Category: Childhood

As my friends know and tell me, I have a relationship to authority that is one of masochism: don’t I love it, the sense of having done something wrong, whatever it is, without knowing it, and then being corrected – told off – and brought back into the fold?

A child’s book – Charmed Life – whose character, the passive Cat (like so many of Diana Wynne Jones’ protagonists) sets himself on fire by striking a match from the book in which his lives are kept (he doesn’t know it yet – and like, again, those others of Jones’s protagonist – but he has great gifts, in his case nine lives and a powerful capacity for magic); sets himself on fire and then in comes the Enchanter, the owner of the castle where the orphaned Cat has found himself and lifts him into the bath – sweet smell of burning – and then rolls him in a carpet to be put out.

Ah, delicious memory – to be bathed thus, to be rolled thus, and after, like Cat to bathe in the attention of one who has hardly seemed to see him – and then to be recognised eventually as another Enchanter – as an heir to the castle and to a government position in this alternate world where magic is everywhere and technology far behind that of our world!

I remember the ghostly flames with which Cat seemed to burn and then understanding – was it then or later – that the nickname, Cat (his real name, Eric) was because, as an Enchanter, he had nine lives, and those left to him placed in that matchbook a match from which he had unfortunately struck.

Yes, to have sinned – though it was not your fault, and then punished, and then attended to, having sweetly burned, given sweet tea in bed: to be weak and tired from a temporary, involuntary transgression that let for the first time, the sense of the Law spring up around you – there are limits, prohibitions, against which you were brought – what reassurance to know the presence of the Law, even in its inscrutability. The Enchanter, the law’s agent, the one who knows, attending to – you: who have you become?

I am reminded, also, of another book, long given away, so I can’t check it – Denton Welch‘s A Voice Through A Cloud, the last of his three novels, unfinished at the time of his very early death, and recounting, in a manner that is more or less true, the story of his accident – a car ran into his bike – complications from which would stop him completing this novel.

Denton half falls in love with his doctor, that’s what I remember. And doesn’t he test the limits of his doctor’s care – doesn’t he transgress a little to enjoy all the more being brought back within the hospital Law? Poor dying Denton, who describes – he is a consummate food evoker – placing peppermints on his chest and watching them rise and fall with his breathing, and isn’t there a very beautiful passage about a cat – I used to know it by heart, but it is twelve years ago at least when I last read it – beautiful because the cat plays its games in his memory, from a time before the accident that is killing him.

Didn’t I have the fantasy as a child of being very ill, confined in some way – when was it I read of iron lungs? in the Guiness Book of Records 1977? – but then I also remember seeing in some programme or another a little girl falling ill and then being confined, but what old black and white film was that? and then some television series about an ill child and helicopter-carried doctors: all that, the medical world, the promise of being ill and then made better, the technical apparatus enticed me then because it seemed another embodiment of that wrong you would commit without knowing it was wrong, but that also elected you to the position of one who would deserve special attention.

Why that love of swooning (Barthelme’s book on King Arthur’s court has all the knights swooning), of illness? – and perhaps the same love now of a kind of falling – or is it the falling that engenders love (recalling the gaze of the boss in Sinthome’s reading of The Secretary)? – of that sweet tiredness that give me the excuse of writing only what asks me to dream along with it, carrying me once again to the limits of the law – this time to what cannot be said, and consoling me by allowing these words I write to come back to me on the blog, pretty and distant and mine.

But then I also admit I enjoy being told off for what I write here and isn’t that another way of being gathered up and loved by the law, like the Little Match Girl in the illustrated book of Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tales I had as a child, who is met by her grandmother in heaven? Gathered up – just as a little girl when I was young, might when she cried in class be sat on the lap of a teacher and cuddled?

Because to be told off is at least not to be neglected. Ambiguous desire, because I am in love, too with that word, ‘neglect’, and isn’t it also that I want that another part of me writes, that part half-writing with me now, in relation to whom I am the master, I am the punisher although I feel tender towards him who loses himself in that wandering that sets him too far from the work I have to accomplish in the world?

How will that review get written, I ask him as I shake him – but don’t I love him, too?; isn’t he the one for whom I feel all tenderness and who goes out from that always wounded place I remember as belonging to my childhood?

It is a child that writes, or half-writes distractedly alongside me. Distracted because his gaze is caught by the field and the trees on the other side of the field, and that space beyond the school that is owned by he knows not whom the path through which he will not discover until when one day on a school walk he sees his own school, his classroom small and far away.

I remember it still, that view. I dream of it. What does it see in me? What gaze did it send towards me? – and by what gaze am I still watched? I indulge him, this child who almost writes. Sometimes I promise myself to use the words cuddle and pretty – a child’s words. And the word toy, for which, as a child I already felt a great tenderness.

Didn’t I know that to the heart of childhood, to those smallest of children who play side by side without mixing and in whom, Deleuze said, one only sees the play of a life, there belonged only those toys? I was perpetually too old for the toys with which I wanted to play. And easy to tears I when told off I also loved those tears and to cry. Marvellous humiliation, and in front of the whole class.

It became annoying only when to be told off was not enough and the teacher had another child take me to the most junior class in the infants and made me sit with the smallest children. What a baby! But didn’t I know I was approaching the heart of what was already lost? – that it was childhood that was drawing me towards it, and that I was living what could not return for the too-old child I was?

That was the perfection of tears, as they gathered me then to the edge of what I was losing. And the perfection of the view that saw me from the field on the brow of the hill beyond the school that always let my tears dry up.

Seeing a friend of mine enthuse his poor son to take karate lessons and then when he cried in front of the other boys and their fathers (it was all fathers) not to take him from the hall of crash mats somewhere private, I thought: he is breeding a masochist.

No surprise years later when the boy denounced his father, and, as I hear, was taken away from his custody. Unfair – cruel – and I think unjust though I know little of the particularities of the case – and the boy is with his mother now, suffused by her tenderness, exalted by her mercy.

Poor Denton, poor Cat and that poor lad, then, though what is he becoming now? Remember what happened when Francis Bacon’s father had him whipped by stableboys? – wasn’t it lads like stableboys who Bacon would henceforward seek out to whip him to his father’s shock? And what is that line by Prince from Come where he sings, don’t abuse children or they’ll turn out like me?’

What strangenesses can be hatched in the minds of the young. Happily or unhappily, conventional relationships are enough for me – I am rather passive, I let things happen, but they eventually harden into an ordinary heterosexualism, into relationships in which nothing is unusual – but then I wander what writing has unleashed, or rather that fallen writing written here. Whose law am I breaking? Whose punishment do I seek?

To be sick, to be made better: a child’s game. A game I might have played with my soft toys as a child, making my voice higher than it was, and seeking by way of those ‘transitional objects’ (Winnicott) passage upstream to what had already shut me from the heart of childhood.

Time was already carrying me along, and those toys were binbagged and put into the lost where they wait still, keeping place for what has no place – indices of what retreats as childhood in childhood. I think I never made the transition, and something of me is as though snagged back there.

Is it the same for all of us? From what do we love, or cuddle? Who is it that looks for the pretty? Didn’t I love pretty girls as a child? And pretty things? And pretty writing? I think these are dull times, and consensual reality is such that you can play with nothing, and relationships are part of the great clampdown.

Wasn’t there a short period in my life when other lives were lived as possible? Ah, that was back in Manchester. And don’t I like now my zipped up fleece and being just like anyone else? Like anyone else – but excessively so, and this ‘too much’ becomes a metonym, I’m sure, for something else.

How strangely desire leads us. I am learning more from the notes I take from Sinthome’s instructive posts on psychoanalysis, which I paste into Word and annotate.

Vaguely and stupidly I dream of a time, a place where fantasies might be lived in body and soul. Like the vanguardist, I would want what is found by way of writing to be discovered in all parts of life. To live what is written. To complete what is begun here, and in the sphere of life.

But don’t I also love the Law that keeps the spheres separate? Don’t I love those arbiters who tell me that I’ve sinned and why, that I might correct my ways. I am a penitent. But then, like an attention-seeking cat, I begin again.

One night, at the end of my first year at university I remember lighting tissues and throwing them out of my first floor window. It was my tribute to the festivities around me. I think I was very bored. And you came over and said, ‘you want attention’ like a father to a son. And didn’t you tell me what to do to overcome my boredom? Didn’t you make all kinds of practical suggestions?

I was pleased to be acknowledged, and happy to be so addressed, and with such care. But I also knew I was turned away from you and from myself, that someone in me had turned his head and dreamed inside me.

Boredom – was that the word? I think I was close to where the Law sent great shafts of light into the sky. At its edge. I think I thought, I am alone. I wrote something in a journal about the head of all waters – a phrase that when I use it I always fear will bring me bad luck.

Do you see – I’ve cursed myself now, and this will be a bad post, I will have confided too much and at too great a length and should lead it home now, like a horse by its nose. Home: you have been out, and now it’s time to come home; the Law opens to enclose you. The Law welcomes you back.

Childhood fantasies. Novels of Diana Wynne Jones, where the gifted one never knows he is such until the end of the book, when it is revealed that his ordinariness hid his extraordinariness, and the others turn to him, modest one, in wonder. But my fantasy was that what was revealed thereby was only the absolutely ordinary, the more ordinary than ordinary, and it would be seen, in the end, that I was just like anyone else, but only there where (second fantasy) I was dying, or at least close to death.

How nice to be ill, and being drawn sweetly towards death. Who told me that dying of hypothermia was like falling asleep? To fall asleep into death, and that point to be the most ordinary, and anyone at all. Do you see, they would say, around my bed, or, better still, elsewhere, even far away, living their own lives – do you see, he was just like anyone else. Anyone, no one: what was the name of that girl who scratched my arm, just to see how I would react? But I let my arm lie there, and thought: this is how I will die, just lying there.

And a stronger memory: letting a boy, weaker than I, wrestle me to the ground. I was stronger, but I was weaker too: by what weakness did I let myself be brought down like a wild animal? I kept quiet; I said nothing. I liked his meanness, and the meanness of his brother; I thought: here it is, here at last, and now, before their meanness, I am anyone at all.

Last Toy

Why did I give you a toy like the last toy of mine, we who were about to leave school? Why that gift, which was the double of the toy I carried in my pocket? As though I would give you an icon for what you were losing – the last of your childhood – or was it that I would give you your childhood again, that it was innocence I would give, but a second innocence, one which would restore innocence to itself?

Then the gift was one of childhood. Or was it that I gave what retreats as childhood in childhood – the secret which is known only in its withdrawal?

Too Young For You

As a child, I smarted at the idea that some toys were too young for me, even as my toys gradually disappeared to the loft, uplayed with. Even as the stuffed toys sat in plastic bags alongside the suitcase of lego in the loft of my parents’ house.

Too young for you – I did not like the phrase, although I never really heard it, because it already pointed to what was already lost by childhood and lost by my own childhood. Toys in the loft: keepers of the heart of childhood – the heart buried outside you like those of ogres in fairy tales. The child is getting older – toys, one by one, disappear to jumble sales and to the loft. But they are in the loft nonetheless, icons of loss, waiting – but for what?

Transitional Objects

The open arms of a teddy bear. The family of woollen sausage dogs my grandmother knitted. The soft-toy puppies made by Andrex. And the holy of holies: that box in which I kept Christmas cracker gifts. Worthless items, but sacred for that worthlessness. A pink plastic angel fish in a finger puppet inside a box: the holy of holies. Worthless, and up there beside the old cot, mine and then my sister’s, and the framed pictures of a stork flying through the blue night with a swaddled baby suspended from its beak.

Winnicott calls them transitional objects, these toys. Transitional objects: as if one should pass from one to another, and then away from childhood altogether. But it is us who are in transit, and the toys which keep place what is already lost.

Double Loss

As I grew older, I knew what was lost by age. But did I know, too, the irredeemable loss at the heart of childhood? Did I know the secret that lay buried in childhood?

Loss redoubled: what happened when they were accidentally lost, the toys? The youngest of the family of sausage dogs lost on a plane, his older brother lost on the roof. Then the bean bag dog whose felt eyebrows were ripped off by a friend of my sister (my outrage, my mourning). Now a part of my childhood was scattered and unprotected. Childhood evacuated, living outside of itself, outside the loft, which is the archive of childhood. Loss must not be lost, but kept.

Toy, Witness

A parent will watch as toys go unplayed with. And the child? Does the child know what has been abandoned when a toy is abandoned? Does the child know the childhood never lived, but concentrates itself in the absolute past?

Childhood mourns because it is too late for childhood. Innocence is too late for itself; that’s why it mourns. And is that why I gave you the toy? Is that why I gave what cannot be given: the gift that would give innocence back to itself? I thought: last toy, guard my friend and guard me. Toy, witness, might it be that our childhood has yet to happen?

Rereading Benjamin’s A Berlin Childhood Around 1900, I remembered what Deleuze insisted when questioned about his own childhood : ‘what’s interesting is to find the emotion of a child, not the child that one once was, but also the sense of being a child, any child whatsoever ("un enfant quelconque")’. Any child whatsoever: Deleuze insists on the formulation "I was a child’, noting ‘the indefinite article has an extreme richness’.

Borges quoted by Steve at In Writing: Everyone is defined forever in a single instant of their lives, a moment in which a man encounters his self for always. To encounter oneself – but what does one encounter? What would it mean to encounter oneself? Is it a question of a particular event, a particular revelation? Of a sign which would contain in minature the secret of a whole life? Or is it something different from a sign – an indication, a testimony of one, in me, who comes forward in the encounter. The one to whom the unknown opens before I grasp the unknown, to whom the event occurs before I can narrate that event. The one who maintains the unknowability of the unknown, who witnesses what cannot be synthesised in the articulation of identity. Who indicates the play of the self in a larger movement, in the great dance of folding and unfolding.

Encounter: Deleuze’s child, a child, is the one who comes forward to take your place (the one who reveals there was never a place to take …) A child belongs to the streaming from which the self coalesces and into which it disappears. Not, here, at the beginning and the end of a life, but ceaselessly, at every moment. Always it is a matter of living with the outside, of bending it in, making a place from which one lives (a place constantly displacing itself, which is displaced with respect to itself). All the while knowing that to enfold oneself is always to resist an unfolding – to stand against the vacancy which threatens to invade the place from which you strive to begin and rebegin. Invasion – but what invades? Perhaps a child is a way of naming what you become when you are claimed from without – when you are enfolded by what takes your place, revealing your place was taken.

A child: the one who, in me, outside of me, is undone in my place. A child – the one who relates in me not to what is known, narratable, but what is unknown. A Bracknell Childhood around 1977: is it a question of asking a child to write my autobiography? But a child is not the one who remembers; the child is forgetting itself …

Deleuze: A writer does not appeal directly to his private life […] does not dig through family archives, but rather remains a child of the world.

Let a child write – how? But it has already happened insofar in a kind of desire which opens across writing. Writing, no longer your writing, writes in your place even as you write. Writing with you, within you, which is also to say outside you, a child writes.

Self-analysis? Why not? Write and see where the words lead. Besides this is a relief from the book, from writing the new book.

Place your soft toys in a circle on the front lawn. How are old you? Too old for such toys, perhaps. Is that why you place them in a circle in the front garden for other children to see and perhaps steal? As if exposing them to this risk was already to expose your own youth (but you are still young: seven or eight, perhaps) to the same risk. But youth, here, is younger still – there are always children younger than you and there is always a child within the child. But what does this mean?

Texts for Nothing: ‘I held myself in my own arms’. I held myself. No: I held my childhood. And had to risk my childhood by laying it around me like a magic charm. R.M. tells me that one diagnosis for abuse is for an observed child to play with toys alone in a room. The child is watched for the actions it would repeat with those toys. What horror!

David Lynch often speaks of his happy childhood. Is this why, surrounded as it were with his circle of toys he can write of such horror? Kant’s sublime, Aristotle’s tragedy requires the spectator steps back from the spectacle. So too if the inner child, the farthest, childish core needs to have grown up safe if it is to enjoy the thrill of wagering, if only in the imagination, that same safety.

M. tells me of a book he has read on the topic of children. ‘They need such care’, he says, ‘it’s frightening’. But in caring for a child you are still caring for one you cared for when you were a child – the one you risked in placing the toys around you in a circle. In a circle – exposed to other children, risking thereby the one within you whose secret you kept. Within you? Not unless what is inside could also be outside. Not unless it was the outside enfolded, the alveoli of the lung, the glove turned inside out (see the new category: A Child) …

Another post about writing? As you would say to a child to shame that child: ‘you are letting everyone down’ so I would say to myself.

This instead. Conversation with W. He says: ‘you have a fascination for genius’. What he suspects is a nostalgia for genius. As if someone should have said to me as was said by D.H. Lawrence when he submitted his first novel: ‘it’s not very good, but you have genius’. And then there is Mailer’s comment on the back of Naked Lunch: ‘Burroughs is the only American writer who is possessed by genius’.

Genius: as if, knowing it, you would thereby prepare yourself to write a work of genius. Is Neo, in the Matrix, the One? Or is he merely told he is the One to give him courage enough to become the One?

How do you brace yourself against the world? By listening to a voice within you saying: ‘you are a genius’? Now Leclair: we have to murder each day that wonderful child within us – the one who is the incarnation of the hopes of our parents for their own childhood, the hopes, that is, which were directed towards you, the child, the one who could be called ‘his majesty the Baby’ (Freud).

Youth: you are the one in whom hopes are placed, the one who will carry through a detached kind of ambition. The parent says: ‘I want you to be happy’, or: ‘I want you to do well’. I remember the performing children of our friends: one could do the Rubik’s cube, the other the twelve times table. They have children of their own: well balanced children who want for no attention, who are driven here and there and never experience that benign neglect that led some of us, as children, to wander across the great fields from which the housing estates and golf courses would spring as though it were our kingdom.

Benign neglect – W.’s phrase. Leave children to experience the infinition of time (Levinas’s word): the turning over of those hours in which nothing in particular occurs. There are the newts and leeches in the lake, the great pine tree, the endless estates to cycle around. Time when without parental supervision, without being driven from here to there, the child wanders with other children in the vast outdoors.

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.

Falling everywhere and unnoticed, falling in every part of the world, yet falling invisibly: it is ideology that falls and covers our mouths and our ears and our eyes.

Do you remember the man who taught his asshole to talk?, Burroughs asks. The asshole talked, but this man’s mouth was covered by a fine film. From now on, the asshole spoke and not the man. But what does he say? What do you hear when you hear the voice of ideology in your own voice? You’ll hear a voice that is pleased with itself. That speaks out of a man for whom the world as it is is the only world there can be; it is natural, eternal, this is it, now and forever.

Capitalism is your milieu; it gave you your chance, you took it; you’re a success. And your success is natural, you say to yourself; you deserve what is yours. A success that would have rewarded others, had they worked hard enough, had they worked on themselves and let capital work through them.

What interrupts this voice? What stops it from speaking? Not boredom: you haven’t the time to get bored. Not melancholy: you have everything you want; the future is yours: a great wagon of a car, a detached house in the countryside, private health care and your children at public schools.

Then what? What remains? The past? Remember the happy moment when capital turned its benign face to you and said: you; I want you. And, being called, you were as though called into being: you were put on the road to where you are; you were able to find yourself. You said: here I am, to the call when it called. You knew you were indebted to this voice, to the voice of your boss, of your workmates.

You found yourself, but what did you find? And what did you lost by finding it? Yourself? No, not that. But the one you were before you were called: you lost him. The non-capitalist, the one who had not been hailed and gathered together. You lost the one you can only regard as lost: the child: youth? Is this is what is unbearable about your own children? That demands you turn them into little capitalists as quickly as possible?

Youth: not your youth – not the youth of anyone. A child: the one who is not yet caught, whom capital has not yet seen. The one has not been hailed. A child: still there in you, capitalist, still alive in you: a child who is not anything at all. A child who returns from the depths of your past. Remember it: but what can you remember? A child: a kind of hole in memory. The forgotten one. The one who is forgotten in you. And the one who forgets, who draws you close when you forget to remember to forget. When ideology, for a moment, does not claim you. And you live from a future you bear in the past: in a future that is not the future of capital.