The Bed of Procrustes – a tale from the dust of Greek myth, yet one that rises from the roadside like a grim milestone marking the journey of civilisation. Procrustes, that innkeeper of cruelty, the highwayman with hospitality on his lips and butchery in his hands, offered travellers a night’s rest on his iron bed. But rest was never the gift; rather, conformity. Too tall? Out came the axe to trim the limbs. Too short? On went the rack to stretch the bones. Thus did he force men to fit the measure, and not the measure to fit men.
Is this not the eternal temptation of mankind? To impose the frame first, then hammer the soul into shape? To demand, like a tyrant tailor, that all men wear the same coat, though some burst at the seams while others rattle in the sleeves? It’s the madness of systems that seek to normalise what’s alive, to iron out wrinkles which are, in fact, the character of the cloth. Plato hinted at this danger when he spoke of forcing the world into the shape of our ideas, rather than letting truth reveal its own form. Nietzsche recognised in it the dull cruelty of the herd, trimming the genius down to size lest he disturb the average man’s bed-time. And Freud – grim surgeon of the psyche – would surely see in Procrustes the superego at its most monstrous, hacking away desire and vitality to leave a docile, crippled self behind.
The bed, of course, is no mere iron frame: it’s a metaphor for every institution, ideology, or creed that demands man be less than himself. Parents who cut their children into silhouettes of obedience. Lovers who stretch one another until affection turns to tyranny. Politicians who believe their constituents exist only to fit into the narrow cots of party lines. And most grotesquely of all – our so-called mainstream media. Here, in our own time, Procrustes has been reborn with a press pass. The headlines are hammered until they lie flush with the preferred narrative; inconvenient facts are lopped off with surgical precision, while minor details are grotesquely stretched into spectacle. The modern newsroom is but a chamber with an iron bed, where truth itself is the guest – bound, gagged, and stretched until it squeals to fit the column width.
This is why we live in an age where war is ‘peacekeeping,’ censorship is ‘safety,’ and propaganda is ‘fact-checking.’ The language itself is mutilated until it conforms. Orwell, in 1984, gave us the image of Newspeak, but he might just as well have borrowed the myth of Procrustes. For isn’t every evening bulletin a Procrustean bed where the body of reality is hacked to match the mattress of ideology? What does it matter whether the bed is labelled Left or Right? Both will slice away what protrudes and wrench what falls short, until the poor guest – truth – lies mangled and unrecognisable.
Yet there’s divine irony in the myth. Procrustes himself was undone by Theseus, who forced him upon his own device. Thus the tyrant tasted his own medicine; the stretcher was stretched, the mutilator mutilated. And so it will be again. For every system that butchers life to make it ‘fit’ eventually collapses under the weight of its own inhuman standard. The media, too, shall lie one day upon the bed it has made, bound by its lies, suffocated by its own false consensus. And on that day the traveller – the ordinary man, weary but awake – may at last pass by, free of the innkeeper’s grin, and make camp beneath the open stars.
In the end, the lesson is stark: beware of beds that promise comfort but conceal shackles. Beware of systems that insist all must fit a single frame. Better the uneven mattress that welcomes your awkward limbs than the gleaming iron bed that mutilates you into perfection. For life’s too rich, too various, too stubborn to be cut to measure; and the heart – unlike Procrustes’ captives – was never meant to lie still.
Wording 