Babel Tower (80 page)

Laminations

My mother groan’d! my father wept.

Into the dangerous world I leapt:

Helpless, naked, piping loud:

Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

Struggling in my father’s hands,

Striving against my swadling bands,

Bound and weary I thought best

To sulk upon my mother’s breast.

William Blake,
Songs of Experience

Our work has been concerned with two things, or concepts, which have in recent history become both absorbing subjects of study, and
problems,
as perhaps they were not in the past. We refer to “the child” and “language.” Before the nineteenth century the child was either an infant or a small adult, wearing the same clothes as his parents, subject to the same legal penalties, including hanging by the neck, and controlled by the same moral codes. Now we take account of the length of time it takes a human creature to become an independent, responsible being, both physically and mentally. We take an intricate interest in the processes—including the
learning of language—by which such independence and responsibility are achieved.

Language, too, has become, not merely the glass through which we see “the world outside” but the instrument with which we shape and limit our purposes and our apprehensions. Our philosophy is a philosophy of language: Wittgenstein sees philosophy, indeed, as “language-games” which are “forms of life,” whereas the school of “Language, Truth and Logic” sees linguistic forms as productive of both facts and fictions about the nature of things. There is a growing belief in some schools of thought that “language is divorced from the world,” that it is perhaps simply a partial system which best describes only its own interrelations and structure. At the same time, there is a proper and increasing interest in language as an instrument of power, of subjection and manipulation, and a concomitant belief that even young children should be familiarised with and alerted to language’s manipulative potentialities. There is, in this context, the vexed question of the relation of such political uses of language to the ingrained British habit of defining “correct” speech and writing in terms partly of the speech habits and linguistic structures of a particular group or class, of identifying the “rules” of grammar with the rules, both helpful and restrictive, of prevailing interests and power-structures.

(Draft, subsequently heavily revised, of the Introduction to the Report of the Steerforth Committee of Enquiry on the Teaching of the English Language)

We are likely to withdraw our willingness to listen when we are told that infantile sexuality is polymorphously perverse. And Freud must mean that polymorphous perversity is the pattern of our deepest desires. How can this proposition be taken seriously?

If we divest ourselves of the prejudice surrounding the “perverse,” if we try to be objective and analyse what infantile sexuality is in itself, we must return again to the definition. Infantile sexuality is the pursuit of pleasure obtained through the activity of any and all organs of the human body. That this is Freud’s notion becomes abundantly clear if we examine the specific nature of the “perverse” components in infantile sexuality. They include the pleasure of touching, of seeing, of muscular activity, and even the passion for pain.

Freud and Blake are asserting that the ultimate essence of our being remains in our unconscious secretly faithful to the principle of pleasure, or, as Blake calls it, delight.

In man the dialectical unity between union and separateness, between interdependence and independence, between species and individual—in short, between life and death—is broken. The break occurs in infancy, and it is the consequence of the institution of the human family. The institution of the family means the prolonged maintenance of human children in a condition of helpless dependence. Parental care makes childhood a period of privileged freedom from the domination of the reality-principle, thus permitting and promoting the early blossoming, in an unreal atmosphere, of infantile sexuality and the pleasure-principle. Thus sheltered from reality by parental care, infantile sexuality—Eros or the life instinct—conceives the dream of narcissistic omnipotence in a world of love and pleasure.

But if the institution of the family gives the human infant a subjective experience of freedom unknown to any other species of animal, it does so by holding the human infant in a condition of objective dependence on parental care to a degree unknown to any other species of animal. Objective dependence on parental care creates in the child a passive, dependent need to be loved, which is just the opposite of his dream of narcissistic omnipotence. Thus the institution of the family shapes human desire in two contradictory directions, and it is the dialectic generated by the contradiction which produces what Freud calls the conflict of ambivalence.

But the contradiction in the human psyche established by the family, is the contradiction between the life and death instincts as previously defined.

(Norman O. Brown, “Death and Childhood,”
Life Against Death,
p. 113)

When they finally woke, it was already dark night. Gretel began to weep, and said, “How are we now to get out of the Forest?” Hansel, however, comforted her: “Wait a little while, till the moon has risen, and then we will find out our way.” And when the full moon was up, Hansel took his little sister by the hand and they followed the flinty pebbles, which glittered like newly minted groats, and showed them the way. They went on all night and at daybreak came to their father’s house.

Other echoes

Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?

Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,

Round the corner. Through the first gate,

Into our first world, shall we follow

The deception of the thrush? Into our first world …

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,

Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind

Cannot bear very much reality.

T. S. Eliot,
Four Quartets,
“Burnt Norton”

A Dream

A woman, waiting for a divorce hearing, finds herself on the banks of a quick little stream, very English, overhung by trees, with sun and shadow chasing each other along it, and a breeze, too, stirring the leaves and the water. She is walking in a meadow in long grasses, by this stream, wearing her engagement ring, which is a row of alternating blue and white stones, sapphires and moonstones. The clasps of the setting spring open and the stones of the ring fall and roll in the grass, blue and white stones rolling everywhere, tiny and glittering, more than the ring ever contained. She tries to gather them up: they slip like drops of water through her fingers and bounce, as tears bounce when wept with great force. The dreamer, who is not the woman now, “sees” the woman’s face with empty eyeholes like the empty sockets of the ring, and blue and white stony tears pouring down her cheeks.

In the river, hidden under the bank, are “water-babies” wrapped like caddis-grubs in shreds of old leaves and broken snail shells, glued into a housing; they peer out, they hang in the current which rushes and bubbles past them but does not detach them.

The tears and stones trickle into the river and melt like waterdrops on water.

The thought of our past years in me doth breed

Perpetual benediction: not indeed

For that which is most worthy to be blest—

Delight and liberty, the simple creed

Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,

With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:—

Not for these I raise

The song of thanks and praise;

But for those obstinate questionings

Of sense and outward things,

Fallings from us, vanishings;

Blank misgivings of a Creature

Moving about in worlds not realized,

High instincts before which our mortal Nature

Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised …

William Wordsworth,
“Ode: Intimations of Immortality”

From the moment of birth, when the stone-age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is the subject of violence, called love, as its mother and father have been and their parents before them … We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.

(R. D. Laing)

At least 83 people, mostly children, are dead, and 46 were still entombed early today on the hillside at Aberfan, near Merthyr Tydfil, after a rain-soaked coal-tip avalanched on Pantglas Infants’ School, a farm and a row of houses yesterday morning. Eighty-eight children are safe and 36 are in hospital.

Mr. S. O. Davies, Labour MP for Merthyr Tydfil, said that debris from a local colliery was still being tipped on the slag heap when the disaster happened …

Among those brought out alive and taken to hospital was the headmistress, Miss Ann Jennings, 64. The body of the deputy head-teacher, Mr. D. Beynon, was found, with five little children in his arms, all dead …

 … Because of early morning fog, 50 children from the neighbouring village of Mount Pleasant escaped the tragedy. Their school bus was delayed and they arrived at the school 10 minutes late, and just after the landslide had occurred. The mother of one of them, Mrs. Olwyn Morris, said, “If there had been no fog, my boy, Joel, 14, would have been in the school. He ran home crying and told me what had happened.”

The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews,

Not to be born is the best for man:

The second best is a formal order,

The dance’s pattern; dance while you can.

Dance, dance, for the figure is easy,

The tune is catching and will not stop;

Dance till the stars come down from the rafters;

Dance, dance, dance till you drop.

W. H. Auden, “Death’s Echo,” 1936