The phrase "come to your senses" is usually offered as a call to reason. But Charles Bukowski's line—"Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead"—suggests another truth: a life lived entirely within the bounds of social normalcy, untouched by madness or intensity, risks becoming narrow, muted, and airless.
For me, "come to your senses" is a reminder to engage all my senses and deepen my experience of the present moment. This is exactly what I'm doing now, standing in a darkened chamber of the Musée de Cluny, where six La Dame à la licorne—The Lady and the Unicorn—tapestries hang suspended in perpetual twilight.
Their silk and wool threads remain brilliant after five centuries. Commissioned around 1500 by the Le Viste family, these masterworks were nearly lost to time—discovered moldering in the Château de Boussac in 1841, rescued from rats and damp rot, and finally installed here in 1882. They have survived where so many other treasures have not.
Five of the tapestries represent the senses: Touch, Taste, Smell, Hearing, and Sight. Each unfolds in a garden dense with millefleurs—a thousand flowers scattered across a crimson ground. In every scene, a noble lady stands between a lion and a unicorn, both bearing the Le Viste coat of arms.
As I move from one tapestry to the next, I engage the sense named in its title. Of course, I cannot touch the woven surface itself. Instead, I touch the intaglio ring on my finger, tracing the profile of a Roman soldier carved into layered black onyx. It reminds me that the Musée de Cluny rests above ancient Roman baths.
My mouth feels dry; I wish I'd grabbed a bottle of water on my way in. Behind me, I hear the murmur of women's voices. One of them seems to be wearing Chanel No. 5—only a guess I don't dare confirm. With my eyes fixed on the animals flanking the Lady in one panel, I wonder whether they are her companions, her guardians, or her prisoners.
The sixth tapestry bears a cryptic inscription embroidered across a blue tent: À mon seul désir—To my only desire. Here, the Lady stands before her tent holding a necklace—the same necklace she wore in the previous five panels—while her maidservant holds open a chest. Most interpreters believe she is placing the necklace inside, renouncing the pleasures of the senses in favor of something higher: spirit over flesh.
But what if she is taking the necklace out of the chest?
What if this is not renunciation, but reclamation? What if spirit does not oppose the flesh, but moves through it?
What if À mon seul désir does not mean dedication to some abstract, elevated ideal, but instead declares: This is mine alone. This desire belongs to me—not to social expectation, not to duty, not to the endless negotiations of conformity.
What if the sixth tapestry marks the moment the Lady stops performing, embraces all five senses, and claims ownership of her wanting? What if she allows herself, in Bukowski's sense, to go "crazy"?
The Lady's story would be incomplete without acknowledging her most mysterious companion: the unicorn.
The Ancient Trap
Medieval bestiaries describe the unicorn as a creature of terrible wildness—fierce, untamable, impossibly swift. It was said to stab elephants in the abdomen with its horn, to be more dangerous than any beast of the forest. The Greeks called it monoceros.
Yet for all its ferocity, the unicorn had one fatal weakness.
Leonardo da Vinci recorded the method in his notebooks, writing in characteristic mirror script:
"The unicorn, because of its intemperance, not knowing how to control itself before the delight it feels towards maidens, forgets its ferocity and wildness; and casting aside all fear, it will go up to the seated maiden and sleep in her lap. And thus the hunter takes it."
The formula was simple, almost mechanical: place a virgin in the forest. Drawn by her purity, the unicorn would approach and rest its head in her lap. Once docile, once asleep, the hunters would emerge and capture it.
What We Lose When We're Caught
Can the story of the unicorn also be our story?
There is a unicorn in each of us—something fierce, strange, and undomesticated, born to be wild. In childhood, it runs free. We ask impossible questions. We believe in magic without embarrassment. We invent entire worlds from cardboard boxes and bedsheets. We rage, weep, and laugh with an intensity that makes adults uncomfortable. We have not yet learned to measure ourselves against the bland metrics of normalcy.
Then comes the taming.
It happens gradually, imperceptibly. We learn which questions are acceptable and which invite discomfort. We discover that wonder is charming in children but naïve in adults. Imagination becomes a hobby; seriousness becomes a virtue. Life, we're told, requires practicality.
In the medieval tale, the maiden represents purity and innocence. Psychologically, she may stand for something else entirely: the domesticating forces we internalize—social conditioning, cultural expectation, the voices of parents, teachers, managers, the entire chorus of authority telling us who we should be and what we should want.
The unicorn doesn't see the trap. It sees acceptance. It lowers its wild head and rests. And in that moment, it is finished.
Like the unicorn, we rarely realize when we are trapped. We tell ourselves we have matured, adapted, become responsible. The mortgage gets paid. Meetings get attended. The alarm rings at the same hour each morning, and we answer it like trained animals responding to a bell.
Our wild interior landscape—the realm of dreams, mad ideas, irrational passions—gets fenced in and subdivided. We insist this is necessary. And perhaps it is. Civilization requires restraint. Discipline and delayed gratification are admirable qualities.
But what happens when the unicorn surrenders completely?
From wild creatures, we become creatures of habit, hooked to the feed. We abandon creative pursuits as "impractical." We dismiss passion as childish. We stop asking questions because the answers might demand change. We trade the exhilarating uncertainty of authenticity for the numbing comfort of conformity.
We don't call it capture.
We call it growing up.
Freeing the Unicorn
And yet, occasionally, we still feel it—the restless, caged thing stirring inside. It surfaces in moments of unexpected beauty: a line of poetry, a stranger's laugh on the metro, light filtering through leaves. It appears in dreams, or in the sudden conviction that our life has contracted into something smaller than it was meant to be.
What would it mean to free it?
Not irresponsibility—not the abandonment of every obligation, not a flight into some fantasized virtual-reality wilderness.
But a grounding in the present. A reclaiming of space for the untamed. A devotion to pursuits that serve no purpose except delight. A refusal, now and then, to be reasonable, measured, appropriately adult.
It is time to ask ourselves:
What is my only desire?
Before stepping back into daylight, I imagine a seventh tapestry: the Lady releasing the lion and the unicorn into the forest, reclaiming her own strength and wildness.
The forest calls.
The forest whispers: Don't be captured.
🖤
— Vibe & Verse
From page to thread — a story you can wear
A Maiden and an Unicorn $35.99