Post by ronprice on Oct 18, 2011 18:41:41 GMT -5
When I was growing up our house backed onto woods, a several-acre remnant of a once-mighty wilderness. This was in a southern Ontario town, a town that is now a city and has gone from a little place of 5000 people in 1950, when I was five, to over 100,000 more than half a century later in 2010. If I went back to that house(which is not likely since I now live on a pension in Australia) Im sure that woods would be gone. I could check it out on google-maps, but my eyes get tired quickly when I try to figure-out places where I lived long ago on that marvellous internet tool.
The enlightened planners had provided, for the first citizens of those little towns, a number of such lingering swaths of green. They have all come and gone: both the planners and the green belts. I did go back to another place where I had lived much later in my childhood, in my early adolescence, that third stage of childhood in the lifespan according to some human development psychologists. Some new planners had done a great job of tidying-up some of the old places where I once played cowboys and Indians or field hockey; young families could now walk and take their kids to play on the swings and wooden-apparatus.
Those woods, to which I referred above, were tame as can be when I walked through them on the way to school. Yet at night they still filled with unfathomable shadows. In the winter they lay deep in snow and seemed to absorb, to swallow whole, all the ordinary noises of your body and your world. Scary things could still be imagined to take place in those woods. It was the place into which the bad boys fled after they egged your windows on Halloween and left your pumpkins pulped in the driveway. There were no Indians in those woods where once they had been. We learned about those Indians in school and, at least for me, at summer camps. They had many names.
Swift, straight-shooting, silent as deer those Indians peopled the periphery of my life. They were long gone except for their lovely names: Seneca, Iroquois, Mohawk, Cayuga, Onondaga, Tuscarora, Oneida, Delaware, Nanticoke, Creek and Cherokee. As I got older I found out dozens of other Indian names for tribes which lived all over North America. As an adult I experienced whole new peripheries to my life.
A minor but undeniable aura of romance was attached to the history of Ontario, my home province. It was a very big place, but no one I knew went into its far north, into its biggest parts. As far as I was concerned, and everyone else I knew, Ontario was southern Ontario with Barrie, Owen Sound and, on the rarest occasions, Tobermory at the end of the Bruce Peninsula, 300 kms north of Toronto. For me Ontario was all about Lake Ontario and Lake Erie and the towns and cities along their edge over to Windsor in the west where I went to teachers college, and to Kingston in the east where the St. Lawrence River began and where I visited a psychiatrist once in 1969; or over to Ottawa where I went for my honeymoon in 1967.
The St. Lawrence River was another great landmark and world on the periphery of my childhood life-narrative. This large river flowed through the middle latitudes of North America and connected the Great Lakes with the Atlantic Ocean. Its drainage area included the Great Lakes, the world's largest system of fresh water lakes. I knew none of this while growing-up. The lakes of which Ontario and Erie were but two, the biggest lakes in my world and Ontarios world of smaller lakes, were just great places to swim on hot summer days.
But the Wilderness of Childhood, as any kid could attest who grew up and survived to tell their story in later adulthood, had nothing to do with trees or nature. It was the same for my father who grew up on the streets of Merthyr Tydfil a city of 30,000 in Wales with its coal mines and pubs, one of which was owned by his father, more than half a century before. I could lose myself on vacant lots and playgrounds, when I was five, or in the alleyway behind the shops in town, in the neighbours yards, on the sidewalks. Anywhere, in short, I could reach on my tricycle and then my bicycle or simply by walking. By these three means I covered my neighbourhood, my world, in a regular route first(with my tricycle) for half a mile and then several miles(with my bike and walking) in every direction.
I knew the locations of all my classmates houses, the number of pets and siblings they had, the state of their bedrooms in particular and houses in general, the brand of popsicle or type of food they served, if any; the potential dangerousness of their fathers, how pretty their mothers were. These locations, in addition to the places of the shops, the ice-skating ring, the curling club, the homes of the girls I liked, the frozen ponds in winter where I played hockey---provided perfectly the mental map of my world. It is a world I have endlessly revised and refined since I left it back in the summer of 1962 never to return---except for a 24 hour period when I dropped in during a visit to Canada some 40 years later on my way to Europe. Childhood is, or has become, for me a rich and important branch of cartography.
Most great stories of adventure, from The Hobbit to Seven Pillars of Wisdom, come furnished with a map. That’s because every story of adventure is in part the story of a landscape, of the interrelationship between human beings and topography. Every adventure story is conceivable only with reference to the particular set of geographical features that in each case sets the course, literally, of the tale. But I think there is another, deeper reason for the reliable presence of maps in the pages, or on the endpapers, of an adventure story, whether that story is imaginatively or factually true. We have this idea of armchair traveling, of the reader who seeks in the pages of a ripping yarn or a memoir of polar exploration the kind of heroism and danger, in unknown, half-legendary lands, that he or she could never hope to find in life.
This is a mistaken notion, in my view. People read stories of adventure and write them because they have themselves been adventurers. Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity. For the most part the young adventurer sets forth equipped only with a fragmentary map. That map is marked: here there be tigers and there mean kid with air rifle. That child constructs out of a patchwork of personal fortune and misfortune, bedtime reading and an accumulated local lore, a grey chaos and dream of stuff, his world. It is this world, as I say above, which is his base for any historical revisionism.
A striking feature of literature for children is the number of stories, many of them classics of the genre, that feature the adventures of a child, more often a group of children, acting in a world where adults, particularly parents, are completely or effectively out of the picture. Think of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Railway Children, or Charles Schulzs Peanuts. Then there is the very rich vein of childrens literature featuring ordinary contemporary children navigating and adventuring through a contemporary, nonfantastical world that is nonetheless beyond the direct influence of adults, at least some of the time.
As a kid, I was not really into reading, too busy with doing things: playing until I had not a trace of energy left except to eat my mothers lunch or evening meal, playing to avoid some responsibility that might come my way if I was too available; finding ways to make money without which I would have none to buy soda-pop or candy, dinky-toys or go to the movies; exploring all the places where adventure beckoned in those places on that above map.
CHILDHOOD NOW
The thing that strikes me when I think about the Wilderness of Childhood in this third millennium is the incredible degree of freedom my parents gave me to adventure in its world. A very grave, very significant shift in our idea of childhood has occurred since then. The Wilderness of Childhood is gone; the days of adventure are past. The land ruled by children, to which a kid might exile himself for at least some portion of every day from the neighbour-ring- kingdom of adulthood, has in large part been taken over, co-opted, colonized, and finally absorbed by neighbours and others, adults and an endless print and electronic media.
TOURISM
The traveller, arguably a particular kind of seasoned tourist, eventually learns that the only way for him or her to come to know a city, to form a mental map of it, however provisional, and begin to find their own way around it is to visit it alone or with a friend, preferably on foot, and then become as lost as one possibly can. I have been to many cities and towns in the world over 100, and many of them maybe a half-dozen times in my life, on visits of different kinds, and yet I dont really know them because every time Ive visited, I have been picked up and driven around, and taken to see the sights by someone far more versed than I in the citys wonders and hazards to me its all just a vast jumbled lot of stage sets and backdrops passing by the window of a car, or homes and places visited by my friends or by me as I stopped for a hamburger or a pie on my way through.
CHILDREN IN OUR WORLD
What we as adults provide for our children is a kind of door-to-door, all-encompassing escort service, contrived to enrich the lives of our children. We schedule their encounters for them, driving them to and from one anothers houses so they never get a chance to discover the unexplored lands between. If they are lucky, we send them out to play in the backyard, where they can be safely fenced in and even, in extreme cases, monitored with security cameras. The sandlots and creek beds, the alleys and woodlands have been abandoned in favour of a system of reservations, MacDonalds play-areas, the commercial Jungles, the Discovery Zones: jolly internment and or play centres mapped and planned by adults with no blank spots aside from doors marked staff only. When children roller-skate or ride their bikes, they go forth armoured as for battle, and their parents typically stand nearby.
There are reasons for all of this. The helmeting and monitoring, the corralling of children into certified zones of safety, is in part the product of the Consumer Reports mentality, the generally increased consciousness, in America and increasingly in the affluent parts of our global society, of safety and danger. To this one might add the growing demands of the insurance actuarial and the national pastime of torts. But the primary reason for this curtailing of adventure, this closing off of Wilderness, is the increased anxiety we all feel over the abduction of children by strangers; we fear the wolves in the Wilderness.
This is not a rational fear; in 1999, for example, according to the Justice Department, the number of abductions by strangers in the United States was 115. Such crimes have always occurred at about the same rate; being a child is exactly no more and no less dangerous than it ever was. What has changed is that the horror is so much better known. At times it seems as if parents are being deliberately encouraged to fear for their childrens lives, though only a cynic would suggest there was money to be made in doing so.
The endangerment of children--that persistent theme of our lives, arts, and literature over the past twenty years---resonates so strongly because, as parents, as members of preceding generations, we look at the poisoned legacy of modern industrial society and its ills, at the world of strife & radioactivity, climatological disaster, overpopulation, and commodification, and feel guilty. As the national feeling of guilt over the extermination of the Indians led to the creation of a kind of cult of the Indian, so our children have become cult objects to us, too precious to be risked. At the same time they have become fetishes, the objects of an unhealthy and diseased fixation. And once something is fetishized, capitalism steps in and finds a way to sell it.
What is the impact of the closing down of the Wilderness on the development of childrens imaginations? This is what I worry about the most. I grew up with a freedom, a liberty that now seems breathtaking and almost impossible. After the usual struggle and exhilaration of learning to ride a bicycle, and the joy of achievement there now rapidly follows a creeping sense of puzzlement and disappointment. It quickly becomes clear that there is nowhere to ride its nowhere that I am willing to let this child go. Should I send my children out to play?
There is a small grocery store around the corner, not over two hundred yards from our front door. Can I let my children ride there alone to experience the singular pleasure of buying themselves an ice cream on a hot summer day and eating it on the sidewalk, alone with their thoughts? Soon after they learn to ride, they might go out on a lovely summer evening. If I wander with my child on the streets of our lovely residential neighbourhood at, say, after-dinner in what might be seen as a peak moment of togetherness, like the magic hour of my own childhood, it is quite possible that we will not encounter a single other child.
Even if I do send them out, will there be anyone to play with? Art is a form of exploration, of sailing off into the unknown alone, heading for those unmarked places on the map. If children are not permitted not taugh to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?
--------------
Note: I have had to remove all the apostrophes because they do not come across as apostrophes. They come across, when typed into the text, as complex visual entities; it is better to have no apostrophes than visually confusing text inclusions.
The enlightened planners had provided, for the first citizens of those little towns, a number of such lingering swaths of green. They have all come and gone: both the planners and the green belts. I did go back to another place where I had lived much later in my childhood, in my early adolescence, that third stage of childhood in the lifespan according to some human development psychologists. Some new planners had done a great job of tidying-up some of the old places where I once played cowboys and Indians or field hockey; young families could now walk and take their kids to play on the swings and wooden-apparatus.
Those woods, to which I referred above, were tame as can be when I walked through them on the way to school. Yet at night they still filled with unfathomable shadows. In the winter they lay deep in snow and seemed to absorb, to swallow whole, all the ordinary noises of your body and your world. Scary things could still be imagined to take place in those woods. It was the place into which the bad boys fled after they egged your windows on Halloween and left your pumpkins pulped in the driveway. There were no Indians in those woods where once they had been. We learned about those Indians in school and, at least for me, at summer camps. They had many names.
Swift, straight-shooting, silent as deer those Indians peopled the periphery of my life. They were long gone except for their lovely names: Seneca, Iroquois, Mohawk, Cayuga, Onondaga, Tuscarora, Oneida, Delaware, Nanticoke, Creek and Cherokee. As I got older I found out dozens of other Indian names for tribes which lived all over North America. As an adult I experienced whole new peripheries to my life.
A minor but undeniable aura of romance was attached to the history of Ontario, my home province. It was a very big place, but no one I knew went into its far north, into its biggest parts. As far as I was concerned, and everyone else I knew, Ontario was southern Ontario with Barrie, Owen Sound and, on the rarest occasions, Tobermory at the end of the Bruce Peninsula, 300 kms north of Toronto. For me Ontario was all about Lake Ontario and Lake Erie and the towns and cities along their edge over to Windsor in the west where I went to teachers college, and to Kingston in the east where the St. Lawrence River began and where I visited a psychiatrist once in 1969; or over to Ottawa where I went for my honeymoon in 1967.
The St. Lawrence River was another great landmark and world on the periphery of my childhood life-narrative. This large river flowed through the middle latitudes of North America and connected the Great Lakes with the Atlantic Ocean. Its drainage area included the Great Lakes, the world's largest system of fresh water lakes. I knew none of this while growing-up. The lakes of which Ontario and Erie were but two, the biggest lakes in my world and Ontarios world of smaller lakes, were just great places to swim on hot summer days.
But the Wilderness of Childhood, as any kid could attest who grew up and survived to tell their story in later adulthood, had nothing to do with trees or nature. It was the same for my father who grew up on the streets of Merthyr Tydfil a city of 30,000 in Wales with its coal mines and pubs, one of which was owned by his father, more than half a century before. I could lose myself on vacant lots and playgrounds, when I was five, or in the alleyway behind the shops in town, in the neighbours yards, on the sidewalks. Anywhere, in short, I could reach on my tricycle and then my bicycle or simply by walking. By these three means I covered my neighbourhood, my world, in a regular route first(with my tricycle) for half a mile and then several miles(with my bike and walking) in every direction.
I knew the locations of all my classmates houses, the number of pets and siblings they had, the state of their bedrooms in particular and houses in general, the brand of popsicle or type of food they served, if any; the potential dangerousness of their fathers, how pretty their mothers were. These locations, in addition to the places of the shops, the ice-skating ring, the curling club, the homes of the girls I liked, the frozen ponds in winter where I played hockey---provided perfectly the mental map of my world. It is a world I have endlessly revised and refined since I left it back in the summer of 1962 never to return---except for a 24 hour period when I dropped in during a visit to Canada some 40 years later on my way to Europe. Childhood is, or has become, for me a rich and important branch of cartography.
Most great stories of adventure, from The Hobbit to Seven Pillars of Wisdom, come furnished with a map. That’s because every story of adventure is in part the story of a landscape, of the interrelationship between human beings and topography. Every adventure story is conceivable only with reference to the particular set of geographical features that in each case sets the course, literally, of the tale. But I think there is another, deeper reason for the reliable presence of maps in the pages, or on the endpapers, of an adventure story, whether that story is imaginatively or factually true. We have this idea of armchair traveling, of the reader who seeks in the pages of a ripping yarn or a memoir of polar exploration the kind of heroism and danger, in unknown, half-legendary lands, that he or she could never hope to find in life.
This is a mistaken notion, in my view. People read stories of adventure and write them because they have themselves been adventurers. Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity. For the most part the young adventurer sets forth equipped only with a fragmentary map. That map is marked: here there be tigers and there mean kid with air rifle. That child constructs out of a patchwork of personal fortune and misfortune, bedtime reading and an accumulated local lore, a grey chaos and dream of stuff, his world. It is this world, as I say above, which is his base for any historical revisionism.
A striking feature of literature for children is the number of stories, many of them classics of the genre, that feature the adventures of a child, more often a group of children, acting in a world where adults, particularly parents, are completely or effectively out of the picture. Think of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Railway Children, or Charles Schulzs Peanuts. Then there is the very rich vein of childrens literature featuring ordinary contemporary children navigating and adventuring through a contemporary, nonfantastical world that is nonetheless beyond the direct influence of adults, at least some of the time.
As a kid, I was not really into reading, too busy with doing things: playing until I had not a trace of energy left except to eat my mothers lunch or evening meal, playing to avoid some responsibility that might come my way if I was too available; finding ways to make money without which I would have none to buy soda-pop or candy, dinky-toys or go to the movies; exploring all the places where adventure beckoned in those places on that above map.
CHILDHOOD NOW
The thing that strikes me when I think about the Wilderness of Childhood in this third millennium is the incredible degree of freedom my parents gave me to adventure in its world. A very grave, very significant shift in our idea of childhood has occurred since then. The Wilderness of Childhood is gone; the days of adventure are past. The land ruled by children, to which a kid might exile himself for at least some portion of every day from the neighbour-ring- kingdom of adulthood, has in large part been taken over, co-opted, colonized, and finally absorbed by neighbours and others, adults and an endless print and electronic media.
TOURISM
The traveller, arguably a particular kind of seasoned tourist, eventually learns that the only way for him or her to come to know a city, to form a mental map of it, however provisional, and begin to find their own way around it is to visit it alone or with a friend, preferably on foot, and then become as lost as one possibly can. I have been to many cities and towns in the world over 100, and many of them maybe a half-dozen times in my life, on visits of different kinds, and yet I dont really know them because every time Ive visited, I have been picked up and driven around, and taken to see the sights by someone far more versed than I in the citys wonders and hazards to me its all just a vast jumbled lot of stage sets and backdrops passing by the window of a car, or homes and places visited by my friends or by me as I stopped for a hamburger or a pie on my way through.
CHILDREN IN OUR WORLD
What we as adults provide for our children is a kind of door-to-door, all-encompassing escort service, contrived to enrich the lives of our children. We schedule their encounters for them, driving them to and from one anothers houses so they never get a chance to discover the unexplored lands between. If they are lucky, we send them out to play in the backyard, where they can be safely fenced in and even, in extreme cases, monitored with security cameras. The sandlots and creek beds, the alleys and woodlands have been abandoned in favour of a system of reservations, MacDonalds play-areas, the commercial Jungles, the Discovery Zones: jolly internment and or play centres mapped and planned by adults with no blank spots aside from doors marked staff only. When children roller-skate or ride their bikes, they go forth armoured as for battle, and their parents typically stand nearby.
There are reasons for all of this. The helmeting and monitoring, the corralling of children into certified zones of safety, is in part the product of the Consumer Reports mentality, the generally increased consciousness, in America and increasingly in the affluent parts of our global society, of safety and danger. To this one might add the growing demands of the insurance actuarial and the national pastime of torts. But the primary reason for this curtailing of adventure, this closing off of Wilderness, is the increased anxiety we all feel over the abduction of children by strangers; we fear the wolves in the Wilderness.
This is not a rational fear; in 1999, for example, according to the Justice Department, the number of abductions by strangers in the United States was 115. Such crimes have always occurred at about the same rate; being a child is exactly no more and no less dangerous than it ever was. What has changed is that the horror is so much better known. At times it seems as if parents are being deliberately encouraged to fear for their childrens lives, though only a cynic would suggest there was money to be made in doing so.
The endangerment of children--that persistent theme of our lives, arts, and literature over the past twenty years---resonates so strongly because, as parents, as members of preceding generations, we look at the poisoned legacy of modern industrial society and its ills, at the world of strife & radioactivity, climatological disaster, overpopulation, and commodification, and feel guilty. As the national feeling of guilt over the extermination of the Indians led to the creation of a kind of cult of the Indian, so our children have become cult objects to us, too precious to be risked. At the same time they have become fetishes, the objects of an unhealthy and diseased fixation. And once something is fetishized, capitalism steps in and finds a way to sell it.
What is the impact of the closing down of the Wilderness on the development of childrens imaginations? This is what I worry about the most. I grew up with a freedom, a liberty that now seems breathtaking and almost impossible. After the usual struggle and exhilaration of learning to ride a bicycle, and the joy of achievement there now rapidly follows a creeping sense of puzzlement and disappointment. It quickly becomes clear that there is nowhere to ride its nowhere that I am willing to let this child go. Should I send my children out to play?
There is a small grocery store around the corner, not over two hundred yards from our front door. Can I let my children ride there alone to experience the singular pleasure of buying themselves an ice cream on a hot summer day and eating it on the sidewalk, alone with their thoughts? Soon after they learn to ride, they might go out on a lovely summer evening. If I wander with my child on the streets of our lovely residential neighbourhood at, say, after-dinner in what might be seen as a peak moment of togetherness, like the magic hour of my own childhood, it is quite possible that we will not encounter a single other child.
Even if I do send them out, will there be anyone to play with? Art is a form of exploration, of sailing off into the unknown alone, heading for those unmarked places on the map. If children are not permitted not taugh to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?
--------------
Note: I have had to remove all the apostrophes because they do not come across as apostrophes. They come across, when typed into the text, as complex visual entities; it is better to have no apostrophes than visually confusing text inclusions.