Spot the unicorn


25th January 2009


What is this life, asked a poet, if full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?

So I’ve been staring at a beer can. Specifically, a can from Kirin, a major brewery in Japan.

I’ve been puzzling over its logo of a unicorn – the kirin – ever since a teacher told me that hidden inside is the word itself.

It’s written in the katakana script, one of three used in modern Japanese, and I’ve been turning the can this way and that, trying to find the word. Is it spelled out through the angle of the unicorn’s neck and the flow of its mane? Or in the arrangement of its legs and tail?

For those tempted to try this riddle, here’s a clue: look in the mane and tail and forget about strange angles.

If you don’t have the patience – or a magnifying glass – you could just enjoy the logo. It’s a handsome creature, with a black-scaled body and a full golden mane that doubles up as a beard.

This kirin owes something to the Chinese unicorn, or the qilin (written with the same characters but pronounced differently). Accounts vary but the qilin is said to have the body of a deer, the tail of an ox, the head of a lion and the hooves of a horse. (Opinion splits over the hooves; some think they’re cloven.)

The qilin is nothing like the pearly, incandescent unicorns of the West; it’s covered with green scales. If you met such a chimera and ran away screaming, no one would think the worse of you.

But there’s really no need to run. The qilin is apparently so gentle, it pays great attention to where it places its hooves so as not to crush living things underfoot.

Its name is a combination of qi, the male unicorn, and lin, the female. It is said that the latter has no horn although this tells you less about the qilin than it does about the people writing about it – and how they feel about females with sharp objects.

Unicorns, being generally well-mannered, will not laugh when you tell them about this differentiation. And the females will, in a well-mannered fashion, not draw attention to the horns on their foreheads.

That single horn is something the qilin has in common with its Western cousin, which looks more like a horse, albeit one with a goat’s beard, lion’s tail and split hooves.

It is an image of purity and beauty – but where there is beauty, too often there is also the desire to acquire.

The traditional way of catching a unicorn is to set a young woman as bait. The idea is that unicorns are drawn to virgins and on finding one, will lay their head in her lap and go to sleep.

Though this manoeuvre has been described in medieval lore and any number of tapestries, it tells you less about unicorns than it does about the people writing about them – and how they feel about sleeping in virgins’ laps.

It is actually not that hard to catch a unicorn. Hunters will tell you different, of course, but they have reasons of their own for doing so, reasons that have mostly to do with their lack of a pension and medical benefits.

It is true that unicorns have horns (yes, yes, even the female ones) but they rarely use them for defence. It is also true that they are fast but no faster than a cheetah, say, or a shooting star. And besides, mankind has a history of overcoming speed.

So why have so few unicorns been captured, so few that most doubt they even exist? It is simple: they are not caught because they are not seen. Not invisible, just unnoticed.

Not possible, you say? Not possible for a creature at least as big as a deer, with a horn sticking out of its head, which may or may not look like a lion’s, to be ignored?

If you ask Joshua Bell, he may say otherwise. One weekday morning in 2007, the award-winning violinist busked for 43 minutes in a busy Washington subway station. His performance was organised by The Washington Post as an experiment in perception, priorities and public taste: “In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?”

For the seven commuters who stopped to watch for at least a minute, it did. But for the rest – over a thousand people – Bell and his Stradivari violin were either invisible or a nuisance competing with the phones in their hands and the headphones in their ears.

He made US$32.17, not counting the US$20 given by the one person who recognised him. A bit of a comedown for a performer who can command as much as US$1,000 a minute.

But when he watched the video of the experiment – it was taped secretly – just one thing puzzled him. Not the fact that he didn’t draw a crowd because it was, after all, a weekday morning and people were rushing to work.

What stumped him was “the number of people who don’t pay attention at all, as if I’m invisible. Because, you know what? I’m makin’ a lot of noise!”

Any unicorns present would not have been surprised. They know the human capacity to turn blind and deaf; they depend on it.

This capacity is refined as we grow older – as children, we are wide open. The tape of Bell’s subway performance shows that all the youngsters who went past tried to stop and watch. And that all of them were hurried away by their parents.

You could argue that this is just how children are and they would have done the same thing if it’d been a beginner on the bongo drums rather than a violin virtuoso.

Even so, there’s something to be said about a worldview that has time for both.

This is the real reason why virgins came to be used as unicorn bait. All the hunters needed was for somebody who could still see things as they were. This usually meant someone young enough to spot any passing unicorns and point them out to the hunters. Virginity was just a coincidence though it sounded much better if you were trying to raise your fees. And it made for nicer tapestries.

The difference between seeing as a child and as an adult is time: you know that you’re growing up when you feel like you never have any. So from the world that has robbed you of leisure, you withhold vision, hoarding your attention.

This seems all the more necessary in cities, where sounds and pictures rush in like harpies that will scratch out your eyes and scream you into deafness.

In self-defence, we blinker ourselves with tiny screens and stop up our ears with headphones.

But if we can teach ourselves not to see, we can teach ourselves to see.

I’ve been practising with a can of Kirin beer but you can start with something closer to hand.

You may, for instance, know someone who’s a little distant, a little unworldly, a little odd. And if you learn to see what’s there instead of seeing only what you expect to, you may find that you’ve known a unicorn all along.

What happens next is up to you. But at least one expert suggests that it would not be tactful to mention virgins.


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Here's where you can find the Washington Post article, "Pearls before breakfast": http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html









Hidden in the Kirin logo are the characters that spell out "unicorn" in the katakana script: キ (ki), り (ri) and ン (n).