He’s busy with sand and sticks, methodically spreading and splitting his materials across a weathered wooden table in the sandbox, utterly absorbed in his workshop or kitchen. Every few minutes he glances over his shoulder, checking to see that I’m where he wants me, which is in view but not too close. When I approach, curious to learn more about his project, he sends me back to my bench—“Dada, sit over there”—and returns to his work. Other children call to one another or their grownups; the chains of the swing set rattle and screech. I watch him drift some distance away, scoop up more sand from a carefully selected spot, and bring it to the table. He unearths a piece of faded plastic, the cast-off half of a toy, and adds it to the arrangement. He’s half-speaking, half-singing to himself. I turn over a line of poetry I’ve been carrying in my head, weighing out its syllables again, listening for the links their sounds suggest: father and son practice their routine, each the other’s understudy.
§
My little son’s improvisations exceed mine: a round stone to him’s a loaf of bread or “this hen could lay a dozen golden eggs.” Birds fly about his bedstead; giants lean over him with hungry jaws; bears roam the farm by summer and are killed and quartered at a thought. There are interminable stories at eating time full of bizarre imagery, true grotesques, pigs that change to dogs in the telling, cows that sing, roosters that become mountains and oceans that fill a soup plate. There are groans and growls, dun clouds and sunshine mixed in a huge phantasmagoria that never rests, never ceases to unfold into—the day’s poor little happenings. Not that alone. He has music which I have not. His tunes follow no scale, no rhythm—alone the mood in odd ramblings up and down, over and over with a rigor of invention that rises beyond the power to follow except in some more obvious flight. Never have I heard so crushing a critique as those desolate inventions, involved half-hymns, after his first visit to a Christian Sunday school.
—William Carlos Williams, Kora in Hell: Improvisations[1]
§
There’s an essential privacy in child’s play, or at least it seems that way to a grown-up. I remember my own games and arrangements only in dreamlike glimpses; the logic of my son’s play is beyond my ken. But while the rigor of his invention often leaves me bewildered, his flights are clearly not nonsense. He plays seriously: his transformations follow rules of his own strict devising, and he is deeply absorbed in the world he continually refashions for himself. At his age—just over two—he mostly plays alone, even when he is with other children. Their worlds sometimes collide or briefly overlap, but they tend to orbit around one another, each his own planet. If he wants me involved, it’s usually to provide logistical support, opening, closing, fixing, or holding something for a moment, though it’s my proximity—even when he mostly ignores me—that lets him play. Winnicott called this absorption and imaginative semi-autonomy the “capacity to be alone,” emphasizing the possibility of solitude even when surrounded by others.[2]
The child keeps himself like a secret: his world hidden in plain sight. For Winnicott, this secret self is the artist’s—or anyone’s—precious, primitive source: “each individual is an isolate, permanently non-communicating, permanently unknown, in fact unfound.”[3] Yet the artist—or anyone—lives among others and seeks to reach beyond self-enclosure. Thus an “inherent dilemma, which belongs to the co-existence of two trends, the urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found.”[4]
§
A stone becomes bread, sand becomes grain, a stick becomes a knife. A stone becomes a school bus, sand becomes paper, a stick becomes a companionable snake. Child’s play is fundamentally transformative. Scraps of the given world are arranged and made provisionally otherwise. Walter Benjamin was particularly well-attuned to this poetics: “[N]o one is more chaste in the use of materials than children: a bit of wood, a pinecone, a small stone—however unified and unambiguous the material is, the more it seems to embrace the possibility of a multitude of figures of the most varied sort.”[5] While grownups might supply them with specialized toys to encourage their development in suitable ways, children “are irresistibly drawn by the detritus generated by building, gardening, housework, tailoring, or carpentry. In waste products they recognize the face that the world of things turns directly and solely to them.”[6] To recognize a face in wasted things is to encounter the world as something animate, to sense a hidden animal kinship, a closeness known only to children. They see what the grownups see, but they see it aslant. “In using these things,” Benjamin continues, “they do not so much imitate the works of adults as bring together, in the artifact produced in play, materials of widely differing kinds in a new, intuitive relationship. Children thus produce their own small world of things within the greater one.”[7] Play is a semi-autonomous work of art, a permeable poem, tethered to ordinary things yet extraordinarily mobile. It folds and unfolds into the day’s poor little happenings. A refuge perhaps, but not an escape. Children depend upon adults, but within dependency they preserve their measure of freedom. After all, the grownup world is, as Benjamin puts it, only “so-called life.”[8]
§
William Carlos Williams understood poetry’s closeness to play. Throughout his life he wrote poems about or addressed to children, and few poems delight kids and inspire such antic imitation as “The Red Wheelbarrow” and “This is Just to Say.”[9] In 1936 he wrote “A Chinese Toy”:
Six whittled chickens
on a wooden bat
that peck within a
circle pulled
by strings fast to
a hanging weight
when shuttled by the
playful hand [10]
The poem is a single descriptive phrase stretched across eight lines. Because it never resolves into a sentence, it seems almost to be a protracted, multifaceted noun, hovering in suspended animation. Indeed, suspension—or suspense—is the poem’s defining quality. Continual enjambment makes each line depend on the others, so while the absence of a complete predicate creates grammatical stasis, the play of syntax against line and stanza breaks induces a strong sense of mobility. Each piece of the poem seems to pull and be pulled gently by each other piece, balanced in motion, and this formal interdependency of the poem’s pieces clearly imitates the structure of the thing it describes. All the pieces of the toy—whittled chickens, wooden bat, and hanging weight—are threaded through with a single string such that the movement of one piece sets each of the others into motion.
In his essay “A Philosophy of Toys,” Charles Baudelaire celebrates the toy as “the child’s earliest initiation to art, or rather for him the first concrete example of art, and when mature age comes, the perfected examples will not give his mind the same feelings of warmth, nor the same enthusiasms, nor the same sense of conviction.”[11] Baudelaire attributes the strange power of toys to their “simplicity of production.” It’s the poorest toys that produce the most immersive imaginative worlds. He describes the way children make toys of ordinary furniture and scraps—chairs for horse and carriage, corks and dominoes for tiny soldiers—in ways that “put to shame the impotent imagination of the blasé public which in the theatre demands a physical and mechanical perfection, and cannot conceive that the plays of Shakespeare can remain beautiful with an apparatus of barbaric simplicity.”[12] He writes with thorough contempt for the trappings of adult sophistication, disparaging “splendid dolls” and the ways that some children “play at grown-ups.”[13]
Baudelaire’s object of fascination is “the barbaric toy, the primitive toy, in which the maker’s problem consisted in constructing an image as approximative as possible with elements as simple and as cheap as possible: for example, the cardboard punchinello, actuated by a single thread; the blacksmiths hammering at their anvil; the horse and its rider in three pieces, four wooden pins for legs, the horse’s tail forming a whistle, and sometime the rider wearing a little feather in his cap, which is a great luxury….”[14] Among these penny toys we might recognize Williams’s Chinese toy and his poem about it. Both toy and poem are made of simple and cheap materials: some bits of wood and string, twenty-six basic words and a few line breaks. Both seek maximum mimesis with minimum means. The toymaker wants to show us chickens; the poet wants to show us the toy that shows us the chickens. Imitation is a matter not of belabored visual reproduction but of quick mechanical analogy. The form of the blacksmith or the chickens may be chastely rendered so long as the toys’ mechanisms conjure their essential gestures. The poem, like the toy, may be a simple moving image-machine. “[T]hese are toys for a penny, a halfpenny, a farthing,” Baudelaire writes. “But do you think that these simple images create a lesser reality in the child’s mind than those New Year’s Day marvels which are a tribute paid by parasitic servility to the wealth of the parents rather than a gift to the poetry of childhood?”[15]
§
The Romantics tended to idealize and ennoble childhood and play. For Wordsworth, “The Child is father of the Man,” and for Schiller, “man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays.”[16] Imagined as a parent, the Child becomes both the source of life and the source of law; the purity and imaginative vitality of childhood come to serve as ideals for a more natural, noble society. Schiller celebrates rational, ordered play—edifying play—over “uncultivated taste” for the “new and startling…colorful, fantastic and bizarre, the violent and the savage….”[17] As play theorist Brian Sutton-Smith points out, Schiller has little else to say about the more chaotic, darker sorts of play that might engage both children and adults.[18] Games of chance and imaginative phantasmagoria, for instance, in different ways court irrational, erratic, wasteful, and destructive forces that do not clearly lead to healthy maturity and might even thwart progress toward a well-adjusted adulthood. Sutton-Smith contends that these more fanciful and sometimes disorderly imaginary worlds might be understood as assertions of autonomy from the orderly adult world, not as aspirations to join it—as “fabricat[ions] [of] another world that lives alongside the first one and carries on its own kind of life…” not mere “replications” of the given world.[19] Of course, Wordsworth understood well the disorder a child’s imagination might induce. In “We Are Seven,” an adult encounters a “simple Child” in whose world the living and the dead cohabitate, and her unwillingness to acknowledge death’s finality gives the somewhat obtuse grownup fits: “Twas throwing words away.” [20]
Williams, Benjamin, and Baudelaire also idealized childhood, but their writings court, rather than avoid, the disorderly other worlds of children’s play. While the adult task is “to provide a world order,” writes Benjamin, the child is concerned with “pure receptivity.”[21] Modernist children have trouble with authority. Consider original Dadaist Hugo Ball, in a 1916 journal entry: “Childhood as a new world, and everything childlike and phantastic, everything childlike and direct, everything childlike and symbolical in opposition to the senilities of the world of grown-ups…To surpass oneself in naïveté and childishness—that is still the best antidote….”[22] Or Andre Breton, in “Manifesto of Surrealism”: “From childhood memories, and from a few others, there emanates a sentiment of being unintegrated, and then later of having gone astray, which I hold to be the most fertile that exists. It is perhaps childhood that comes closest to one’s ‘real life.’”[23] And Winnicott on infancy: “There are long stretches of time in a normal infant’s life in which a baby does not mind whether he is many bits or one whole being, or whether he lives in his mother’s face or in his own body, provided that from time to time he comes together and feels something.”[24] If growing up means losing or suppressing one’s ability to linger unintegrated, Winnicott finds that supposedly healthy adult sanity often “has a symptomatic quality, being charged with fear or denial of madness, fear or denial of the innate capacity of every human being to become unintegrated, depersonalized, and to feel that the world is unreal.”[25] Poetry is the antidote: “Through artistic expression we can hope to keep in touch with our primitive selves whence the most intense feelings and even fearfully acute sensations derive, and we are poor indeed if we are only sane.”[26]
§
Who’s imitating whom? Aspiration runs both ways. Benjamin maintains that children don’t really imitate the works of adults, but that’s not quite true. I don’t fully understand my son’s games, but I recognize in them a face, strange and half turned away, of the world I know. He pretends to talk on the phone, to cook a meal, to fill a page with writing. But his phone line reaches across species; his plate is never empty; his writing reinvents its script in every gesture. His own small world remakes the world it persists inside, yet it turns out with a perpetual difference, an instability, a potential I can neither foresee nor comprehend. He wants to be a grown-up in his own way, on his own. So what exactly is the desire to imitate a child—to take the Child as our Father, to improvise reveries or phantasmagoria worthy of a toddler or a kindergartener? The desire to make another image of ourselves, on our own. A simpler image, perhaps, made of scraps and string, letters and lines, poorer but strangely more real.
§
In her essay “Poetry and Grammar,” Gertrude Stein traces the writing of poetry back to childhood experience. In an oft-quoted line, she asserts that “poetry is essentially the discovery, the love, the passion for the name of anything” but goes on to describe our mature distance from that discovery, our adult lack of love for naming: “Naturally, and one may say that is what made Walt Whitman naturally that made the change in the form of poetry, that we who had known the names so long did not get a thrill from just knowing them. We that is any human being living has inevitably to feel the thing anything being existing, but the name of that thing of that anything is no longer anything to thrill any one except children.”[27] The suggestion is that modern poetry’s formal disruptions—such as Stein’s repetitions and grammatical idiosyncrasies—are attempts to seek again the childhood thrill of naming things.
It’s a commonplace in criticism of Stein to deride—and occasionally praise—her writing as the work of a child. Sometimes critics have ranked her even below a child. “She has written a book or so of inconceivably idiotic drivel,” wrote one 1914 reviewer of Tender Buttons, “compared with which the babble of a three-year old child is Hegelian. Her specialty seems to be the throwing together of language absolutely meaningless and insulting alike to one’s sense of taste and decency.”[28] Echoing this charge of idiocy, the famous communist Mike Gold condemned Stein’s work in 1934 as “an example of the most extreme subjectivism of the contemporary bourgeois artist, and a reflection of the ideological anarchy into which the whole of bourgeois literature has fallen…The literary idiocy of Gertrude Stein only reflects the madness of the whole system of capitalist values.”[29]
There’s a useful insight buried in such condescension and apoplectic overstatement. If we emphasize not idiocy’s connotation of imbecility but its root in ἰδιώτης, i.e., a “private person” or “person without professional knowledge”—we might begin to understand the substantial opacity and strangeness of Stein’s writing as manifestations of a basically self-absorbed focus and intensity.[30] Stein wrote first for herself, every day and at great length. Reading the red notebooks in which she originally drafted Tender Buttons, one sees how little she edited the work before publication; the published text presents her strange array of nouns and verbs more or less as she first wrote it—an ongoing practice within her own small world of things, written for herself and possibly for Toklas, but not for us. “In those days,” Stein wrote of herself, “she never asked anyone what they thought of her work, but they were interested enough to read it. Now she says if they can bring themselves to read it they will be interested.”[31]
As we walk down the street my son names the things he sees, repeating and recombining nouns and verbs in endless permutations. He’s delighted; sometimes his words are lost on me, at others I’m interested, even thrilled by his compositions. He wakes up naming things I imagine he dreamt. Children often talk and play just for themselves. They don’t mind if we hear, but they don’t always care whether we understand their intricacies. One of Stein’s achievements—or errors, depending on your view, or perhaps your mood on any given day—is to have so resolutely played her own game for so long. Guy Davenport once wrote that her work “is the very literate equivalent of children playing in a sandbox. They are happy, busy, purposeful in their own way, but only angels know what they think they’re doing.”[32]
§
“On the subject of the plaything of the poor,” continues Baudelaire, “I once saw something even more simple, but sadder, than the toy for a penny—this was the living toy.” He tells a brief story about a rich child who casts aside his own “glittering” doll when he beholds the toy of the dirty “urchin” on the other side of the fence: a caged rat. “To save money,” Baudelaire writes, “his parents had taken the toy from life itself.”[33]Baudelaire says nothing more on the subject. A caged rat seems a step beyond poems and paper toys, with their primitive imitations of the familiar world. The readymade toy is something more primitive still: a piece of the world, broken off and renamed, somehow made more—or simply other—than itself by play. A rat renamed “a rat,” not an image but the animal itself. This is play as a radical realism, fascinating and at least a little frightening.
§
Charles Burnett’s film Killer of Sheep is a neo-realist story of a father and his family making their way in Watts during the 1970s, but it’s also something else: a wandering non-narrative of children at play, a document of the almost-innocent underworld they maintain in plain view of world-weary adults. Adolescent boys poke around in trainyard detritus and wrestle in the dust, turning suddenly tender when one gets hurt, then jokingly tough again when they find he’s faking it. Another boy lies beneath a boxcar, head by a wheel, and urges his buddies to push; the train won’t budge, but they tie his shoelaces together as he laughs. A little girl croons a nonsense version of Earth, Wind, & Fire’s “Reasons” to an unkempt, naked doll while her mother applies makeup in the next room. In another scene, the girl watches her father and his friends in a deadpan rubber doggy mask. A dozen kids leap from roof to roof and climb the ledges of dilapidated buildings while a grown-up quarrel explodes into the open. The kids throw pebbles at each other; a boy hurts his arm and begins to cry. Two children sit inside on the couch while their mother waves a gun at her no-good man. Outside, their friends keep at their games and antics, turning a poor apartment complex into an afternoon’s playground. Their cries and laughter permeate the soundtrack.
Notes:
[1]William Carlos Williams, Kora in Hell: Improvisations(Boston: The Four Seas Company, 1920), 76-77.
[2]See D.W. Winnicott, “The Capacity to be Alone,” The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, 29-35.
[3]Winnicott, “On Communicating and Not Communicating Leading to a Study of Certain Opposites,” in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment(London: Hogarth, 1965), 187.
[4]Ibid., 185.
[5]Walter Benjamin, “The Cultural History of Toys,” Selected Writings Vol. 2 1927-1934trans. Rodney Livingstone, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 115.
[6]Walter Benjamin, “Old Forgotten Children’s Books,” in Selected Writings, Vol. 1: 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 408.
[7]Ibid.
[8]Ibid, 410.
[9]See the many samples of children’s imitations gathered by Kenneth Koch in Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?
[10]William Carlos Williams, Collected Poems, Vol. 1 1909-1939, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1938), 407.
[11]Charles Baudelaire, “A Philosophy of Toys,” inThe Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Publishers, 1964), 199.
[12]Ibid.
[13]Ibid., 198.
[14]Ibid., 199.
[15]Ibid., 199-200.
[16]Friedrich Schiller, “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man,” in Essays, ed. Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (New York: Continuum, 2001), 131. Italics in the original.
[17]Ibid., 174.
[18]Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play, 131-32.
[19]Ibid., 158, 166.
[20]Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth,Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800, ed. Michael Gamer and Dahlia Porter (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2008), 102.
[21]Walter Benjamin, “A Child’s View of Color,” Selected Writings, Vol. 1: 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 51.
[22]Hugo Ball, “Dada Fragments,” in Modernism: An Anthology ed. Lawrence Rainey (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 478.
[23]Andre Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” in Modernism: An Anthology ed. Lawrence Rainey (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 737.
[24]D. W. Winnicott, “Primitive Emotional Development” in Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis(New York: Basic Books, 1958), 150.
[25]Ibid.
[26]Ibid., 150n.
[27]Gertrude Stein, “Poetry and Grammar,” in Writings 1932-1946, (New York: Library of America, 1998), 329-31.
[28]Richard Burton, “Posing,” in The Critical Response to Gertrude Stein, ed. Kirk Curnutt (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2000), 163.
[29]Mike Gold, “Gertrude Stein: A Literary Idiot,” in The Critical Response to Gertrude Stein, ed. Kirk Curnutt (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2000), 163.
[30]Oxford English Dictionary, 3rdEd., s.v. “idiot.”
[31]Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in Writings 1932-1946, (New York: Library of Congress, 1998), 712.
[32]Guy Davenport, review of A Stein Reader, New Criterion, November 1993, 73.
[33]Charles Baudelaire, “A Philosophy of Toys,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Publishers, 1964), 200.