularly who is hideously deformed by these efforts, and most have heard of the real-life Barbie Twins" buxom pin-up & playmate adventures) would likely in therapy thrill to the voodoo playacting relief.

The building blocks of childhood are now "windows" of shopping prowess and "windows" of computer and television stages of adult escapes from disappointments. And yet we continue to propagate the myths and bankroll our displacements with feverish, competitive zeal. Pirated dreams and inventions internationally cheapen the thrill and pose the imposters as just as good as the real thing….illegal….but unless anyone finds out….who cares?

In the third stanza, what some might call prophetic is the real now's scenario as robots are just about ready to go beyond mere cleaning and dancing and butlering to replacing us in many of we now regard as vitally human endeavors. They are starting to look like us, move like us, and are processing information faster than us and now also able to create and soon replicate themselves. The independent voice that scientist's conjecture is a potential reality of robots someday being capable of rebelling and demanding…..some even now question the need for their "insurance" opens up a whole new doll conversation. Humans seek to even reinvent themselves, and stylize traits with implanted computer chips, etc.
John's closing lines, "Doesn´t need you anymore, beloved owner, playmate, comrade!
It´s self-discovering; universally translating; a pirate copy of itself.
At first it reacts just as you want it to, though it stares straight through you
As if there wasn't a person there, but rather a squishy obsolete model
To be soon disposed of, deposited on staring piles of sightless eyes.
Self-correcting its bottom-up circuitry stealthily, it learns by moving
And slouching into soft objects time and again. At last it will strike you,"
puts us eye to eye and leads all to wonder who might be the "toy" in the future warp-speed gestations of manic grasping of every titillating thought that pops it's estranged ecstasies into the equation.

OH. BOY….HAVE I RAMBLED ON WITH THIS ONE. ANY SENSITIVE PERSON WOULD EDIT AND CORRECT THE MISSPELLINGS AND I APOLOGIZE FOR JUST DUMPING THIS ON THE PAGE….BUT I'M WORN OUT.

My Poet, you thrill, you chill, you confront will to choose, to "imagine" and exercise caution to preserve the sensory base of our creation and to question every quest without to look first deeper within. Thank you for the treasure of diving into your Pandora's box and coming out feeling just fine, as I head off to paint a mermaid's sultry come-hither smile …….only I know she will look back a me even more inquisitively and ask who she is beckoning. I only hope that she never bares her teeth.

Soon I shall start preparing for the holiday season's adventures in posing
smiles that never incorporate any form of plastic...it's a challenge, but I manage to do it every year.

This is a wonderful poem, John. Are not dolls simply reflections of ourselves or what we want to be? There are certainly enough young women around trying to be Barbi with high breasts (silicone again? wasn't that outlawed or something) and feet permanently "high heeled" into shape. Oh, what a strange world we live in. Do Ubu's walk among us? I think they do.

Stunning - John - I love what you do with this, interweaving mythic reality with the subtext of our culture's anomalies and how we prefigure those anomalies into our everyday existence, which, at once becomes one of many realities 'in between.'

Chilling look.

Hoffman is a terrific example here.

John, this is a Feature in The Renewed Activist.

Don't buy any dolls for me John. These are the kind in the horror movies. Its an interesting and essayistic poem like that of Alexander Pope. I find the way a child's toy has been exploited by adults especially troubling when I see how many horror movies are based on toys. The fact that children have become the target of capitalists is not as surprizing as the fact that those same capitalists have so little regard for the market they have created. So it isn't surprizing to find lead in toys or toys in horror movies. What is surprizing is that few have - in the manner you have done here - made their outrage audible.

It's been a pleasure in several dimensions following up from here to Yeats' Dolls and Giger's dead-eyed humanoid nightmares. Knowing PK Dick's Ubik better than Jarry's Ubu, I had to pursue the French a bit and ended on an eye-slicing 1975 film of Salvador Dali on Outer Mongolia, in French with Catalan subtitles. (That was instructive.) The PKD work, if you don't know it, nails the ubiquity of commercialisms, three or four decades ago. And then there's Hoffman's Nutcracker, a story also not for children, spiritually siamese-twinned to this calmly savage poem of yours at the ending. Hah.

Interesting to me by contrast how the Waldorf-Steiner early childhooders go for hand-made dolls, the simpler the better. As a radio person (tv, too, but far deeper into radio), I understand the principle. Everything sensory that is provided obliterates (okay, obviates) the need for imagination. The totally specked-out doll-androidette pushes the child's mind and heart back into the body, where it becomes a recluse, needing the shock treatment of horror films eventually to liberate some kind of response. The Waldorf doll, by the way, should be made from good materials, but can be as little as wool in a ball wrapped in cotton and tied off. Eyes, mouth optional. Imagination required, but fortunately plentiful in any healthy child.

Shut off the tv, by the way. It's the malign doll-cyclops that's been in the home for sixty years now. Godfrey Reggio of Koyaanisqatsi fame has done an eight-minute film of children watching tv. No dolls could be less animated.

Lovely, John, this doll-kebab.

Can't -- don't know how to -- embed the Reggio, here's at YouTube.

---

Having slept on this, I am now starting to see the all-details-perfected-totally-lifelike-wets-you-when-you-hold-it doll as an agent of Mechanism. To the child its hidden message is simple: future generations will be machines. They will more and more take care only of themselves. You will have nothing really to offer them, except your credit cards.

You've opened a rich vein of darkness here, reminding us that it is we who shed light on so-called reality.

What images -- headless Barbies hanging form Halloween trees, the sharp enamel teeth, teeth within teeth. I hadn't heard of this new Ubu guy but with more toys like this robotic creep our children will soon resemble zombies -- no longer knowing how to play or make believe. Give me a tree with some knotty bark and acorn caps and I can fly to the moon.

Edward, I want to thank you again for the ideas for editing that you gave me on the three sections; thank you again for your help!

Tom, such an incisive comment, that speaks to the paradox of humans becoming ¨happiness machines¨, to quote Calvin Coolidge, in the era of unprincipled consumption that leads one to value the accumulation of things, rather than development of people. Your comment reminded me of a book I´ve recently read, CONSUMED: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, And Swallow Citizens Whole, by Benjamin Barber, author of JIHAD VS. MCWORLD.

I will look at your poem, Dean. These trends are disturbing, and your poetic voice, important.

Your analysis of this poem as a mirror for the ebbing of imagination is very apt, Ron. And your focused comment on plastic soldiers leading to real weapons, speaks to the imitative nature of humans, where we replicate in play and simulation what we fear and may destroy us and then use these make believe games as the stored hive of powerful urges to make further war when adults.

Gracias por venir, Douglas, you are right in thinking about how your kids impressions and memories are shaped, even as the culture mutates around you.

Destiny, thank you for pointing out those lines. Objectification is a good overall premise word for summing up this poem, as we look at objects in new ways--dynamic, cybernetic, intelligent, and then finally sentient, living, interchangeable with us.

I´m sure Ubu would feature tie-ins, Yorgo, that´s just the start of the campaign in the new viral doll season, also data mining, any way to get sticky with the public and into their homes and private places of leisure and narcissistic admiration in the toys which surround themselves, as you tip here.

You read my poem deeply and well, Smaragdus, noting the nod to Alfred Jarry´s play UBU ROI about a tyrannical king who ends up destroying his own country out of sheer monomania, which you then illuminated with your equation of dimming human imagination and memory to greater robot computational power, until we reach well...the Singularity, right?

O how your divine penetration into the mysteries of the metaverse spoke, and spoke well (wheel), surpassed only by your rapier-like incision into the layered complexity of Dollness, after which it was amusing to see you wisely disregarding some paradoxical murmurings of the pseudo-intelligentsia. The universally affecting themes of i piccolli mostri des enfantes nearly brought tears of joy and awe to my overdazzled orbs as they beheld the not-so-benign implications of what can only be described as a masterpiece of purely Wagnerian proportions. The sheer audacious genius of declaring the axiomatic dichotomies inherent in your perceptive -- nay, brilliant -- analysis of this outrageously underused symbol -- my god, the previously [sort-of] untapped reservoir of the goddess *Barbie* -- was so nearly original that my very dog danced circles of rapture around his dish as I read out loud. How perfectly metered is your precise skewering of Our Culture and all that it anomalizes. As a small prayer to Hegel, my inner dialectic scrambled and un, I can only conclude: Oh dude, this ROCKED.

I think I will hop into the closet with Amy.

I had many dolls in my doll-buggy but
actually, for some years now I've said if I had it
to do over I'd home school, no TV, no malls, no Barbies.
Adventure, culture, ethics, self-reliance to be taught instead.

Of course, this poem is brilliant in its skewering. Yer a witty guy!
Brilliant and prophetic, scary and sad, perfect combination, John,
to make us take notice of the world's and our craziness.

Scary to think of a future where commercialism will reach a point where we will be marketed..as victims of our own oversized fantasies. From an age of innocence to a time of being watched, marked and hurtled right into the nitty gritty of more! more! more! details and finer machines, finer timings and what not. I suppose the warning here..that we are headed towards becoming machines ourselves, a sad reflection of who we used to be, is real. We can see it happening all around.
I was not prepared for the shift in tone from the gentle,luring first stanza to the beginnings of a creepy feeling in the second and then the sudden jump in the third. Like you say, you worked in the words to add to the sensory appeal as well as to stress the use of marketing words, they all fall into place in this poem.

Not just a visual and nostalgic trip but a grim warning too. You tighten the rope of our own dreams around our very breath, John. Time to take note of what we are doing to our culture and children. Many powerful lines, full of images....too many for me to pick out and mention here.
If this ever becomes a play, I wish I will be able to see it! The effect on stage will be something to watch out for!

John, I'm late as always. But I came! All the comments above and your responses to them haven't left me with much that I can say.

As I read, there was a dreadful sense of foreboding...of dark inevitability. When I finished reading, the thought occurred to me that the avatars in the digital games of cyberspace's virtual reality - which is actually unreality - is a 21st Century equivalent of dolls and perhaps a portend of robots dehumanizing us further...we becoming robotons. Have I just coined a new word?

Fortunately or unfortunately for me, I never even had a teddy bear as a child.

I wish I could give you more than 10 stars for this brilliant though disturbing work, my friend.

I enjoyed disapearing in the world of the dolls. I have to come back and read part III.

Brilliant - although that whole Ubu thing rather gives me the creeps! You've gotten deep inside the doll well with this. It reminds of the book A Little Princess in which our protagonist, at first a wealthy little girl, always stands outside her sitting room door before she opens it very suddenly and quickly - hoping to catch her dolls moving about in secret.

The last three words of this cynical and satirical look at culture sums up the ruinous beast our politicians and merchants have foisted on our modern world. After reading the first stanza, I was envisioning a screenplay combining the movies Valley of The Dolls and Rosemary's Baby. The last two lines of Stanza 2 would certainly be fodder for a Marilyn Manson tune. This poem had many stark and disturbing elements and yet comforting to know that the inanimate objects are no real threat. The real threat is how we let things material destroy our sense of reality that leads us to blind apathy, or even acceptance of the ills in our societies. Although I can feel the gist of your poem, it does not mention how things visual (TV, movies, etc.) are also destroying our social fabric. This is sensational writing and, I hope you don't mind, a style of poetry I intend to study.

Hi JOhn,

Such exceptional thoughts.You have fabricated those mythological realities with the daily life fun.Very refreshing poem with a stunning ending...

Thanks, John, for the dedication. I come to this fertile laboratory of the soul too rarely, but enjoy the richness and care of the commentary. You have, in the finest sense, a network of incisive, compassionate minds... A part of me takes macabre pleasure in having a poem dedicated to me be horrifying, it's that old Poe/Baudelaire two-step, that Lisztian Mephisto shuffle. I think I understand how you came to the doll as the primary avatar, the empty vessel that can be the shamanistic medium for transcendence or the commercial imprint for dull repetition. The moral of the story being that if the individual is not vigilant about the conditioning troughs of image and concept slimely and seductively being vomited at us through our media, one can descend very easily to a banal evil, an automaton hum, and it will be our very imaginations hiding in the closet next to those lovely women. The doll is the child of our virtual avatars, and the first vehicle for homo ludens, the actor's assuming of another identity, which is the landscape of play, and I believe your poem is cautionary, that our freedom relies first on our freedom of perception.....Lovely and stimulating stuff that leads down many untrodden paths.......Thanks again

An amazing trip through humanity's relationship to the doll. Your implication that Barbie is a vodoo of sorts (damaging those who try to match her image) is wicked, as are your suggestions that Barbie be mangled and hung on a Christmas tree!

I thought at first that Ubu1 might be that baby-like doll given to teens to illustrate the horrors of caring for an infant. I love it that Ubu1 ultimately turns into a HAL-like psychopath.

Thank you for posting this to The Surreal Circus.

All I can say is that I absolutely love this