Exaggerated understatement renders the extraordinary ordinary and makes it funny. And makes it true. Humor can do what no long, detailed, and accurate catalog of arming a knight ever could.
Fiction delivers. Humor delivers accurately.
I mentioned earlier that I know about one other elaboration of the rite of the Bapendes tribe of the Congo. It is this: After the young man passes through the ritual of making a mask of the ghost of his childhood, that mask is cast aside and replaced by a small ivory duplicate, which is worn as a charm against misfortune and as a symbol of his manhood.
Do you carry a small charm of your childhood with you?
It might be a healthy thing to carry a replica mask of your childhood—to polish up every now and then and review the web of fantasies that once you laid down thread by thread.
Does Charlotte write in that web? Does Mary Poppins walk there? Did you ride an elephant with Kim? Do you have a Secret Garden in England? Did you find treasure? Did you float down the Mississippi River on a raft?
In Up From Jericho Tel, Tallulah has this to say:
… the camera got harsher and harsher. I have never thought it fair that by the time I could play any age at all—having been through them all—the only thing the camera picked up was an old lady. I’ll never forgive the camera for that.
The camera does lie, darlings. It never sees the girl within the woman, and that girl is always there. Remember that, whenever you see an old lady. There’s still part of her that is just twelve years old.
The camera lied about Tallulah because it was too literal, too accurate, and could not pick up the replica mask of the ghost of her childhood. The camera cannot scan for it, but we can. If we look, we can find it in a person or in his work. I think Picasso carried a replica mask of his childhood with him. I think Einstein did, too. The late Nobel Laureate Richard Feynmann did, and so did Nobel Laureate Barbara McClin-tock. Faulkner did; Hemingway did not. Mozart did; Wagner did not. Early J. D. Salinger did; late Salinger does not. Maurice Sendak: yes, always. Barbara Bush, yes; Nancy just said no.
Walk the beaches in South Florida, and every now and then, you will find a few people wearing masks of wrinkles and gauntlets of liver spots, but who have hidden—out of focus of any camera—the replica masks of the ghosts of their childhoods. They are the ones who can still be astonished, the ones who are still curious and who continue to feel outrage at things other than the high cost of living and the low monthly payments of Social Security. They are the adults with perspective, with humor, and—very often—with a book in their hands. They are the ones who know that they have not been able to wear all the masks they once read about, but they are glad that on the small replica of the mask they carry, there is evidence that—once upon a time—they tried them on.
I am not a poker player, and I cannot marry everyone I really want to know. I cannot take them all to Mardi Gras, either, but I can ask them what children’s books they’ve read. If you really want to know someone, ask him that. Ask him what children’s books he’s read.
Someone once said, “If I can write all the nation’s ballads, I don’t care who writes its laws.” In this fortunate career I have, I have often said to myself, “If I can write all the nation’s children’s books, I don’t care who writes its laws.”
One spring, not too many years ago, I spoke at a children’s literature festival in suburban Baltimore. The following day, I was to meet my son Paul at a restaurant in the Inner Harbor. It was early evening when I arrived; shops and offices were closing, and as I walked across the floor of the restaurant to see if I could spot Paul’s car in the parking lot, I heard a young man call my name. He introduced himself and told me that he had gone to hear my lecture the previous evening, and I was flattered to learn that he had driven in the rain from Baltimore to the far reaches of its suburbs to hear me. He asked me to join him for drink. As we sat down, he said, “I was in a bookstore some years ago. As I was looking over the shelves of children’s books, I saw Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinlej and Me, Elizabeth, and I said to the young woman standing next to me, whom I didn’t know at the time, ‘That is my all-time favorite children’s book.’ She said, ‘Mine, too.’” He smiled and added, “I married that young woman.”
I know I can’t write all the nation’s children’s books, but I have written some. And that will do. Writing some is a double privilege. Not only do I get to take out that small replica mask of my childhood and pull at the threads of its fantasies and weave them into new ones but also because I have written some, I know that for two young people in Baltimore, Maryland, there exists on the masks of their childhoods a little girl named Jennifer sitting in a tree, and maybe for others she sits there in the divine company of a little girl named Anne Frank, who is more visible in death than she was in life. And for others, maybe not for many—but for some—on the replica mask of the ghost of their childhoods, there is a small stain of another ghost named Tallulah who wants you to preserve the mask beneath your face. And wants you to look for it in others.
And so do I.
Here in the 90s
Since I wrote “The Mask Beneath the Face,” I have learned that one of the masks of the wolf has lost its fangs. In the interest of political correctness, “Little Red Riding Hood” has been rewritten. In the new Golden Books version Grandma does not get eaten by the wolf. (Too much violence. Too much sexual innuendo.) Instead, Grandma hides in a closet, finds some linens and a needle, whips up a ghost costume, comes out of the closet in her ghost costume, scares the wolf, and he runs away.
The anti-ageists will be pleased. The Womyn of Antioch may or may not be: grandma is a womyn hero all right, but she saves her life by sewing—woman’s traditional work. And the animal-rights lobby is bound to be very unhappy with the New Wolf. I expect them to demand that wolves write wolf books after all.
Here we are, all of us in the field of children’s literature, sitting on the edge of the information superhighway, our VCRs blinking, and the people out in left field are busy putting fig leaves on David.
Don’t the politically correct know that it is not nice to correct your elders? Don’t the politically correct understand that what the unrewritten classics have to offer is what the naked David has to offer: a record of how a civilization felt about itself at a given time. “Little Red Riding Hood,” as written by the Brothers Grimm—politically incorrect, sexy, and scary—is part of my past and my children’s past and in a few years I expect it to be part of my grandchildren’s past. It is as integral to the culture I want to pass down as how I make my brisket.
Books offer something more than content. They offer continuity of experience, and reading offers a unique process. Reading as a means of processing information is unique to human experience. I would put reading right up there with the opposable thumb, Michelangelo, and milk chocolate in the order of evolutionary milestones. Books establish and reinforce a perception of the world that has gone on for six thousand years. Programming our brains to print is necessary to establishing the continuity of our civilization. But the network of the information superhighway is threatening the program with cancellation.
If we are to save this evolutionary high road, we must start on time. We must start with the children, and therefore, the books we start with must be children’s books.
My joy and despair that this is so is the theme I addressed when I delivered the Anne Carroll Moore Memorial Lecture at the New York Public Library in November 1992.
9. The Big Bang, the Big Picture, and the Book Yor Hold in your Hand
Twenty-eight years ago, two scientists from the Bell Laboratories in New Jersey aimed a radio telescope at the constellation Cassiopeia in order to measure the radio waves coming from there. Instead of getting the clear signal they expected, they got a lot of static. Something was wrong. They checked their equipment and found a pair of pigeons nesting in the horn of the telescope. They removed the pigeons as well as a deposit of some “white dielectric material,”
but the static persisted.
Since they were taking their measurements from a spot close to New York City, they next wondered if the noise could possibly be coming from the stars of the Great White Way instead of the Milky Way. I hate to say this because I do love New York, but in the universal scheme of things, bright lights, big city cause little static. The buzz persisted.
The scientists found the buzz not only wherever but also whenever they pointed their telescope toward heaven. Throughout the course of an entire year, through one full revolution of the earth around the sun, through four seasons, night and day, day and night, this unexplained noise persisted.
Finally, from a combination of calculation, consultation, and a process of elimination, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson knew what they had.
The sounds they were hearing were the reverberations of the Big Bang, that cosmic explosion that occurred some 12 to 15 billion years ago . . , that same cosmic explosion that produced every atom on the earth, in the seas, and in the air we breathe. The same explosion that formed every atom in this room, its chairs, and its people. We all came into this world, not with a whimper, but with a bang—a big bang—one that was so loud that it is still being heard billions and billions of years later. Penzias’ and Wilson’s discovery means that all the sounds made by all the world since time began are out there. When we say “heaven knows,” it does.
Think of it. The sounds of the four-year-old Mozart playing the piano and the sounds of Shakespeare acting in his own plays are out there. His voice is out there. And so is Antony’s wooing Cleopatra and Moses’s receiving the Ten Commandments. And Charlton Heston and Mel Brooks doing the same.
It is all out there. Your baby’s first words and what your mother-in-law really said about your brisket, your hemline, and your housekeeping. It’s all there: spoken Sanskrit, Veni, Vidi, Vici, and “I am not a crook.” And so are the sounds of those eighteen and a half minutes of lost tape, and if we had a radio telescope properly aimed and sensitive enough, we could hear it all.
Penzias and Wilson discovered that there is no void in the Great Void, and for their discovery they received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1978.
Twenty-nine years before that, Jorge Luis Borges wrote a story about a man who has an instrument—not to hear everything but to see everything. He called his story “El Aleph.”
Borges himself is a character in his story.
He tells of meeting another writer by the name of Daneri who is writing a poem called “The Earth” in which he is setting to verse nothing less than “the entire face of the planet.” Borges makes Daneri’s work sound like an interleaving of Harlot’s Ghost with the World Almanac, written in the style of James Joyce—long, long-winded, and inconclusive.
One day Borges gets a call from Daneri, who is very, very upset because his house is about to be demolished. He tells Borges that without his house he cannot possibly finish his epic poem, that very work in which he is setting to verse “the entire face of the planet.” Daneri confides that in his house, in the cellar of his house, under the stairs of the cellar of his house, is the Aleph.
“The Aleph?” Borges asks.
Daneri says, “Yes, [it is] the only place on earth where all places are—seen from every angle, each standing clear, without any confusion or blending.”
Borges is skeptical but goes down into the man’s basement to have a look. As instructed by Daneri, he positions himself under the cellar stairs, counts off nineteen steps, looks up, and sees the Aleph. “I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance … The Aleph’s diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing … was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle …”
I can quote only a small part of the remarkable passage in which Borges tells what he sees as he looks into the Aleph.
I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; ... I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast ... I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet... I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death. I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon—the unimaginable universe.
Borges leaves Daneri’s house, rattled by his experience, “afraid [he] would never again be free of all [he] had seen.”
The house is demolished, and the Aleph is destroyed. Months later, excerpts of Daneri’s poem—not the “entire face of the planet”—are edited and published, and Daneri “no longer cluttered by the Aleph,” wins a prize.
Just as it was paralyzing for Daneri to try to communicate all that he saw, it would be paralyzing to try to communicate all that we hear. Imagine the terrible burden of being able to both see it all and hear it all.
In “Renascence” Edna St. Vincent Millay has this to say about being omniscient:
For my omniscience paid I toll
In infinite remorse of soul.
All sin was of my sinning, all
Atoning mine, and mine the gall
Of all regret. Mine was the weight
Of every brooded wrong …
Ah, awful weight! Infinity
Pressed down upon the finite Me!
In a word, if our eyes could see it all and our ears could hear it all, it would be godawful.
We would scream: Give me something, give me an instrument so that I can select what I see and what I hear. And give me some tools so that I can finely tune and delicately focus it.
The bad news is that there is something that is threatening us all with omniscience. It is already making us dizzy and we are about to lose consciousness.
The good news is that each of us already has an instrument that is wired and properly aimed to let us select, and we already have tools with which to finely tune it. The instrument we have is the human brain. It comes correctly wired, and the tools with which we can finely tune it are one, our need to connect, and two, our gift to learn, and three, children’s books.
You’re probably thinking: what a stretch! You’re probably thinking: what chutzpah. But I want to tell you, it sounds good to me. And, Dr. Seuss and Lewis Carroll, wherever you are, I know it is sounding good to you.
I am convinced that now, in this, the tag end of the twentieth century, not only do children need children’s books to fine-tune their brains, but our civilization needs them if we are not going to unplug ourselves from our collective past.
Because we are human we have a long childhood, and one of the jobs of that childhood is to sculpt our brains. We have years—about twelve of them—to draw outlines of the shape we want our sculpted brain to take. Some of the parts must be sculpted at critical times. One cannot, after all, carve out toes unless he knows where the foot will go. We need tools to do some of the fine work. The tools are our childhood experiences. And I’m convinced that one of those experiences must be children’s books. And they must be experienced within the early years of our long childhood.
And that is what I want to talk about today: brains and books. Connections within, connections without, connections between.
Let me first talk about our brains as a personal radio telescope. Let me talk first about its wonderful built-in wiring for tuning out the static of our civilization in order to better tune in its symphony.
Let me tell you about Meg.
Meg is my granddaughter who is exactly ten months old today. She wakens in the morning to sounds of her mother and father pounding on the stairs, the rush of water from morning showers and the toilet flushing. She hears her
dog Fidget bark. She hears dishes rattling. On her way to day care, she hears the car motor, the whistle of the wind, and the songs of birds. But what does Meg say, now that she is beginning to talk. She says mama and dada. She does not make the sound of the car motor or birds chirping. She does not imitate Fidget barking. She says dada or mama. Not because mama comes from Mother Nature but because it comes from her mother and is in her nature. Meg’s mother and father help her tease mama out of the myriad of sounds that it is in her nature to hear. The sounds—all of them—are in her head. She is programmed to hear rattles, squeaks, barks, and chirps, but when she chooses to speak she selects those sounds that are uniquely human, those sounds that are the beginnings of language.
Think how wonderful that is. I am full of wonder at it. How does Meg know how to tease out of the cacophony of sounds surrounding her, the exact syllables that connect? She knows because, besides being an adorable baby, she is an adorable human baby. Her radio telescope is hardwired as a human—not a puppy, not a refrigerator—and when she sends out her first signals, she does so in syllables, not static. She chooses language. Because language connects her not only to her family but also to the family of man.
Meg may be hardwired to hear it all, but she puts some of those sound bites in storage.
She has to.
Just as Daneri’s epic poem, setting to verse “the entire face of the planet,” was unreadable until someone had edited it, Meg has to edit out some sounds in order to be better understood. As she acquires greater skill at repeating sounds that make syllables, as she continues to tune her personal radio telescope, she will tune out some frequencies altogether. Since Meg’s mother, father, and sister Anna plus two sets of grandparents will communicate with her in English, reception on the English-speaking channels will become clearer than any others. As a matter of fact, Meg will begin to tune out other languages and by the time she is an adolescent, she will shut down those foreign networks. She will even pull the plug on some of them. Meg will so effectively tune out the sounds of the four tones of spoken Chinese and so effectively tune out the sounds of French vowels that by the time she is an adolescent she will not only not be able to say them well, she will not hear them clearly. The wires will be left dangling, unconnected to the section of her brain that hears them.