I have to confess that as a young man there is a book that I loved reading way more than the scriptures. I was first introduced to it in Mrs. Roberts 5th grade Gifted and Talented class. It’s author was more revered to me than any other – Shel Silverstein. The Book was “Where the Sidewalk Ends”. This little tome of silly poems and illustrations could be read over and over again and new insights and humor would always be forthcoming.

There was one illustration and poem that I have often repeated to my kids when I find them in the throes of its topic – “Nose Picking”

As adults, we know that this tale used to instill fear in children to avoid this unpleasant habit is just a fiction. I always use the poem as a fun distraction and not a dire threat.

I wonder, though, what the world would be like if people actually believed this tale and taught it with strict enforcement to children…

Silversteinianism

Suppose that Shel Silverstein was revered as a prophet of God. His books of poetry scripture and his illustrations absolute truth. Silversteinian parent’s used his poems to teach lessons about what was right and wrong and what the realities of the world were. The lessons from the poems in his books were considered doctrine.

Early training

Because it was addressed directly – the vile and unclean practice of nose picking was particularly condemned. From a very early age, parents would instill a fear of nose picking in their children. It wasn’t directly referred to while the children were infants. The parents themselves would make sure to set an example by using many layers of kleenex to protect their fingers when they wipe the infant’s nose. As the infant grew, the parents were very careful to guard the wandering finger against making its way into the nostril – yanking the hand away from the face and emphatically shouting “No!” This started to instill a fear of his nose in the mind of the young child.

As the child grew and could now understand language, the parents would recite the poem “Warning” frequently and his baseline fear of his nose was further elaborated and personified by the “sharp-toothed snail” that lived within it. How did the snail get in there? Why would God create humans with such a dangerous creature lurking about the nasopharyngeal passages? These questions would occasionally cross the youths mind but were only fleeting and paled in comparison with the tangible horror that adults expressed anytime his finger even brushed his nose.

Sacred Science

Furthermore, since the nose was blessed with so strict a guardian as a sharp-toothed snail, it was assumed that this olfactory appendage was the most sacred and protected part of the human body. It was, after all, the defining feature of the face and was squarely present in the middle of every human encounter. It only seemed natural to the Silversteinians that it should be regarded as such. As a result, the prohibitions against nose-picking took on both an aura of fear as well as a sort of worship of the sacred. In either case, it was not something that could be ignored and began to occupy more and more of the child’s fascination. A fascination that was only reinforced every time he was reproved for threatening it’s desecration.

A new sensation

As the child grew there were practical problems. His nose generated things which impaired his ability to breathe. Boogers. These crusty and sticky things would start to fill up his nasal passages, and he was helpless to do anything about it. Sometimes at night he would find that his hand unconsciously found it’s way to his face – and he would find himself waking up to find his finger digging through his nose and clearing out all the nasty buildup of boogies and snot. He would franticly stop himself from violating these strict and sacred boundaries. Checking his finger to make sure that it was still whole he would, at the same time, feel intense shame and guilt.

He couldn’t help notice that he could breathe easier, though. This too fed into his guilt. He had been told that other people who did not understand the sacred nature of the nasal passages would excavate them regularly with abandon. If God had intended the nose to be violated by a finger – he would not have created it to manufacture boogers or populated with the dangerous sharp-toothed snail! How could these people not see this? They shamelessly violated the sacred trust of the nose – all for the selfish gratification of uninhibited closed-mouthed inhalation. Disgusting! Even if the sharp-toothed snail didn’t manage to remove the offending digit in return – they would surely find a painful torment as a reward in the life after this.

The hapless child who found himself trapped in a cycle of nocturnal nose digging could only think of himself as falling to the same degenerate levels as the vilest hedonists. He felt worthless now that it was no longer an accidental happenstance that found him to wake with a finger a knuckle deep into his nose – he would consciously pick under cover of darkness!

The cycle of guilt

The relief of a full uninhibited respiration was unlike anything that he could remember and he would dig frantically after he was sure that his family was safe and soundly asleep. The thrill and anticipation of that first deep breath would build as he dug deeper and deeper. First the tip of the finger- often the most gratifying as the low-lying fruit was usually the most desiccated and lent itself to the tactile rolling of the booger between the first and second digits. It would be a game to see how many would stick to the opposite wall after a good flick. Returning to the task at hand, the second and then the first knuckle plunged the depths of his choanal canal (it’s a word for the nose passages – look it up). He had learned a while ago that either his sharp-toothed snail was hiding much deeper in his nose than he ever ventured or that his snail was waiting to catch him off guard. He didn’t care at this point – the enticement of that first full inspiration of air through his nose blinded him to these fearful realities.

Once he had evicted every reachable boogie, nosegoblin and snotwad from his schnoz under cover of night he would indulge in the most divine experience he could ever remember. A full, unimpeded intake of air through clean, uninhibited nostrils. This was no simple inhalation. Having been accustomed to mouth breathing due to chronically occluded nasal passages – he saw the difference. Air taken in through the nose was warmed and moisturized through the nasal turbinates. It was filtered of particulate matter by the numerous nasal hairs. A full breath of nose-breathed air was not like the cold impersonal and sterile air that the mouth provided – it was a tailor-made experience created by his own body to fulfill the essence of existence. Surely the breath of life which God had granted humanity was taken through the nose!

Just as soon as he had taken this first ecstatic breath and held it for a few short moments to savor its transcendental powers his previous fears and guilt would come flooding into his mind. The spell of the anticipated breath was broken and he would exhale quickly and fully through his mouth. How could he have fallen to such base and selfish impulses? Disgusted with himself he would violently wash his hands of all the evidence of his crime. In the morning he would have to hide the evidence of his nocturnal excursions – cleaning the snot stains and booger debris from his bedsheets – castigating himself in his mind the whole time. Idiot! Doofus! You knew that you weren’t supposed to do that! Do you want to lose your finger?! What would Silverstein think if he knew that you ignored his warning?! You deserve anything bad that happens to you today!

The dangers of the unbridled nose

The youth goes through his day, seeing his parents, friends and Silversteinian leaders all completely confident in their ability to abstain from the foul deed. This thought only leads him to condemn himself more. In his group meetings, he listens to the Silversteinians assigned to instruct youths in the ways of the world. They regularly teach about the importance of abstaining from anything that even alludes to a whiff of digital nasal excavation and speak as though only the weakest and lowest of people engage in such forms of nasal self-abuse. He is instructed on how, once cleared of the protective shell of boogery crust, the underlying olfactory senses become accustomed to the enticing and savory uninhibited scents that the unencrusted world has to offer. He is warned how the sensuous appetites of the perpetrator become aroused and they start fixating their lives on experiencing more intense and exotic smells. It may start with a particularly pungent European cheese or the unmuted fragrance of a bouquet of flowers – but soon enough the unbridled reprobate moves on to more bizarre and gratifying perversions. The gunk extracted from beneath one’s toenails. The aroma of a dead skunk on the road. Dog farts. The offenders foul appetites will drive him to these indecent and unnatural extremes. The guilt-ridden child cannot hold his head up in his classes. He is wracked with guilt. He realizes that he has been secretly sniffing his own armpits – It has begun! He himself is on this lonely and dreary path to utter depravity.

Hopelessness

As the child tries again and again to abstain from his filthy habit – he is confronted with his undeniable weakness. He tried bargaining with God – promising that if he read all of Shel Silverstein’s books 3 times over and memorized the most important poems, then God would grant him the strength to stop picking. That failed. No amount of reading or memorizing would remove his desire to breathe freely or experience the full spectrum of nasal sensation. On the advice of a high ranking Silversteinian leader, he attempted to tie his arms to his bedpost to prevent the subconscious exploration of his nasal passages that his hands seemed to fall into. This too failed as the very hands which tied the bindings were adept in removing them when sufficiently motivated. Despite these and other strategies – he continued to fall into this pit.

He began to hate his nose. Worse still, he hated himself. Everyone else also has a nose – but they all manage to keep their fingers out of it. The problem is clearly with himself. He is the one who is at fault – because he is the one who can’t master his own body. Even with all the help that the Silversteinians offered and all the effort he could muster – it wasn’t enough. His imagination was filled with the remembrances of the scents he had experienced. It elated and disgusted him at the same time. He wondered if he wouldn’t be a better person if only his hands were cut off and replaced with hooks – just like Captain Hook in Silverstein’s sacred poem.

So the child continues to grow. He suffers constant and repeated feelings of inadequacy all the while amazed at the ability of those around him to abstain from his curse so effortlessly. His Non-silversteinian friends regularly joke about nose-picking, but he knows that they are not enlightened enough to know the severity of the sacred forces that they are toying with. One joke, in particular, irks him: “What do you find inside a clean nose?” a friend would ask. “Fingerprints!” was the reply, followed by fits of loud laughter. Couldn’t they see how damaging it was to deal so lightly with something so sacred? He would caution himself from becoming too attached to these so-called friends. They didn’t hold his standards. Even if he wasn’t able to keep the standards – he should at least surround himself with the sort of righteous upstanding Silverstienians who could. Then perhaps they would lift him up to their level rather than drag him down.

Alone

Years pass and the child grows into a young man. One day he walks into his father’s office and sees what he thinks is a glimpse of his father retracting a finger from his left nostril. In a stifled and abrupt motion his father rubs his nose and makes a comment about how there was an itch on his left outer nose – accenting the word ‘outer’ a bit more forcefully than seemed necessary. After leaving the office, the youth wonders if it was possible that his own father was guilty of the same weakness that had plagued him. While at first it gives him hope that his father may have compassion and understanding for him – he remembers the passion and intensity that his father displayed during his last rant against “those vile nose plunderers”. He couldn’t risk asking his father and revealing himself to be the biggest nose plunderer of all – his own father would look at him with disgust all the rest of his life.

Escape and knowledge

Now imagine that the youth grows in experience and life and eventually discovers that Shel Silverstein was not actually a prophet of God, but was actually just some crazy kook who was very creative, but took himself and his poems way too seriously. One of the implications is that the laws and restrictions that only made sense if Silversteinianism was true needed to be re-evaluated. The only reason that nose-picking was condemned so harshly and completely is because of a story about an imaginary snail. Sure, people could become obsessed about their nasal passages and end up hurting themselves by being too aggressive and fixated, but the odd thing is that such a fixation was almost unheard of outside of groups that called great attention to the practice by condemning it so completely.

Furthermore, it turns out that almost everybody picks their nose. It is completely socially unacceptable to be done in public, for sure, but most people simply reserve their nasal evacuations for private times when they are not likely to gross people out. Among non-Silversteinians the parents do not teach their children that they are evil or weak for experiencing what is by all accounts a normal part of human existence. Study after study shows that nose-picking is almost universal and furthermore doesn’t stop when people grow into adults and move into more complex living situations. This was particularly interesting because as a youth the child had heard of marriages that were broken up after one of the spouses was discovered to be a filthy nose-picker and disfellowshipped from the group. If the studies are true – then the very Silversteinian leaders who enacted this condemnation were likely guilty of nose-plundery themselves. What hypocrites!

The most remarkable thing happened once he let go of the fears that had kept him in turmoil. He began to smell the beauty in the world around him. The fresh subtle fragrance of the morning after a rainfall. The complex aroma of an aged cheese. The intoxicating smell of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. These sensations filled him with a love of the world around him. People who had grown up without the threat of the sharp-toothed nail had been able to experience these things without anxiety or guilt – because there was nothing to fear. They could clear their nose without a second thought. They breathed freely and the amount of time they spent racked with guilt and self-doubt over doing so was non-existent.

Once leaving the Silversteinians the young man was tempted to talk about his experience with members who are still beating themselves up over this problem. He knew, however that to bring up nose-plunder in any degree of permissiveness or frankness would immediately invite accusations. He could hear them already in his mind – because he would have made the same accusations “That’s why you left the Silversteinians! You were a filthy nose-picker who couldn’t bridle your booger harvesting ways! Didn’t we warn you that violating those sacred nasal passages would lead you into the pit of hell? Get thee behind me Apostate!” All of these arguments would have seemed to make sense to him until he discovered just how much of a crazy kook Silverstein was and how all the things that he claimed were true, were, in fact, the vain imaginations of his addled mind.

Regret and hope

The young man felt particularly bad for the friends and colleagues that he had judged so harshly for not having his standards. They had been patient with him and had made accommodations for his standards in nose-picking and other prohibitions, but he had only ever looked at them with a sort of condescending pity. Gathering all the confidence he could muster, despite his regrets, the young man swore never to give any of his children the same curse of guilt and self-abasement by filling their heads with the lies and condemnations of a crazy lunatic – no matter how entertaining his poetry is.

Also, no one ever lost a finger to the sharp-toothed snail. Ever.

[Originally published Jan 15, 2014. Updated with images in May 2015]