Ode to Mr. Magoo
Near-blind and oblivious cranky sprite, he sets the universe honking. Not completely sighted, whatever that would mean, but not completely sightless either. Bopping along, being alive, rivers of appalling wreckage everywhere behind him…
Things do not align with themselves, but Magoo feels perfectly aligned with Magoo. In a world like the world, he lives approximately but is happy perfectly. Towering confidence in exact proportion to ever-descending circles of wrongness.
And then of course his mumbling and chuckling and thinking out loud. He is his own running commentary. He talks to make sense, talks his way around, around the world of his own deeply dug mistakes, the inexorable chains of events, gone underwater or up in the sky, chatting with lamp posts and animals, prompted always by some initial misjudgement, some unacknowledged and out-of-kilter reading. He mutters sense down out of the resistant texture of things, babbles and chortles his jim backus chortle which is always so ebullient, triumphant, self-pleased of course because self-blurry…
What’s there to say? We dig his cockamamie certainty. We dig his fluid inventiveness. We appreciate his not-knowing and odd-knowing. We love that he survives. And more. We love his happiness. We love his mastery of chance. We love his always cheerful orchestration of the flubbed. We crave his perilous aplomb.