As a child I would dream of stuffed toys that I had lost – of the woollen dog, youngest member of a ‘family’ my grandmother knitted I left on an aeroplane and then of its older ‘brother’, thrown onto the schoolroof. Early memories: wanting the plastic lamb left in the playgroup to return with me. I wanted it to be mine – one of the first things I wanted to own.
A couple of years ago I saw a second hand book I should have bought: Winnicott’s Transitional Objects which concerned stuffed toys. There was one on the cover: a blank-eyed teddy bear with its stuffed arms splayed.
What is the relationship a child forms with these toys? It is as though a child needs a child to care for: as if the cared-for child needed to care in turn. Why? Is it because all a child knows is being cared for, a ritual to be enacted anew as children repeat adult behaviour? Or is it because there is a loss of childhood at the heart of childhood, as though the child knows the ultimate object of parental care has plunged inside her, as if to be a child is to be one of a series of children, one within the other, until there is the pure form of childhood, something inviolable called innocence, but which in truth is adamantine, as hard as a diamond?
A loss of childhood: you remember conversations when it was clear that you were the child being talked about – you were object of conversation, this was pleasant but in the end you shrugged your shoulders: you were the child, but were you? The phrase ‘the child’ seemed to miss you as it referred to you. You thought to yourself: I am not that child or any child. Yet you took care to hide toys in a small box as if this box in its secrecy – you showed it to no one – was the bearer of that child buried inside you. This is who I am, you thought and you thought it tenderly. It reminded you of those fairy stories where the heart of the ogre was buried in a box and sunk in a lake; the hero would have to retrieve that heart and drive a stake through it in order to kill his adversary. Still, the desire for secrecy, for a childish secret – the secret of childhood – came before anything.
As you grow older, these objects were necessary to you until what was painful was the fact they were unnecessary; their time was past, they no longer held the secret. There they are still, the toys of your childhood, in binbags in the loft of your parents’ house. Alongside the suitcase full of Lego. You remember those toys uneasily, wishing you had a young relative to play with them, to bring them to life as each toy bring stands in for the heart of childhood which fascinates even the child.
I remembered those toys this week as I moved the books I had collected over the years into my office – hundreds of books, fiction and non-fiction, which had moved with me from one city to another. Now I am secure (for the moment) in my job, I am aware that these books, too, have lost their importance as fetish-objects, as repositories of hope and faith.
A friend told me of the distress of his little son when he saw dozens of boxes of Buzz Lightyear in the toyshop. I feel the same kind of distress knowing my battered copy of Kafka’s Diaries, an old Penguin edition with a Paul Klee painting on the cover, is the same book as the copies of the Diaries in the library. My books are no longer singular; worse, they are inferior – my editon of Balthus’s paintings is inferior to the edition in the library; my book of Chagall cannot match the vast compeniums of his paintings on the shelves of the art collection.
Almost year ago, I started this blog with the aim of writing about the fiction which I had stopped reading years before. I thought: I will read them again. I moved all the books to do with my job to my office; here at my flat, I kept poetry and fiction.
Ah, those books! R.M. was impressed when she first saw them: a universe. A universe spread in bookshelves around my bed. But over the year, they’ve lost their aura; they’ve become books like other books. All this because I am secure, because I have a place in the world, because my office is that neutral repository into which they disappear as my early adulthood has disappeared. Who am I now? The one whose heart is buried neither in my toys nor my books, whose heart is dispersed across the libraries of the world.
Today? A disenchanted world. True, I am a reader again: I take Appelfeld to read in the gym; I read Josipovici in bed; Bernhard has become essential. But I am a safe reader, I read from a distance which has become safe.
Lars Iyer's Blog 