the other thing is

[lapsedmodernist]

I was driving around with one of my urbex pals today (after a second failed infiltration of this one place--seriously, this place is, like, cursed--this time we managed to uncover a rusted vent (two drops above some old machinery) behind a chimney, and crawled through it until we came upon an flimsy ladder attached to the side of an old boiler, that led down, and it just wasn't gonna work...the only other entrance into the building would have required climbing a rope from the roof about three stories or so...the rope was actually decent, with thick knots throughout, but we all sheepishly admitted that we sucked at climbing rope in gym class, so unless we were sure we'd be able to find a door we'd be able to unlock, it seemed like a bad idea--oh well)--anyway, she was telling me about this Pride event she was at where she was eating fire. I was asking her about that, how it works--she said, "well, fire needs oxygen to burn, so if you swallow it in the right way, it goes out, because there is no oxygen."

Oh, I said. That is then totally the same as that trick I learned when I was little, of putting a burning match in my mouth.

She looked at me kind of weirdly.

I reflected on the fact that that statement did, in fact, sound weird. I further reflected that when I was little we TOTALLY used to play with matches--I am talking 7 or 8 here--not just learning how to swallow burning ones, but also playing a game called "Hottabych" named after a beloved Soviet children's book about an ancient Arabian genie, who is rescued out of a bottle by a young pioneer, the friendship they form, and how the genie adjusts to living under socialism, and how the young pioneer helps him abandon his reactionary ways (by the way, despite definitely being a period and a zeitgeist piece, the book is wonderful, and the translated e-text is available here and I SERIOUSLY ENCOURAGE YOU to read it)--anyway, this game involved taking a match out of a matchbox (a large matchbox of wooden matches, the size of a deck of cards maybe), lighting it, sticking it back in the box, quickly sliding the box closed, then throwing it down on the ground and watching it erupt in a fireball).

um, for encouragement, here are the book cover and the movie poster for the genie story


Another favorite pasttime in the apartment complex I grew up in involved taking scraps of lead that for some reason were all over the place nearby, making little forms in the sand, melting said lead in spoons liberated from our parents' kitchens, then pouring them into the forms--making crosses, letters, numbers, etc. This does not stand out in my memories of childhood as somehow abnormal--it's there alongside with the pyramid-shaped milk cartons, and Fanta bottles (we, of course, had Fanta because Cuba was our friend, which didn't quite make up for the absence of Coke), and completely dark winter mornings, going to ice-skating lessons in a sled.

I was also thinking that we used to hang out on the roof of our apartment complex, which was 16 stories high--and we must have been 10 or 11 at the time. And we were kids from "good" families. I mean, I am sure our parents would have been freaked out by it, but that public hysteria over everything discourse just wasn't so...present. The fears that were drilled into us were either larger-than-life--so, there was a big scare about this serial killer in the late 80s-or really about something else--like the series of articles about "rape rooms" in self-made basement gyms that girls were supposed to avoid, because that's where boys hung out. This was a media-proliferated anxiety that emerged right at the time when the wealth gap started to widen, in 1989/1990, the urban infrastructure was changing seemingly overnight, and rapidly a new generation of Clockwork Orange-ish young men were emerging who were being socialized into raw capitalism, capitalism on steroids, former violin-playing pioneers turning into a new, alien species, 6 feet tall and in leather jackets.

But the fears of natural environment, or elements in the natural environment, or contamination...all of that just didn't exist. Maybe because there was no point--so what if you lived near an energy plant or a nuclear reactor--you couldn't really pick where you lived. Or maybe--and this is something that I think about periodically--it was the same thing that was at the core of the public discourse about the Atomic Age between the US and the USSR--the capitalist approach of the former, where Information Was Disseminated, and the resulting anxiety could be mitigated by consumption: an industry of iodine pills and fallout shelters--vs. the fatalistic approach of the latter, where there was a general sense, dissipated through politically dangerous anecdotes, told in half-tones in communal kitchens, that if something bad was going on, the government wouldn't tell anyone anyway. Like when Chernobyl happened, and the only reason why the government reluctantly copped to anything happening was because Sweden figured out something was up with radioactivity levels in the air masses coming in from the East. Or like when the Cuban Missile Crisis happened, and the average Soviet comrades like my parents had no idea it was going on. We didn't have Bert the Turtle--we had a "hedgehog from Chernobyl."**

I am sure part of it isn't just the cultural gap--it's also the generation gap, the rupture between people who learned how to learn before the internet and people who grew up and became parents with that resource. But still, I was thinking about it, and thinking back to hanging out at a friend's house the other day. We were sunpainting silk scarves with ferns and flowers on her back porch, and our babies were playing with a bucket of water in the driveway. And I sighed, with that mixture of guilt and delight, that always fills me when I am at her house--thinking that this is what my mother would call "bad parenting"--that she would disapprove--at the joyful chaos in the house, of us hanging out while the kids run around squealing in delight, covered head to toe in blueberries, and so is the kitchen floor, and they are not being regimented or acted upon, like little subjects, they are learning about the world, the surfaces, gravity, tension, structure, and such empirically--like, I don't care if Fionn reads at an adult level by the time he is 3, like I did--and I told my friend that--and she said something like "dude, we are so much more actively supervising that kids than our parents did; my sister and I built a fort in the foods behind our house, by ourselves, when I was, like, 3, and we would spend the whole day there by ourselves."

And Fionn is so happy when he is running around and exploring, and he is basking in what theophile calls "ambient attention"--when he is making his terribly important discoveries, and excelling in the Invisible College for babies, and receives attention and engagement whenever he wants it, but it's not imposed on him. "Like a weed"--which is what my mother says, reprimanding, about kids that are not managed constantly. She subscribes to the parenting philosophy that since the first few years are the optimal learning age, that "window of opportunity" should be maximized, and as much learning should be crammed in as possible. I love the idea of my baby growing like a weed, beautiful and fully realized through sunlight and water and earth, and it makes me think of weeds in bloom, and that Leonard Cohen passage from "Beautiful Losers" that I can't remember exactly right now but that is beautiful in the way that the world filtered through my mental loupes and cobwebs is beautiful.

Fionn is my beautiful little weed in bloom.

"**There was this children's story about a...um...what the fuck would it be called in English...a piece of dough that was round, that you could eat. Kind of like a donut hole. Anyway, let's say it's a donut hole for the sake of translation. In the story the anthropomorhized donut hole keeps rolling along his merry way, encountering all sorts of forest creatures, who all threaten to eat him, but he outsmarts them all, except the fox, who eats him. The refrain of the story is, everyone he encounters--the bear, the wolf, the fox--they all say "Doughnut hole, doughnut hole, I am going to eat you."

Here is a Russian claymation cartoon of the story, just for context:

Also while looking around on YouTube for it I found this upsetting version of it, clearly made by robots, but it's in English:

So in a joke that was popular after Chernobyl, the dialog unfolds thusly:
-Doughnut hole, doughnut hole, I am going to eat you
-I am not a doughnut hole, I am a hedgehog from Chernobyl. [cuz all his needles fell out from the radioation, geddit?]

Comments

[vertigo1021.livejournal.com]

The claymation doughball looks a hell of a lot like the Wal-Mart smiley...

[contrary-wise.livejournal.com]

That's the Gingerbread Man! The exact same story gets told to kids in the US. Minus the Chernobyl hedgehog.

[leighsala.livejournal.com]

Enid Blyton wrote a different version of the same story (I don't know whether she was just codifying the British version or stealing it from somewhere else)--there's a lamb who's going to his grandma's house and all along the way he meets animals who say 'lambikin lambikin I am going to eat you' but he tells them he'll be MUCH tastier once he's gotten fat at grandma's so they let him go. He gets to grandma's, and true to his word, gets fat eating an entire barrel of corn or somesuch, but then he climbs into the barrel and rolls all the way home in safety.

..at least, that's how I remember it going! I wonder if that's anything like the book actually was.

[dreams-of-wings.livejournal.com]

I love the image of Fionn as a weed, a beautiful one. I'm sure he'll turn out to have medicinal properties or something when left to mature and grow to his full potential. :)

(My mom had to leave me to my own devices lots when I was a kid to take care of my little brother, and I think I turned out pretty ok. *grin*)

[dcart.livejournal.com]

That weed analogy is very much how I think of my childhood. I had probably a square mile of woods, lake, and fields that I roamed from the age of 5 until 7. Once my parents bought me a bike, that increased to probably 5 square miles. I could be gone for hours on my own or with friends as a small child and it was the same for all of my friends. Before the age of 5, the only thing that was really different was the amount of space I had to roam. My life was very unstructured. There were no preschools or daycare or any of that.

If I allow myself to think about too long, I get really sad over how managed most kids lives are in this country at this time.

[elevenoclock.livejournal.com]

My Kazakh ex-boyfriend and current friend thinks that there are massive similarities between the way we raise children here in the US and in USSR. He was born in Moscow and moved to NY when he was, I think, 8. They put him in a Soviet school in the US, somewhere in New York, where he was totally getting a communist education (how is that even possible--the mind boggles) and learning to snitch on his friends and the like. He really enjoys drawing comparisons between the indoctrinations and the propaganda, and the controlled media, etc. He is also an anarchist, so of course everything in the two systems is, at its base, wrongly authoritarian to him. Which I agree with completely.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

hm, one interesting thing is--snitching was ingrained to be completely taboo in Soviet schools. It was NEVER okay. If the entire class was held after school, until it got dark, because no one would fess up, for a week straight, still no one would snitch, even if everyone knew who was behind the incident in question. If you snitched, your life in the school was ruined forever--and you would be in the same classes with all the same people until you graduated. When I started school in the US I was surprised that snitching was much more normalized, encouraged and practiced without the fear of total and complete ostracism.

[elevenoclock.livejournal.com]

Then I'd guess the snitching wasn't part of it, as I remembered; but I do specifically remember him telling him how they regimented his class so that there was a hierarchy of people checking on each other, etc. I'll have to ask him.

Snitching is a very US thing, I think.

[msmsgirl.livejournal.com]

I love this - I think you're totally right about the generational and cultural divides mapping on to each other. I wonder if you, like me, were raised with a kinky combination of more unsupervised freedom than kids are "supposed" to get today, and also a parent who was kind of an early adopter of the hyper-enrichment, hyper-managing, "window of opportunity" theory (how intimately familiar that sounds!).

My mother, today, asserts that children can/should get even less "weed" time than I did (which was pretty little, and stopped pretty early to make room for all the Activities), because -- get this -- "you can't let children play outside any more. The world has gotten too dangerous since you were little."

I think this is _absolutely_ to do with Information Being Disseminated/consumption v. fatalism, and I think you're right that the era of the internet has, in a sense, made the earlier American mode of parenting look like the Soviet mode by comparison. But after a weekend at my redneck family reunion in the woods in Mississippi, I also wonder if one difference in what I saw as a child v. what I'm seeing as an adult might be in the _class level_ of American parenting that I'm exposed to (here, now, in the 'zeitgeist' or the NYT or NYC parents or whatever, v. small-town Mississippi)... or maybe the dissemination of aspiration to upper-class, not just middle-class, social status, further across the society than it was before?

My many 30-something cousins raising young kids in small town and rural settings in MS made an interesting study. They're not so much 'rednecks' as 1st-generation non-rednecks, and they also exhibit this kind of schizophrenic mix of letting their kids do these hair-raising things -- riding in the back of a pickup with the tailgate open, with their legs hanging off the back, in a pouring rain and lightning storm, on steep hilly country roads (T. and I back there holding on to their little bodies, having heart attacks, trying to act chill), or swimming in a deep lake without life jackets when they can't really swim -- combined with MUCH more discourse about not only the 'danger of everything' but also the 'need for enrichment/academic achievement' than I remember people in their position participating in in the generation before (when their parents' positions of laxity and, really, fatalism re: 'safety' and 'enrichment' stood in stark contrast to my parents' at this very same family reunion).

In my own experience, definitely, I feel that the "window of opportunity" dictum of parenting served an aspirational function -- I was (am) told constantly that this approach was necessary in order to mitigate the advantages that kids growing up in places with better schools and more cultural opportunities would have over me, to put me on a level playing field with the children of the northeastern intellectual elite -- and that I am enabled to critique and abandon it now in part because I have attained a certain elite level of educational/cultural capital. [due to the effects of the "window of opportunity" theory???] Like, that because of the worlds I have access to, my children will be privileged enough to be 'quirky' if they want to be, whereas it's not at all clear if the "weed" mode of parenting that I would like to follow as a parent would have gotten my butt out of my bass-ackwards town in MS? My mother felt very strongly that it would not have. Perhaps she was wrong: 1. children raised in exploration and freedom have a stronger self to impel them to formulate and execute big dreams, 2. CASE IN POINT for not raising children in a setting where your #1 parenting goal is to get them out, 3. the approaches to learning that you're actually talking about have little to do with the real educational and life trajectories that will be available to a specific child.

Anyway, all I'm saying is that I think the recent fucked-up-ness has a great deal to do with class too -- I think it's aspiration seeping into really destructive places, i.e. into a capitalism-fueled construct of how upper-class parents treat their babies, and into regimenting and managing how a baby learns about surfaces, tension, blueberries, light, and water... I love the imagery of your little weed!