Unicorn Lit

Do unicorns poop rainbows?

Isn’t that a Philip K. Dick novel?

I don’t think so.

What “Blade Runner” is based on?

It’s based on “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”

Then why is there a unicorn in the movie?

An ingredient to make replicants more human. To dream is human. To dream of mythic creatures even more so. 

Hmm. But are those implanted memories? Or things he has seen? “A moment that will be lost in time, like tears in the rain?” 

A scene I had never seen until recently.

You’ve never seen “Blade Runner”?!

No. But I did see “Blade Runner 2049.”

And you call yourself a film buff?

Exactly what my brother said.

It’s a very famous scene. 

Number 42 on AFI’s “100 Years … 100 Movie Quotes.” I admit to some lacunae in my cinephilia. I have thought a lot about that quote and why it’s moving.

Tell me why it’s moving to you.

I wasn’t thinking much about Rutger Hauer’s Roy Blatty as a replicant nearing human qualities … but as a repository of knowledge. 

Are memories the same as knowledge? What he witnessed, stored in memory, is the same as books or footage, I think … For him to die and lose all that is like the burning of the library in Alexandria.

It’s just like losing a server.

Which really pissed you off when it happened because you lost all the photos you saved in it.

You mean all the porn you saved in it …

That, too.

Then it made me think of dementia. Every day losing moments like tears in the rain. Then it made me think of Cartesian duality. How we say they are not the same person as they were anymore after dementia. Same body, different mind? Or was it the mind all along, so the body becomes different when the mind becomes demented?

Do demented people dream of unicorns?

I don’t know. Probably not. I think demented people try to hang on to as much reality as possible - to demonstrate what’s real as much as possible so they can prove to others that they are not demented.

They don’t want to speak of unicorns because they don’t want to be deemed as kooks. But we’re surrounded by unicorns now.

Kind of trippy to watch “Blade Runner” in 2020 since it is set in 2019. 

Very little of its technology came true but it predicted we will be dreaming of unicorns.

A steep rise in the use of the word unicorn since 2000.

Unicorn startups. Swingers looking for unicorns. Unicorns everywhere. A unicorn selling Squatty Potty. Unicorn poop cookies. 

The unicorn as queer icon. Tattooed on Amrou Al-Kadhi’s chest.

AKA Glamrou!

I found them nakedly honest in “Life as a Unicorn: A Journey from Shame to Pride and Everything in Between.” 

A product of good therapy.

So soul baring. They would need a therapist to piece themselves after that.

Tell me a moment in your life when you were a unicorn.

I felt like a unicorn as a 16 year old freshman in college. I was that rare thing among my friends. Being young. My queerness was not what made me a unicorn. But the paradox of being a unicorn is that what makes you special is what makes you feel acutely different from others. I don’t think the longing to be treated as someone ordinary ever goes away.

How many unicorns will it take to not be a unicorn anymore?

If I go to Therapy, all of us cease to be unicorns because we are in the company of unicorns?

Exactly. Gays in a gay bar cease to be unicorns.

So true. They turn into narwhals when the work lights are turned on at 3 a.m.

Or white rhinoceroses.

Rhinoceri.

Probably what Ctesias mistook as unicorns. 

Or Unibulls.

Like the pens?

No. More real than unicorns. This biologist from Maine, Franklin Dove, surgically experimented on a calf to make two horns into one.  

That’s messed up.

Unibulls or more real than unicorns.

Stop messing with my head. I feel like Susannah York in “Images.”

Well, she got messed up by unicorns.

That’s a messed up children’s book.

Like what age group is that book supposed to be for?

“In Search of Unicorns.” That’s the title of the book.

Her inspiration are the “The Lady and Unicorn” tapestries from the Musee de Cluny. So it feels like she’s leaning into the sexual symbolism associated with unicorns. Like Tracy Chevalier did in “The Lady and the Unicorn.”

“In Search of Unicorns.” Well, search no more - she could go to Therapy. 

More like medieval Christianity symbolism. Purity, virginity-

Yes. Phallic. So she could still go to Therapy.

Do you think her head was messed up because she kept wanting to ride the unicorn? Even though it wasn’t her husband’s unicorn?

So her psyche was fractured by being horny? And she has to kill the slutty self. Possibly. 

I admired it more this time. I appreciated the music more and how effective the lo-fi tricks were. Simply achieved by doors and lighting.

And creepy narration of that children’s book.

I’m sure you can find that in a bookstore in Brooklyn.

It should be in a gift shop at the Musee de Cluny.

Yes, next to an origami unicorn.