Life-Size Plastic Unicorn It Is, and Apologies to No One

I am quick to acknowledge my errors (since I allow myself only two a year this is no great embarrassment); but I do get impatient with readers who accuse me of errors when none has been committed.

Sometimes these complaints are exceedingly strange. For example, I wrote recently that my wife has “a life-size plastic unicorn” in her bathroom garden.

I have received numerous letters questioning that phrase:

“So I can sleep assured of the accuracy of your observation,” writes Irving B. Kasow of Arcadia, “please tell me how you know the plastic unicorn in the little walled garden outside your wife’s bathroom is ‘life-size’. Never having seen a real live unicorn I’m more than somewhat puzzled.”

“What is a ‘life-size plastic unicorn’?” asks Aaron Kommel of Northridge. “What is a ‘life size’ of anything imaginary?”

“What do you mean a ‘life-size plastic unicorn’?” writes Alan Griffiths. “When did you last see a unicorn? Or a unicorn (see) you?”

Owen J. Brady, a Pasadena attorney, asks, “How big is a real unicorn?”

What these people are saying, evidently, is that since unicorns are thought to be imaginary, we cannot say what size they are.

Nonsense. If one can imagine a unicorn, one can imagine its size. They might as well say that no one knows what size a dragon is, or an angel.

True, different cultures have imagined the unicorn as resembling different animals, and being of different sizes. In ancient China the unicorn was thought to look like a horse (ancient horses were, of course, smaller than those of today). Actually, I have never believed that the Chinese unicorn was truly a unicorn. It was what we may call a horse unicorn, that being a slightly different species, or cousin to the unicorn we know.

Ctesias, a physician and diarist in 400 BC, gave us our first written description of the unicorn: “There are in India certain wild asses which are as large as horses. . . . Their heads are dark red, and their eyes dark blue. They have a horn on the forehead. . . .”

Our unicorn looks more like a deer, or, even more closely, like an Arabian oryx, an antelope with scimitar-like horns. The oryx is often mistaken for a unicorn because, when standing sideways to an observer, it appears to have but one horn. The oryx is said to be 40-47 inches in height, which is about the height of the unicorn.

Those who haven’t actually seen the unicorn in life are best served by the medieval tapestries of “The Hunt of the Unicorn,” which show this graceful creature at court and in the field. In another series, “The Lady With the Unicorn,” a unicorn is shown with its front feet resting in a lady’s lap. (It is said that a unicorn can be captured only when it is lured into a virgin’s lap.) In these famous works the unicorn is shown to be about the size of a deer.

It may be that there are more than one species of unicorn. In ancient India it was said to resemble the rhinoceros--a fancy derived more from the fact that both have one horn than from any true resemblance. When Scotland joined England, the Scottish unicorn joined the British lion on the coat of arms. They appear to be about the same size.

In 1982 I wrote a foreword for the Unicorn, a publication of the Paws Prints staff at Wilson High School in Hacienda Heights. It read as follows:

“A great deal has been written and spoken about the unicorn, most of it nonsense, or not terribly trustworthy, at best. It has been said that the unicorn was actually a rhinoceros, or a certain kind of whale that has a horn, or an oryx that happened to be turned sideways, so that his two horns appeared to be one.

“Though an oryx standing sideways does indeed look a good deal like the unicorn whose pictures we have seen, it is, after all, only an oryx standing sideways. A real unicorn is an animal whose purpose is to show that there is something more in this world than meets the eye, and that what seems so may not always be so, and vice versa.

“As long as there are young people, and old people, too, who can imagine realities beyond seeing and touching, and as long as there are poets, and artists, and musicians, there will be unicorns.”

My wife’s unicorn is about the size of a small deer, an oryx or a goat. It is seated, so that its height can only be guessed at. In calling it life-size, I did not consider that it may be only a young unicorn, and not fully grown. I don’t know whether a young unicorn would be called a colt, a fawn or a kid, but in any case it appears to be nearly mature.

If you want to know what a unicorn looks like, go to the Los Angeles Zoo and look at the oryx--sideways.