Almost ten months on, the hodge-podge of incomplete thoughts that make up the post “Baby Love #1″ seem quite distant to me. I remember writing that post. It was an interesting experience because I remember feeling clear headed and like I was going to solve all the problems of the world and produce an amazingly coherent theory about why mothers become obsessed with babies. But, when it came down to it, I couldn’t finish the post. I couldn’t finish the post, I guess, because I wasn’t convinced of the theory and also my using Rilke’s poem as a way of seeing the world was wrong. There was something missing in the poem and missing in my view of the situation.
The problem, I think, was that I thought Rilke was right. I believed that idea about love and creaturely openness, expressed in the Eighth Elegy, was what formed the basis of my reflection on those mothers’ interaction and obsession with their babies. But Rilke’s poem does not serve as a theory for how the world works, it is just one view. In fact, while I love the poem, I think in some ways Rilke expresses a fundamentally pessamistic idea: love makes you feel like you can do anything. But, he argues in the poem, the feeling of love is an illusion, love cannot truly open you up to the world, it makes you feel open but you are kidding yourself. You’re blinded by your lover and really you are caught in a narcissistic feedback loop with your lover, looking at the reflection of yourself eyes in his. Likewise babies only have this openness when they are tiny, before they have language; they are born open and the process of growing, aquiring language and social skills makes them close off. In other words experience this open wonderousness until their mother or father stops them from doing something in order for them to become social.
Rilke says:”A child, at times, may lose
himself within the stillness
of it, until rudely ripped away.”
I read this as, the child may lose himself in the wonder of the open, a pure imaginative space beyond politics and beyond laws but it is rudely ripped awhen a mother or father stops the child from doing whatever it is he is doing and, worst case scenario, shames him for doing it; “it” being something we may recognise as socially unacceptable like playing with himself, wearing a ballet skirt, wantonly breaking toys or pouring chocolate sauce all over the chesterfield.
But this does not take into account the experience of the mother or father marvelling at the child’s deviance and assumes the mother or father will always shut down the dream life of the child in an attempt to make them properly social. And, what’s more, that the shutting down of the dreamlife will always completely succeed and nothing of that daydream or open deviance will survive the force of the law of the father or mother. But the point is, I guess, that the child might not obey them. They might go and grow in all kinds of crazy directions, and they could remain open. Just as lovers may not necessarily just enjoy how they look in their lovers eyes and use that same gaze upon the wider world. Its all a matter of what we do with it and how much we are willing to risk. Getting completely and entirely lost in the lover’s eyes or clamping down on a child with an authority so airtight they can do nothing but grow up in the exact same way as the parent are only two of a range of possibilities here.
I worked at a chalk art festival in Parramatta last october. We had a large wooden snake, a bucket of chalk, a bucket of water and a large sponge on the street, specifically for kids to come draw all over. One kid, three or so, kept going to the bucket to get the sponge and his father kept stopping him. The kid kept going to the bucket and the father kept stopping him. Other kids would pick up the sponge and wash down their section and carry on, and this kid would go to the bucket and his father would stop him. On about the fifth attempt the father said to this kid firmly, all of three, ‘Do not touch the sponge. We all need rules and boundaries in this world and this is one of them. This is your boundary and you cannot use this sponge.’ I dreaded to think what would happen to the little boy if he even cast his eyes on a pink tutu. I also thought that in some instances yes, the experience of childhood wonder is broken by the parent but, even if the little kid didn’t get his hands on that sponge, he could in years to come. And, most parents didn’t stop their kids from picking up the sponge, getting completely covered in festy chalky water and making a mess everywhere.
What’s more, the capacity to marvel at how kids both break rules and love each other was what those mothers were captivated by (see previous post); they were captivated by how they had told the kids not to do something and then they had promptly done it anyway and also they marvelled at how they also had not explicitly told the kids to be kind to each other and love each other, and they were kind and loving anyway.
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So, what am I saying? Well, rather than the mother’s marvelling striking me as frustrated, stifled and myopic, I now see it more as something quite amazingly open itself: the gazes of the child, mother and lover very similar in this respect. The trick is, I guess, to get it off those discrete objects and to spread it wider and further and to not feel pressured to shutdown by those whose gaze is not as open as your own. The trick is, basically, not to be like the mother in Black Swan and instead to remember the opennness you felt as child, or the joy you feel when a child remembers to break the rules or the pleasure you divine from looking at a lover, and see those feelings as the foundations of how we can look out at the world as a whole. And, what’s more, the very fact that Rilke became a poet is proof that such a gaze is possible.
[Correction: Thanks to CMJ for proofing my posts! I wrote baby, lover and mother are verisimilar in this respect. But I meant "very similar"!)
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
