Wednesday, August 28, 2019

The Generosity of Children

Berkeley, August 28, 2019—
LANGUAGEHAT TELLS ME that Alexander Gavrilov, in an interview, told a Russian blogger
It was at that moment that I grasped the difference between the reading of children and adults. Children are generally much more generous readers. I have the fixed idea that a book is created by its reader almost to a greater extent than by its writer. I have often heard adult readers say something like “There are no really good books left, it’s all crap, it was a lot better before.” At that point the reader is admitting that he no longer has the substance that makes all books magical in childhood.

As usual, a lengthy stream of interesting comments follows LanguageHat's post, many of them suggesting that what happens is that as they grow older children learn critical discrimination. Perhaps that "substance" (a word LanguageHat considers carefully in his translation [from Russian] of Gavrilov's comment) is in fact innocence.

This brought me back to last night's after-dinner conversation, when I was asked why I no longer care to write criticism. Criticism, well practiced, enlarges its subject — but at the expense of framing it within a construct built of the critic's accumulated experiences. And, let's face it, taste. When I write about a Mozart opera the opera Mozart composed begins to disappear behind the opera I have just seen performed, as my mind rambles from it within a landscape of other Mozart, other opera, other even further experiences that come to my mind, all of them wanting attention and needing shepherding if they're not to clutter the view entirely.

And, of course, the older I get, the more experiences and memories, even if the memories come less readily to mind when wanted.

I have tried always to be two people: a critic and a child. The critic thinks, reads, listens, discusses, expresses. The child looks, listens, asks questions. Too soon he becomes himself critical.

So a critic's farewell to criticism is a step in the process of restoring childlike generosity, or innocence. As we prepare to go elsewhere let us efface our presence here. I don't mean entirely: I'm taking care to leave a record behind. But I'm eager to give up the active pursuit of framing reality, thus lessening it, by insisting on my own view of it. It's time, instead, to empty my mind.

2 comments:

Curtis Faville said...

This sounds very Eastern.

You know that the only way to escape from the experienced mind is through some form of intervention.

In dreams, I think I sometimes approach the innocence of direct experience. In dreams, my mind literally creates scenarios, fictions which narrate my subconscious intentions--or fears, or lusts, or passions, etc.

We were never less mortal as children than we are as adults. We may have thought we were "farther away" from it then, but we knew the "sound of thunder at the picnic."

Criticism--or the habit of it--is a way of discovering how you feel as well as what you think about something. The discipline of forming an argument, or an opinion--putting it into a form, with shape, substance, meaning--is also, as you note, a form of creative thinking. We make new works this way, new versions of originals.

In fact, we may be incapable of fully comprehending any work of art or thought, since our mind, even in childhood, manipulates and alters what we perceive.

My Mozart isn't your Mozart, my Stein isn't your Stein. Is this kind of diversity useful?

Is individuality useful? Probably not for insects, in their social milieu.

What are our brains for?

Curtis Faville said...

Charles:

The process of comprehending a work of art involves delving into one's own feelings. it's as much a process of self-discovery as it is an explication of a pre-figured framing.

I often done't even really know what I think about something until I begin to try to explore it verbally, which involves searching through my sensibility and casting about for a means to express it in language.

I think people who never make themselves express what they think or feel really have unformed or vague notions of what they experience. Putting it into words forces you to clarify and articulate your sensibility.

You may have grown weary of critical writing, and after 10 years of blogging about various subjects myself, I understand that fatigue. But I'm by no means against the idea as a life purpose. I think that--tiven two lifetimes--I might never completely wear out my interest in posting reactions to things I see and hear and feel. It's after all how we communicate and share with others.

Can we recapture our innocence, the innocence of first reading poems and seeing pictures or movies? I think we can. In writing about certain classical cinema, I'm able to revisit the sensations I had then, to place myself back in the proscenium of my awareness at a certain point in time. It's not a trick. It just requires a little bit of memory recall.

I'm not ashamed of the construct that is my taste. After all, it's always changing, if only incrementally. it's exciting to encounter something or someone who alters one's sense of the meaning of things. I find that at 72 I'm still able to do that.