rukin in any other language...

a pretty scary RPPC from the uk circa 1920, of two dolls or puppets on a stage, with some incredibly beautiful fabric letters behind them.

i tried a google search for 'rukin' and got only a slew of last names, a dictionary search yielded nothing; and my usual favorite, running it through google translate's 23 different languages and still every time it comes up 'rukin'... a word that only means what it sounds.

so here some text by rilke about dolls, that seems somehow to capture how unsettling dolls and puppets can be...

"so in the end we really destroyed you, doll-soul, when we thought we were cultivating you in our dolls. it must have been the larvae who were eating you from within; and this explains too why the dolls were so fat and why they could not be given more food.

now this new timid generation escapes and flutters through our dark sensibility. looking at these, one might describe them as tiny sighs, so faint that our ears are not attuned to hear them. they swarm and fade at the uttermost limit of our vision. for their only concern is to dwindle away. sexless like our childhood dolls themselves, they experience no decline in their permanent sensuality, into which nothing flows and from which nothing escapes. it is as if they yearned for a beautiful flame, to throw themselves into it like moths (and then the momentary reek of their burning would fill us with limitless unfamiliar sensations). thinking these thoughts and raising our eyes, we stand almost unnerved as we contemplate their waxen nature."

r.m. rilke, dolls, from: essays on dolls, penguin, 1994