Look at the spray-painted image adjacent and reproduced at greater magnification below.
It appears about halfway along the Rodney Street Tunnel, on the right as you approach King George V Park.
What do you see?
Some locals find a rather wild, unsentimentalised head and shoulder of a unicorn – nostril-snorting, teeth-baring and tongue-lolling – facing left to right.
Others see a snarling demon – hunched, malevolent, bristling – poised to pounce, some even going so far as to identify it as a chupacabra: the vampiric ‘goat-sucker’ of Latin America.
Drawing upon the vast depth of our psychological training, Spurtle will hesitantly suggest that if you first see a unicorn then you are a credulous optimist, and if you first see a demon or chupacabra you are more likely to be a miserable religious fanatic or conspiracy theorist.
If you can see both simultaneously, you are … special.
The Austrian thinker Ludwig Wittgenstein dealt with such peculiar ambiguities in his Philosophical Investigations (1953), a book about comprehension which 99% of the world’s population agree cannot be read or understood.
Rather than unicorns and demons, he of course illustrated his ruminations with a picture of the mythical French duck-rabbit (mallard-imagine-hare), concluding that the external world could not remain the same once an observer had first seen one element of the identity and then afterwards recognised the other.
We have no idea at all what implications this has for those using the Rodney Street Tunnel. Probably best not to worry.
Meanwhile, for local goat-suckers seeking answers to our Edinburgh Safari (8), the answers appear below the pictures here. A new safari challenge will appear shortly.
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@theSpurtle Not quite sure what to make of the fact that my first reaction is that it's neither pink nor fluffy ... (I blame my daughter.)
Euan MacGuzzi McGlynn James Gillespies