Читать книгу An Archaeology of Yearning - Bruce Mills - Страница 14
ОглавлениеSince just after midnight, Jacob has been awake. He is nine. He wants Ludwig Bemelmans’ Madeline to come out of the television. He extends his arm, makes straining noises, and acts as if he is reaching toward and into the TV downstairs. Hanging from a string taped to the slanting wall above our heads waves a drawing of Madeline. She is in a cloud. It is the kind of cloud that often leads from the mouths of comic strip characters, and I wonder if Jacob means for us to know that Madeline is in his dreams. I remind Jacob that Madeline is pretend, a storybook character. His body tightens at the news.
“Not pretend!” he says. “Reach. Reach. Not say pretend.”
Tonight, Jacob is fighting something. After midnight, half-asleep, he kicked off the blankets and then pounded his feet against the wall and then against me.
For a short time, I try to relax. I know that it is likely Jacob will be awake all night or fall asleep shortly before dawn. Around the room, the signs of his demands begin to break out of the shadows: the red plaid sheet hanging from the curtain rods to keep out the morning light, the run of thin rope from bookshelves to ends of curtain rods that used to hold up sheets for a tent, two Madeline video boxes, scattered drawings of Madeline and Pepito, a Pooh helium balloon that dances against the ceiling when the heater kicks in. Beside me, Jacob asks repeatedly for Madeline. I stop answering, and he tosses his water cup across the room, tears off the bedding, and then lunges at me, pinching and scratching at my forearms. When he starts to throw books toward the window, I move in to hold him, wrapping my arms around his. Our feet shuffle in an awkward dance before we collapse to the floor. The room grows close with the smell of sweat and anger; my limbs ache with hopelessness.
Not every night is such a struggle. Jacob frequently sleeps from nine to six without interruption. Awake, he often lies wide-eyed but quiet, occasionally laughing or running through his own version of a video script or leaning toward me and uttering “hug.” In time, he allows me to fall in and out of sleep. In the slumber broken occasionally by his sudden laughs and phrasings, I begin to imagine stories that I might tell. Beyond the red sheet and window blind, I think, moonlight washes the south side of the house. Toward the east, past the thick branches of an oak and the sullen stillness of its leaves, the stars begin to congregate. In this tale, I imagine the precarious dots of light mapping the constellation of our limbs, as if creating an enchanted blessing to redeem the day. On some nights, caught up in the promise of an image or combination of words as I edge toward sleep, I reach toward the floor to find something that might serve as a morning sign, something to help me remember where my story left off. I take whatever is within reach—a book or scrap of paper—and put it beneath my pillow or slide it toward an uncluttered space between bed and door. I am Hansel in the forest, hoping to leave just enough stones or bread crumbs to find the way back. More truthfully, Jacob is the forsaken child, and I am the father after his return. I yearn for the treasure taken after the witch’s burning, the pearls that drive away hunger, the forgiveness of open hands and pockets emptied out. I want forgetfulness, no word of my anger, no hint of abandonment. My wants are abundant, thick as the needles beneath rows of pine.
Here is one memory stone near the open door. When I was younger, I used to tell Grimms’ stories to my brother. He was nearly four, I was thirteen, and we both shared the same bedroom. In large families, it is rare that a child sleeps in a room or bed alone. For all of their years prior to high school, my sisters, three years apart, slept in the same bed. Until I was a sophomore (and my two older brothers had moved away), we rotated three single beds in a variety of arrangements. In the first home that I can remember, we all slept in the narrow second-floor room of our small cape cod. After we moved, I was for a short time in the same room as my second oldest brother. When my first of two younger brothers came along ten years later, I soon became the older sibling sharing a room and occasional stories with the younger.
When I began the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel from memory, I did not yet understand that bedtime stories fraught with evil risked restlessness and worked against the task at hand: ushering a child to sleep. Even now, I still feel the gut check of the sudden suspicion that the impending cruelty might be too much for my brother. I remember moving past the wickedness of the stepmother and the cowardice of the father; I lingered instead upon the ingenuity and wit of Hansel’s effort to leave a trail and the magical features of the gingerbread house. I congratulated Gretel for her bravery and overlooked the oven’s flames and witch’s shrieks. With the ending, I painted a joyous reunion. (Looking over Grimms’ published story, I realize that I had also forgotten much, including the jewels retrieved from the old woman’s gingerbread house.) Perhaps I even invented a kind mother and left my brother imagining Hansel’s and Gretel’s full stomachs, warm beds, and forgetful slumber. But of all that comes back to me in the traces of this memory, I am still surprised by the vivid emotional echo of the storyteller’s dilemma, the sudden worry of unleashing first-time fears like evils from Pandora’s Box.
My grandmother also used to tell my older brothers, sisters, and me Grimms’ tales. My father’s mother lived in a small cottage on the east side of Storm Lake, the side that caught the snow blown across the ice during long Iowa winters and left six to ten foot drifts between homes. Bitter winds made her windows moan and whine in mid-January. In the spring, big-leafed rhubarb bordered her back yard, and in the damp, shady places beneath bushes and trees, a strong aroma of weedy flowers invaded the air. Inside, the small kitchen smelled of tea and cinnamon, the cupboard always seeming to hoard a pan of bread or graham cracker pudding atop wax paper. I learned to love the texture of soft foods like bread pudding with raisins, covered in thick cream. At some point during our visits, in the time after outside exploring and before our mother picked us up, my grandmother would sit us beside her on the couch or alongside a chair capped with cross-stitched doilies and tell stories. In these years, I heard “Hansel and Gretel” but also another Grimms’ tale, “The Straw, the Coal, and the Bean.” Spiced with a Liverpool accent, so exotic to the ear of an untraveled, midwestern boy, my British grandma told this brief tale of a precarious camaraderie forged after a chance escape from an old village woman’s fire place and cooking pot. In the fragments of my remembering, I catch my innocent lingering upon the lesson of self-sacrifice: the thin straw’s willingness to lay his body across a stream to allow for his friends’ escape.
Curious to hear again this favorite story and to read the full version of “Hansel and Gretel,” I tracked down an edition of Grimms’ Children’s Stories and Household Tales. In addition to reading of the redemptive reunion between the father and his children, of the jewels and precious stones, I learned that Straw did not experience a happy ending. Rushing upon his thin comrade as he lay stretched and hopeful across the brook, the hot-headed Coal paused fearfully when hearing the water below and burned Straw in half. Both plunged to death in the brook. Bean, having held back, burst his seam laughing and was later stitched back together. So, after all these years, why did I hold on so tenaciously to the moral of self-sacrifice? Had my grandmother altered the ending to soften its harshness? Did she field the inevitable questions of her grandchildren in ways that eased the hardness or uplifted the heroism? What would it have meant, after all, to imagine Straw’s sacrifice as no more than a prelude to a meaningless fall or mocking laughter? As my grandmother looked into my eyes, she might have seen a child’s need to believe in the possibility of such sacrifice; perhaps she knew that the story told only a partial truth, that it had forsaken goodness in the midst of evil, that death had erased Straw’s generous impulse. So much, after all, can occupy that imaginative space. What should we remember and who should we praise: selfish Coal, cautious and unsympathetic Bean, or self-sacrificing Straw?
All storytellers face the problem of just how much to tell and just how to tell it. How much should be left out or let in? How piercing should the teller paint the evils of the world? How much of the tale changes in what the listener can understand and what the storyteller knows can be told at any given time?
My curious journeying back to Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s book made me wonder how they wrestled with such questions and whether they spoke of this tale-teller’s dilemma. Having listened to, recorded, and revised the hard-edged narratives, they must have considered, like any father sitting in the storyteller’s chair or on the bed’s edge, how they opened a world of fear and abandonment within the sanctuary of a family’s sleeping quarters. In reading their preface to the second volume of the tales’ first edition, we hear them express such a concern. “There are those,” they write, “who do not even want [their children] to hear bad things about the devil” and parents who “might not want to put the book into the hands of their children.” But, not surprisingly, they err on the side of the telling, concluding that they “do not know of a single healthy and powerful book used to educate the people (and that includes the Bible) in which such delicate matters do not actually appear to an even greater extent.” In the folk tales, they see a “document of our hearts.” If so, for both the storyteller and the listener, the document is of a kind that haunts as it heals. The stories that keep calling us back are also the ones that may keep us up at night.
In my years of learning about stories and how to read them, I remember once coming across the name of Bruno Bettelheim in relation to fairy tales, and so, in my library browsing, I sought out where this recollection might lead. Just as my grandmother sought to frame how to read Grimms’ tales, Bettelheim must also have offered some insight into the stories. How might he illuminate these tales of famine, estrangement, and loss in the intimate home of memory and desire? Sitting down with The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, published in 1976, the same time as my bedtime storytelling to my brother, I read of Bettelheim’s fascination with the harsh realities of Grimms’ fairy tales and their important role in educating children. The hard facts represented in literature and especially fairy tales, Bettelheim cajoled readers, stimulate and enrich children’s imaginations and consequently their developing minds and emotions. Seeing the world through a Freudian lens—and the psychoanalytical bogeymen of unconscious desires, “oedipal dilemmas,” and “sibling rivalries”—he emphasizes the significance of Grimms’ stories in the growth of identity and self-worth. To deal with inner tribulations and achieve self-understanding, children must engage in dream and fantasy: “[A child] can achieve this understanding, and with it the ability to cope, not through rational comprehension of the nature and content of his unconscious, but by becoming familiar with it through spinning out daydreams—ruminating, rearranging, and fantasizing about suitable story elements in response to unconscious pressures.” In this way, it seems, self-understanding is not possible without stories and storytelling. We often make use of the short time before sleep to narrate the day in the context of near and far off fears.
It is not a bad thing, then, for parents and teachers to encourage children to sleep with all that might lead to sleeplessness. In important ways, a listener’s unscripted fears and chaotic fantasies can be given shape through such troubling narratives as “Hansel and Gretel.” With this kind of tough love, Bettelheim rejects what he sees as the widespread cultural desire to pretend that the “dark side of man does not exist” and asserts that “only by struggling courageously against what seem like overwhelming odds can man succeed in wringing meaning out of his existence.” In the 1970s, The Uses of Enchantment must have seemed timely, an odd solace in the face of the era’s violence within and beyond the nation, of alienated sons and daughters, of disillusioned citizens attempting to “wring meaning” from so much that was falling apart. Having survived time in a German concentration camp and yet still able to articulate the prospect of courage, compassion, and hope, Bettelheim himself seemed the storyteller to meet a parent’s (and nation’s) needs. He promised the possibility of mastering the evil within by doing more than simply offering the stories; he provided a master narrative, a way to piece together all the fragments: the mother’s deception, the father’s abandonment, and the child’s exile or silence.
Still, caught up in these fantasies of psychoanalysis, I did wonder just how much to trust Bettelheim’s shaping of Grimms’ tales. Within the forest of his own enchanting logic, I began to lose what it meant to live with and in a tale, to sit beside the child, to taste the words as they drifted amid the smells of steaming tea and scones. I felt the imposition of meaning and a kind of forgetfulness, as if such stories do not shift and bend within the realities of an intimate storytelling. Is it not possible for the loving gesture, the timely sacrifice, to hold the weight of both suffering and hope and thus repair some painful gap or fracture in life? With her grandchildren upon her lap, my grandmother did not use her hands or words to choke meaning from a harsh world; she was no witch mixing evil with sweet breads. But, she did invite evil in, gradually, describing the outlines of wickedness and sorrow, letting our bodies lean against hers in the fear of the imagining. In this space, death did not go away; Straw and Coal still fell voiceless in the rushing stream. And, yet, having experienced a kind of exile from her home in leaving her family to come to the United States with her World War I husband, my grandmother must have known that the texture of a story’s truth emerged in more than the hard and ever-present reality of loss. With some nudging, she invited a simultaneous and complicated truth—that the meaning changed with Straw’s gesture, even when considered in light of the perhaps predictable rashness of Coal. In the legacy of this interpretation of the story, I find different questions. Is there an account of the tale where the bridge holds, where one can feel the heat scarring the back yet lie without breaking across the chasm? Or, perhaps, is the story of the falling just the beginning, a point where the listener takes up the emptiness without forsaking the need to cross the gap together?
I think of my son’s restless nights and our wrestling in the dark. I recall the days and weeks when I felt the fall and the splash, felt his fingers in my flesh and my too-hard gripping of his body. But, if the truth be told, there is more in the remembering: the echo of “hug” and a leaning of his body into mine, a laughter and lightness of spirit that sees Madeline floating and shapes a world through the happy endings of Pooh. Can I find a way to capture the whole story? Can I see that at different times Jacob and I exchange the putting of our bodies down, the stretching toward the other side? Can I write a new story out of the old ways of seeing, a tale that honors the fall but holds more than death and loss?
Perhaps these questions point to the truth that another reader of Bettelheim, Maria Tatar, so eloquently expresses in Off with Their Heads!: Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood, a book that stood near The Uses of Enchantment on the library shelf: “Just as every rewriting of a tale is an interpretation, so every interpretation is a rewriting.” Here, then, is one more framing of the storyteller’s dilemma. In the end, no tale receives a passive listening; no telling enacts an innocent repeating. We can never get out of our place in the plot.
So what is my place in the tale? How can it be told? How does the imagination embrace the child or parent lost along some journey? How do the mother and father bargain for the son or daughter who has bitten from some forbidden fruit? Like children, adults, too, spin out their own fantasies.
Mary and I started sleeping with Jacob when he was five years old. He had always been a restless sleeper, unlike our daughter Sarah who, at six weeks, began sleeping through the night. We could not count on our son for such accommodation. Having learned to walk by nine months, Jacob soon mastered the gymnastics of climbing from his crib. It took a few weeks before we realized that he was spending parts of the night wandering in his room. When Mary or I brought him into our bed and laid him between us, he would rarely return to sleep. In the end, one of us would take him back to his room and nod off in the rocker or on the floor with Jacob looking on. Finally, succumbing to our need for sleep, we bought him a full-sized bed, cleared the room of any thing that might fall or be swallowed, and attached an outer latch to the door.
But nearing three years of age, he also began waking in a panic. When we arrived in his room, he would be shaking. It was as if the bedroom filled up with what he could not name, though once or twice, in his limited speech, he seemed to describe animal sounds or shapes. It was a panic that could not be calmed, could not be quickly soothed from his memory. What experiences or stories, we asked each other, haunted him to the point of such fear? Rocking with him, we would repeat, “It’s all right; it’s okay,” and soon Jacob began to take up the incantation. “It’s all right; it’s okay,” he would say, as we laid him back down, his limbs still trembling. We wondered why he would not call out our names when he needed us—and then we realized that he had rarely called us by name. And we thought of those nightmares from which we awake, gasping for air, unable to find our voices or words to cry out in recognition or for comfort. After we found out that Jacob had autism, we tried to remember that ignorance, not cruelty, had led us to abandon him in his trembling and wakefulness.
Sleeping with Jacob started slowly, the way hunger creeps up after a missed meal. We first tried the routines and rituals of our own childhoods; we read books, turned on the soft light of the night light, and rested against the bed until Jacob fell asleep. We picked out the stories composed for such times: Goodnight Moon, Where the Wild Things Are, Weird Parents. Eventually we brought up a single mattress to rest upon as we watched for signs of Jacob’s slumber. It was more comfortable as we waited, though we often slipped into sleep before he did. Soon, we crawled into bed alongside our son and stayed through the night. We alternated nights, Mary usually sleeping four days of the week or five if my teaching schedule intensified. We stayed for five years.
Succumbing to such sleep fulfilled the needs that come with confusion and uncertainty. The evening began to seem more peaceful without the worry of Jacob’s noises and aloneness. Moreover, when Mary or I slept with our son, we believed, in the better times, that it was a kind of gift, a brief respite for the other. We began to feel as if we had some control over or achieved some deliverance from the evils of the day: the after-school tantrums, the seemingly impossible diet recipes designed to “recover” our son, the uncertainties of medication, the urgent demands of work, the isolation from friends and family. Let loose during the daytime, the evils retreated at night—or so we pretended. Like all the stories that we told, we believed that our own wit and will, mixed with the sacrificial magic of sleepless love, could replenish and sustain us.
When I married, I thought that I would never again sleep alone. I knew that Mary and I would be apart at some time. She or I would return alone to family in Iowa or travel to a conference or workshop or interview. Still, with the exception of these infrequent absences, I pictured our bed as a place where the day ended—in conversation, in weariness, in making love, in the quiet play of what we knew and still wished to discover about who we were and wanted to be.
In marriage, this kind of knowing is its own story; it is the mystery that holds together the gaps in history and memory and motivates the desire that pervades the telling. It is a narration without resolution, however, for the past is endless and forever calls the other to ask and wonder and at times forgive. For instance, not long after we were married, I discovered a picture of my wife when she was twenty. She sits on a metal folding chair in her parents’ basement. Behind her, the cement block wall gives greater distinctness to her white cotton shirt and red pants. Her left leg is crossed upon her right knee; her hands cup her left calf. She is unaware of the picture-taker. She looks toward a place that I cannot see; it is not in the room but something interior—perhaps something fleeting like a thought about driving home from college or perhaps something deep and intimate like a future child or a parent’s death. So much history registers in this random flash. In looking upon this moment, this distant glance, I risk a kind of disorientation, a loss of bearings. How is it that, in our storytelling, we can act as if the unknown past and future can be taken in? How can I hope to knit together what seems so vast and unknowable? Yet, in first telling, I believe in the possibility of knowing, of holding together so much of the unwitnessed, of what has been and will be. In first embraces, after all, so much must be taken on faith. It is a faith that calls us toward the parts that have been left out or have yet to come. To get to these places, we must ask the unexpected question and develop the discipline of listening, of letting the mind’s eye estrange the familiar.
Did the husband and wife in the tale of Hansel and Gretel begin with such desires? In the first days, at the edge of the imposing forest, the cottage might have seemed like a sanctuary. During the waking hours, the echo of the woodcutter’s axe would have provided a reassuring cadence; for the wife, the mixing of flour, yeast, and water, the kneading of the dough, and the firing of the oven would not have yet become a burden. All might have been the taste of new seasonings, the replenishing moment spilling forth without hesitation. The deepest hunger must have been the desire that came from waiting, the yearning for the next disrobing, the taste of the remembering and telling, and the touch of tongue and breath. In the time of first knowing, this coming together might have been enough, this willingness to talk about the past without judgment or blame amid the fragrance of bread and pine sap.
What is it that was forsaken? What is it that could not sustain the possibility of imagining a way through the famine? The old story does not flesh out what must have been endured. That it was famine which broke the covenant seems the surest of truths. Famine is the slowest of tragedies. It may first come in hints, like happenstance and rumor. The rain does not fall; the blight speckles the first leaves. The neighbor’s front door swings indifferently in the wind; the hoe leans unattended. The people left behind accommodate less. They learn that leanness can even be a mark of strength, the legacy of hard work and diligence. Hope and endurance give way to unsteadiness and malaise. Soon loss narrows into habits of survival; the mouth accepts coarse grain, not flour and bread, then chaff not wheat, then the unimaginable.
It is hard to look back at so many years attending so closely to so little. In my own world of work and home, I became an expert with rationing. As a teacher, I often paused during the day to multiply the number of student papers by the amount of time needed to read, compose responses, and record grades. The reading itself required a kind of empathy, a willingness to listen without intruding too quickly with judgment and correction. It demanded rest and, if rest was not possible, a willed attentiveness. Incoming sets of papers often meant between twenty to thirty hours of additional work over ten days—and then the next set of writing came in, and then the next. In one eleven-week semester, when committee and teaching responsibilities were especially burdensome, I would set the alarm for 3 am and fall asleep after I put my daughter to bed at 9 pm. Beside me, where Mary used to sleep, I left open the unfinished papers or chapters. I stemmed the chaos with numbers; I survived because I knew an end would come. The cycle of work guaranteed completion.
At times, I thought of what could be worse. I remembered the years when I contracted to detassel corn in the fields surrounding Storm Lake. In the summers during college, I would paint houses or farm buildings during the day and, in August evenings and weekends, make extra money by heading out to the fields. Once, my contract included half miles rows, i.e., pulling corn tassels from over six foot stalks, eight to ten inches apart, for a distance of a half mile. It took an hour and a half for one row. Doing this work required a mental discipline, a breaking down the ninety minutes into manageable units. Daydreaming was costly, though inevitable and calming.
In my own way, I unknowingly reduced mystery and story to a spread sheet. I only had so much to budget, literally, for my time at home. What, then, was the cost of a week of daily tantrums, holding Jacob’s arms during his daytime meltdowns while Sarah sat on the stairs and cried or retreated to the basement? How much future interest should Mary and I forsake? We had our time. We had told enough personal histories to provide for the next month and year. Without clearly voicing the change, I began the hard bargain of survival. At night, after Mary left for bed, I slept because I could not stay awake and then awoke because it was necessary. My most productive work emerged in the dark mist of forgetfulness. I learned that story and memory are not like grain to be stored in the Pharaoh’s bins and parceled out during lean times. Memory is a fluid thing, full of feeling and open doors. During the famine, it can be a wolf at the threshold, ready to devour the last of flesh and bone.
In the chaos that provides the stuff of life and fairy tales, evil and good sometimes knock with the same soft touch. When we open the door, we have only what we can imagine and generate from our hearts. It may be years before the bargain is understood, before the riddle is solved, before a story begins to take shape or make sense. The good stories must take it all in, all of it. In the in-between, there may only be questions and then a lying down. Sleeping with Jacob was a tenuous bargain. The fitful nights risked everything: the loss of the emotional strength that sustains the habit of laughter and play and that feeds the desire to know and piece together ever-growing fragments of new memories. But it was a story whose terms we thought we knew and accepted. Something of the nature of sacrifice had been part of our own rearing: as middle children of large families, as individuals whose religious faith centered on a giving up, on a tradition of stories that fostered an acceptance of the hard fact of death and the need to wait for the next day. This was the soft touch, the good that fed muscle and bone and imagination.
But we did not fully know.
If stories do not simply give a face to the good and the bad, the clever and the conniving, the pure and impure, but instead provide a framework within which to house meaning, to greet the unbidden guest, then the reader must remain vigilant. Guilt and blame can offer as much sanctuary as open hands and forgiveness. It is a hard truth that our stories shape how we come to know.
Sometimes we get lucky. The story that might have broken us has been lost or retold, and we can look back and learn. In the current narrative of autism, for instance, we do not attribute the cause of a child’s withdrawal to parenting, to a failure to bond with or properly nurture a child. We know that it is a developmental disorder, a genetically wired way of knowing that shows itself most dramatically around the time that a child should be acquiring language and learning the cues that help establish familial and social ties. Not long ago, however, another narrative framed how doctors and parents saw autism. Oddly, the storyteller is a familiar figure, Bruno Bettelheim.
Less than a decade before penning The Uses of Enchantment, in 1967, Bettelheim published his influential study of autism entitled The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self. Having already gained a national and international reputation for research asserting that autism emerged from an individual’s deep rejection of the world, he wrote of initially being disturbed by but curious about children whom he saw as deliberately turning their backs on the world. “If we could understand which isolated aspects of reality were so abortive of humanity as to snuff it out,” he asserts in the introduction, “there might be something constructive we could do.” Quite tragically, here is the story that he told: inadequate mothering at critical stages of development led to catastrophic rejection and resulted in various evils, including schizophrenia and autism. In other words, “refrigerator mothers,” as they came to be called, inflicted psychological wounds severe enough to cause the child to reject the world and turn inward. In this narrative, little imaginative distance existed between the stepmother and witch of “Hansel and Gretel” and the flawed mothers of Bettelheim. Ultimately, parents were told that the child with autism could only be reborn in intensive therapy, separated from the mother, and outside the home. And so Bettelheim formed the Orthogenic School, a supposed sanctuary where the driven out, the Hansels and Gretels, were fed gingerbread and families waited for the return.
