Wednesday, September 12, 2007

DB 3: Grapefruit Boats: Is Childhood Hell?


How to make a gutter-boat: Halve a grapefruit, placing each piece within reach of a ravenous five-year-old. Stand a safe distance away and watch as the juices spray, the laughter ascends, and the fruits diminish. Prepare a scraping tool so that once all the meat has been removed, you can scrape out the remaining pith. While scraping, provide each child a stick of chewing gum, off-brand is OK. Once thoroughly gummy, press each chewed wad into the center of the bottom of the grapefruit. Construct flags by adhering a small paper triangle with tape to a toothpick (colored is preferable). Insert the flag into the gum so that it pierces the peel of the grapefruit beneath. You’re ready to go! Now just wait for heavy rain to fill the gutters in the street, and you’ll be amazed by the speed and agility of your handcrafted vessel. 


That is one of the most vivid memories of my youth: my best friend and I learning the art of fruit-craft construction.


As we grow older, we continue to learn more about ourselves and the world we inhabit. As T.S. Eliot says, we do not read widely to accumulate a vast store of knowledge, but rather to absorb the perspectives of others for a time, glean what is of value to us, and cast the rest aside. Knowledge (of self) is not a stack of books in the brain, but a single collage of the effects of these interactions. In this way, I am “my one-year-old-self all the way up to my eighteen-year-old self” (Hannah Chesser). I think it’s dangerous, however, if childhood is over-romanticized. It is good if we gain from past experiences, but not if we try to return to them or try to relive them as our present.


Children are beautiful. Their way of being seems so pure to us from up above. Once, when I sitting on a small beach off the coast of Ireland, I saw a clan of young children playing together. They were buck naked, racing each other to the water’s edge. The proper racing stance for this activity is (apparently) on all fours: bend over with your butt as high as high in the air as you can stick it, dig your face into the sand, and you’re ready to go. Proceed by driving your legs into the earth behind you and digging a trench to mark your path – your face is the shovel. The children seemed so gleeful. What could possibly be better than a veritable “sandwich” with a side of mucus-grit caked nose and burning eyes?


But of course none of these children thought to stop in the middle of their game and ask, “Am I happy?” This is outside of the immediacy of their experience. The capacity to witness, to live with equanimity and to experience without attachment, is not a capacity young children have. “If you are standing by a river and a leaf floats by, you have your choice of following the leaf with your eye or keeping your attention fixed in front of you” (Dass, 148). Not only is a child going to be distracted by the leaf, he’s going to whoop! and jump in after it. “The Witness, however, is not passive, complacent, or indifferent. Indeed, while it’s not attached to a particular outcome” (Dass, 147), the Witness is able to live more fully in the moment because it is “focused essentially on what is” (Dass, 152). The child is not experiencing in this way. He has yet differentiated himself from the objects around him. In fact, the child is exclusively identified with those objects that surround him.


So must you be aware that you are happy in order to be so? Mill “thought” (past tense emphasized) that if you “ask yourself whether you are happy… you cease to be so” (Mill, 694). I do not believe that “ignorance truly is bliss” (Christy Krawietz), and “I do not want to be a child again” (Hannah Chesser). Youthful naiveté cannot be the peak of a human life. Life is not six years of “sugar icing and doughy goodness” (centerstagechicago.com/restaurants/ articles/southport-sweets.html) followed by seven decades so “unseasoned that they were like stale bread or card board” (newyork.citysearch.com/review/7169157). It is easy to grasp for what we do not have; it is much harder – yet much more fulfilling – to realize what we do have and to be grateful for it. Retaining childlike characteristics – yes, absolutely, that’s wonderful. But retaining childhood? We had better be careful of what we ask for.
As with most people, I do not recollect a specific instance that demarcates the edge between childhood and whatever comes after that. I remember feelings of being somehow different from people around me. Fifth grade seems to be a year when I began to realize that I felt differently about things than others did. I no longer agreed with all the beliefs of my friends. Differentiation can be a painful process. No longer absorbed in our surroundings, we strike out on our own and begin to carve our own paths. Like Bryan’s Lincoln log hours, my alone time allowed me to ponder and reflect. Becoming conscious of myself was not easy, but it is inevitable and is part of the great chain of development to true bliss. Many a romantic has claimed that youth is Heaven, and that quickly thereafter we are cast from the Garden. But bliss emanates from a state of great awareness, not of ignorance. Ken Wilber summarizes this by saying that Heaven is found with cosmic consciousness. Human beings progress through various stages of consciousness. As children we are not even self-conscious; we are unself-conscious and therefore in a state of unconscious Hell. But our awareness grows. We become conscious, aware of the Hell that surrounds us. So we move to conscious Hell, which is why so many people at this stage wish to return to the prior state of ignorance. If, however, we can continue to deepen our awareness, we come to a place of conscious Heaven (unconscious Heaven is not even possible – consciousness is a prerequisite for Heaven). With our pockets full of our past we shall travel, but it is forward we must go.


It is interesting to note a couple things that Cobb pushes in “The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood.” She emphasizes the value of retaining child-like values, especially those of middle age childhood. But she ends the article by insisting that we be wary of “a dangerous trend toward neurotic self-interest.” There is a funny intersection between these two points. The child that possesses sought after intelligences is also highly self-absorbed. Most children are not developed enough to take on the perspectives of others; they are narcissistic. So I think it is important to realize that while there are desirable qualities that children (from our point of view) happen to possess, being as a child is not to be striven for. There is a balance and it incorporates one, two, three, four… all the way to eighteen and beyond.