From the book "The Soul's Code : in search of character and calling." Copyright © 1996 by James Hillman. This Warner Books edition is published by arrangement with Random House, New York, NY. Warner Books, Inc., New York, NY.
Chapter 7 Penny Dreadfuls and Pure Fantasy
How do we select the right nutrients for the acorn? How can we judge what is a waste of time? Is there health food for the soul?
In the good old days, values were established and directions from them clear. There was standard stuff to study, a canon (today renamed the core curriculum)---not only in the basic three R's, but also in drawing, elocution (pronunciation), music appreciation, nature studies. The minds of very small children were guided, or drilled, whether in the direction of reason or of aesthetic imagination. John Stuart Mill, the nineteenth-century philosopher whom we know today mainly for his utilitarianism and his ideas of liberty, never attended school. Educated at home by his father, he began learning Greek at three and Latin at eight, and by fourteen had read most of the major ancient texts in the original. Another wondrous example of nineteenth-century education was the Anglo-Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton:
At three he was a superior reader of english and considerably advanced in arithmetic . . . at five . . . he loved to recite yards of Homer in Greek; at eight he added a mastery of Italian and French . . . and extemporized (improvised) fluently in Latin. . . . By thirteen William was able to brag that he had mastered one language for each year he had lived.
This demonic appetite for language took him through Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, Chaldee, Malay, Bengali . . ."and he is about to commence the Chinese" wrote his uncle, complaining of the cost of providing the books for his ravenous nephew.
Francis Galton, who pioneered the study of genius and was yet another of these freak Victorian masterminds, could read by the time he was two and a half, sign his name before three, and wrote this letter to his sister before he was five:
My dear Adele,
I am four years old and can read any English book. I can say all the Latin substantives and adjectives and active verbs besides 52 lines of Latin poetry. I can cast up any sum in addition and multiply by
2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10
I can also say the pence table, I read French a little and I know the clock.
Francis Galton
February-15-1827
Nearer to our day---in time only, but just as distant in spirit as Galton and Mill---is the punishment meted out to Dorothy Thompson by her Methodist minister father. Thompson, born a century ago, was once named by 'Time' magazine the most influential woman in America next to Eleanor Roosevelt. She was a persuasive liberal journalist, the first American woman to head a foreign news bureau, and the first correspondent to be expelled from Germany by personal order of Hitler. In her columns and broadcasts she reached millions for years, taking on the right wing, the Republicans, the anti-Semites, the fascists and Clare Booth Luce with courage, skill, and much learning.
Once, when she slapped her little sister
her father locked her in a closet and would not let her out until she could recite Shelley's "Adonais" from beginning to end. By the time she was grown, Dorothy could deliver without pause whole chapters of the Bible, the sonnets of Shakespeare, great chunks of 'Leaves of Grass,' Chesterton's "Lepanto," dozens of the Psalms, and the entire Constitution of the United States.
The kind of punishment, though decreed by her father and decidedly cruel and unusual by today's educational standards, seems to have been chosen by her own protective daimon, who had, of course, anyway selected that particularly literary father. The memorizing of texts fit the pattern of her life of writing among such colleagues as Alexander Woollcott, Rebecca West, H. L. Mencken, and Thompson's own husband, the Nobel Prize--winning writer Sinclair Lewis.
Mill, Hamilton, Galton, and Thompson are exceptions only in their early mastery, not with respect to the materials mastered. From Plato (who insisted upon music as essential to the canon) through the Stoics and Sophists; from the Catholics (especially the Jesuits), the Orthodox Jews, and Philipp Melanchthon (whose ambition it was to educate Protestant Germany) to Rousseau and Froebel with their Romantic programs; and on up to Rudolf Steiner and Maria Montessori, there have always been strong recommendations in the European tradition for an authorized program to prevent the young mind from wasting itself on trivia. The inner life of the mind, whether endowed innately or merely a tabula rasa (clean slate), needed to be correctly nourished in its full range, not only by means of logic and mathematics but also by addressing its ethical character and imaginative powers.
Therefore many recommendations have been less strictly mental and less literate, but just as dogmatically enforced. Hands to be kept busy; play restricted or supervised; no idleness; chores finished. Construction: Make things, tinker, sew, learn crafts, do repairs and maintenance. Manners at table, in dress, in hygiene, with neighbors. Language was disciplined so the child would be well-spoken. Moral instruction from the religious, who ministered to the soul with Bible, hymns, and homilies. And certainly not least, especially for the Romantics from Rousseau through Steiner, was the instruction of nature, the soul's primordial nutrient drawn from fields, flowers, and farmyards, and from the coasts and headlands of rocks and tidal pools, sea sounds and the winds.
Edith Cobb's 'The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood' makes it clear that the poetic basis of mind needs the nourishment given by the phenomena of nature. Imagination cannot come into its own without immersion in the natural world, or at least without occasional contact with its wonders. John Lennon, for instance, a city boy, visited Scotland at the very beginning of adolescence, and while out for a walk one day he lapsed into "a trance . . . the ground starts going beneath you and the heather, and I could see this mountain in the distance. And this kind of 'feeling' came over me: I thought . . . this is that one they're always talking about, the one that makes you paint or write because it's so overwhelming that you have to tell somebody . . . so you put it into poetry."
Conservative thinkers from Plato through Steiner to scornful Allan Bloom and that thug of virtue, William Bennett, with their various notions of back-to-basics, disciplined education that supposedly brings out the best in the child by giving it the best, would at the same time suppress vulgarities like porn and pulp (and even wine, according to Plato), insisting that imagination must be fed good stuff of cultural quality, natural reality, inventive challenge, and moral example. The soul, they say, needs models for its mimesis (imitation) in order to recollect eternal verities and primordial images. If in its life on earth it does not meet these as mirrors of the soul's core, mirrors in which the soul can recognize its truths, then its flame will die and its genius wither. Ideal heroes and heroines provide the ecotypes on earth that release the guiding archetypes of the soul. [archetype: Psychoanalysis (in Jungian psychology): a primitive mental image inherited from the earliest human ancestors, and supposed to be present in the collective unconscious.]
But please now look at these stories of those whose flame blazed and whose genius flowered, and try to swallow the kinds of "soul food" their imaginations relished. Cole Porter, debonair songwriter of sophisticated word-rich lyrics, en route to and from his music lessons while a small-town Indiana schoolboy, became an "insatiable consumer" of spicy books---penny dreadfuls---hiding them away in his music bag. No sooner was the lesson done than he sped off to spend the day plunged into cheap adventure tales. Frank Lloyd Wright played viola as a boy; he read Goethe, 'Hans Brinker,' Jules Verne---but also "tattered thrillers from the Nickel Library." "Blood-and-thunder penny pulps . . . exerted great fascination [on James Barrie] with their garish covers and manly oaths issuing in balloons from sneering faces." Richard Wright, Mississippi poor and without enough to eat was "forbidden to read anything except church literature and the Bible at home." He managed to get hold of "pulps and dime novels . . . with money he earned as a delivery boy." He loved murder mysteries and read "Flynn's 'Detective Weekly' and 'Argosy,' both popular magazines of the 1920's." Havelock Ellis read his Milton and Walter Scott and Defoe; but also he fell prey to a "hypnotic concentration" on 'The Boys of England,' a penny weekly which printed dramas "as high and remote from reality as were some of its settings." Ellis read "while he was eating, while stomping the streets alone, and even somethings while ostensibly sleeping."
Sir Edmund Hillary, the first European to scale Everest, read, before his teen years, the Tarzan tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and also H. Rider Haggard, and others like them. "In my imagination I constantly reenacted heroic episodes, and I was always the hero." Another reader of Rider Haggard was John Lennon.
Then there is the high school dropout guy who "dressed mostly in black, drove a silver Civic, dined at Denny's and Jack in the Box, read crime novels and comics voraciously, loved Elvis and the Three Stooges, always celebrated his birthday at the movies, and---legend has it---amassed $7,000 in parking tickets." The movies he particularly liked portrayed women in prison and Asian martial arts. The person? Quentin Tarantino, scriptwriter and film director. His major film to date: 'Pulp Fiction.'
We need to remember that as the bodies of sports giants have often been raised on junk food, the imagination may be fed by cheap, popular, and "unhealthy" equivalents. What matters is passion, which may be more predictive of capacity and productive of motivation than other usual benchmarks. Cole Porter said: "I suppose some of my lyrics owe a debt to those naughty books." There is no right food and no wrong food; the food must only meet the appetite, the appetite find its kind of food.
As for the "acornic" significance of "extra-curricular books," consider Coleridge. He read of "'the Sufferings and Surprising Adventures of Mr. Philip Quarli' one of whose deeds was the shooting of a large and beautiful seabird . . . an action he immediately regrets." 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,' to which this dead seabird is central, is perhaps Coleridge's best-known longer work.
There are, I believe, certain necessary nutrients besides the occasions of chance that evoke the early imagination, as they did for Lennon on the heath and for Havelock Ellis immersed in his penny dreadful. Among the many prerequisites for furthering imagination I would single out at least these three: first, that the parents or intimate caretakers of a child have a fantasy about that child; second, that there be odd fellows and peculiar ladies within the child's perimeter; and third, that obsessions be given courtesy.
Biographers usually look to the mother. Lyndon Johnson was called a mama's boy; so was Franklin Roosevelt; Harry Truman handwrote letters to his mother while at the Potsdam Conference ordering world history. So it is customary to see in a mother's ideals and intensity of ambition what is carried out by one or another of her children. According to biographers, the source of success appears to lie in a mother's doting---or in her neglectful selfishness, which forces an offspring out on its own.
This piece of the parental fallacy (a mistaken belief), with all its accompanying jargon about bad double-binding mothers or seductive smothering mothers, and also about absent or possessive and punitive fathers, so rules the explanations of eminence (prestige) that its jargon determines the way we tell the stories of our own lives. Notice that these psychologisms draw attention away from the child and back to the parent, who asks: "How am I doing?" They raise doubts and anxieties, not about the nature of the child, but about the parents' own problems: Have I the right attitude? Am I too strict? Too lenient? Am I good enough?---all of which reveal the inherent and almost inescapable self-referential narcissism in the parental fallacy. Of this we have already said enough in the chapter devoted to this theme. Here we need only recover one decisive influence from our global condemnation of the parental fallacy, and that is the parental 'fantasy.'
Parental Fantasy
What is the connection, if any, between the parental imagination---by "parent" I always mean the immediate, intimate caretaker of a child---and the child's acorn? How do the parents imagine the child? What do they see in this little person who has been dropped in their laps; what is it bearing on those frail and bony shoulders, what is it looking for with those eyes? Have the parents a fantasy of an invisible fate in the visible traits displayed every day?
Justus Bergman certainly looked for, and recorded, the visible traits displayed every day in his daughter, Ingrid. He was a man filled with fantasy. Ingrid was named after the Swedish princess born two years prior. On Ingrid's first birthday, Justus filmed her in a white dress; on her second birthday he filmed her again. His third film shows her laying flowers on her mother's grave. Justus had a photography shop and studio on Stockholm's elegant Strandvagen, a hundred yards from the Royal Dramatic theater, and Ingrid was a favorite subject of his camera, dressing in various roles and loving to act in front of her father. At age eleven, during an interval at the theater, she announced her vocation: "Papa, Papa, that's what I'm going to do."
The parental fallacy here sees sublimated incest, a father's daughter who lived out his controlling fantasy, as so many sons live out their mother's dreams. The Platonic fantasy, however, says Ingrid's soul selected exactly the right place and the right father to foster her acorn's desire. She even selected the right mother, who, by dying early, allowed the intertwining of Ingrid's calling and Justus's fantasy to proceed unimpeded by triangles of jealousy.
The parental fantasy may not come as directly as in the example of Justus Bergman. It may instead show itself via dreams, or in overanxiousness, or in parental fights over school, over discipline, over sickliness---and over odd obsessions such as reading pulp fiction and watching midnight movies. The way the child's behavior is interpreted accords with the fantasy of the caretaker's vision. Does the mother kick her boy out of the house to play rough with other kids in the street because it's her fantasy that this boy needs to toughen up and be the man about the house (counterphobic to his weaknesses, and hers), or because of her fear of sissies and "queers," or because in her mind's eye she sees her son as a raider, with dash and good looks? The behaviors her instructions ordain or prohibit affect the child less than does the fantasy guiding her instructions.
To expect primary caretakers, for example, parents, to see through the child into the acorn, to know who is there 'in nuce' (nucleus), and to tend to its concerns---is far too much. That is why teachers and mentors come into the world. He or she is another special person, often someone whom we fall in love with early, or who falls for us; we are two acorns on the same branch, echoing similar ideals. What heartsease and bliss in finding a corresponding soul who singles us out! How long we move about, desperate to discover someone who can really see us, tell us who we are. One of the main seductions of early love, and early therapy, arises from the desire to meet a person who can (or who you believe can, or who can at least pretend to) see you.
Greg LeMond, the remarkable American cyclist who won the Tour de France, received from his father money for equipment, clothing, and bicycling magazines. In addition to that encouragement, LeMond had a mentor: Roland Della Santa, a master bicycle-frame builder. "Once or twice a week," said LeMond, "I went to Roland's shop and hung out while he worked. He'd tell me stories about the great European stars, thousands of screaming fans and legendary races . . ." The mentor provides specialized knowledge as well as the lore, the atmosphere of a tradition.
As caretakers, parents cannot also be mentors. The roles and duties differ. It is enough for a parent to keep a roof over your head and food on the table, and to get you up and off to school. Providing a cave of security, a place for regressions is no small job. Freed of these tasks, the mentor has only one: to recognize the invisible load you carry and to have a fantasy about it that corresponds with the image in the heart. One of the most painful errors we make is to expect from a parent a mentor's vision and blessing and strict teaching, or expecting from a mentor shelter and concern for our human life. Van Cliburn's mother, who taught him piano for years, set a sharp border between her two natures: "When I'm teaching you, I'm not your mother."
The failure to distinguish sufficiently between the rather ruthless limits of mentoring and the rather broadly mundane responsibilities of parenting---as when parents try to be guiding instructors, and mentors make a family of their following---leads to bitter breakups between apprentices and mentors. The younger person's wish to be fathered or mothered in a caring personal way (according to the Yale study by Daniel J. Levinson and his team) is the main reason for a failed end to the mentor relationship. The confusion of expectations results also in the common resentment of "adult children" who complain that their parents never accurately assessed them, never recognized their inner nature.
The complaint may refer to more than absent parenting or mentoring. There may have been no access to fictional or historical figures, those imaginary mentors who can continue as guides even into older age. When Truman was about to fire MacArthur for insubordination and incompetence, he went back to the image of Abraham Lincoln, who had to fire General George McClellan despite all the political consequences of alienating McClellan (who later entered politics and tried for the presidency). The parallels and threats were clear, but Lincoln provided the mentoring image. Diane Arbus had 'Jane Eyre'; J. P. Morgan, Washington and Napoleon; John Lennon, 'Alice in Wonderland.' Gary Gilmore, executed for murders, had "studied the legends of violence . . . the stories of John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, and Leopold and Loeb . . . Barbara Graham, Bruno Hauptmann, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs. . . . [He] brought home books about condemned men and women, and read them avidly." [Mikal Gilmore, "Family Album," 'Granta' 37 (Autumn 1991): 15.]
Books too can be mentors, even providing a moment of initiation. R. D. Laing, writer, philosopher, and revolutionary psychiatrist, tells of this discovery in a small public library, while he was still an adolescent in the 1940s. He came upon Kierkegaard while
eating my way through the library, I mean I was looking at all the books . . . working my way from A to Z. . . . The first major thing of Kierkegaard that I read . . . was one of the peak experiences of my life. I read that through, without sleeping, over a period of about 34 hours just continually. . . . I'd never seen any reference to him . . . that directed me to it. It was just this complete vista. . . . It just absolutely fitted my mind like a glove . . . here was a guy who had 'done' it. I felt somehow or another within me, the flowering of one's life.
This moment of initiation is also like a ritual of adoption. Kierkegaard---along with Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche---became one of Laing's spiritual parents, a member of the family tree that nourished his acorn and fed his intellectual fantasy. You expect less from your natural parents, and they become easier to bear once you have discovered the other family tree on which the life of your soul depends.
Perhaps the worst of all atmospheres for your daimon, trying to live with your parents in their place and circumstances, arises when these parents have 'no fantasy whatsoever' about you. This objective, neutral environment, this normative, rational life is a vacuum with nothing blowing through. So-called good parents abstain from fantasies for their children. Each person has his own life and her own decisions to make. "Good parents" don't interject their prejudices, their values and judgments. Unconditional positive regard is all a young person needs: "I'm sure you'll succeed at whatever you decide to do." "I'm with you, whatever it is, all the way." The fantasy that governs these parental stupidities is distancing, euphemistically called independence: You have your own room, with your own TV and your own phone line. Independence as distancing finds its daily (or evening) expression in the great American long distance addiction and the phrase "I love you" spoken over the phone. No ideas, no indignation, no anxiety, and no fantasy; love as anesthetic. This sentence, "I love you," parroted back and forth by child and parent may have a subtext that means many things, but it definitely does not mean love, for when you love someone you are filled with fantasies, ideas, and anxieties.
For a documentary of this void, watch the twelve-part television series 'An American Family,' which chronicles the day-to-day "life" of the Louds, a Santa Barbara, California, household of Mom and Dad and five kids during the early 1970s. Marriage, family, and individual personality gradually collapse before your eyes, and the reason unfolds as you watch: The home has no living fantasy.
The great difference between these people in California and the ones portrayed in Chekhov or in novels of family decay---'Buddenbrooks,' say---lies in a family life enriched by class commitments, cultural concerns, probing conversations into the imagination, wild longings, regrets, and especially despairs. Literature gives to the despairs the complex flavors of irony and the beauty of tragedy. These fictional people are not only living family, they are living fantasy. The fictions of these families are more vivid than the family-fiction lived by the Louds, which has no stretch to its imagination.
If there is such a thing as negative culture or culture minus, the Louds have it. The blaring sound of rock is the high point of the creativity in the family. . . . There is no religion, no threatening Jehovah, no merciful Mary, no sense of the beyond of the Talmud, the catechism, the myths of Jupiter and Hera; there is no avenging sensibility; no real moral right or wrong, no sense of judgement of good or bad weighing over the family.
Husband and wife "sit in their living room afraid, it seems, of nothing---no demons give them bad dreams, no wild animals haunt their steps. A brush fire comes within inches of their house. . . . They comment about the fire casually. If the house burns it's insured; nothing really has the power to hurt them." They belong to no clubs or organizations and have no real hobbies. . . . "no passions, such as movies, painting, reading, sewing. When they're in the house they lie by the pool."
Anne Roiphe, whose introduction to the published text of the documentary I am quoting, claims that "culture, if it means anything, must mean the binding of the individual into the social fabric." But the Louds were woven into the consumer-rock music-alcohol-TV-automobile-health-school-apparel-business fabric. Anyway, the social fabric is only a part, and an insufficient part if that social fabric impoverishes individual fantasy. What came into that household left the Louds unsatisfied and numb to that dissatisfaction.
More important to culture than social fabric is the necessity of imagination. And the Loud family are extraordinary people for its lack. They have no fears, no desires, no strong angers or ambitions, no pity and no terror, and no images or language for their expression. Their emotions and their imaginations have not been fed by fantasy. It is as if they have been insured against its risks. Or, more likely, they do share one major fantasy: denial. "I think we're a very well-adjusted family." Mrs. Loud says after the falling-apart and divorce. She is absolutely right, for the Louds are indeed well adjusted to the American dream, with their own blue lagoon in their own sunny yard, sharing their hyperactive passivity. Denial as fantasy; innocence as ideal; happiness as pursuit.
Was the virus that led to the family's disintegration brought by the camera that intruded into their intimacy for seven long months? Or was there no intimacy to begin with, despite the sharing? Did the Louds fall apart because their real life was transposed to TV---or was there no real life? Perhaps the camera was merely a lens that magnified the virus already latent in the home. Despite the limits of this series as an anthropological study, it does display the present fault in the American family: the want of stimulating fantasy, which, I am claiming is the principal fun and agony of parenting.
In the old days, the agon in the family had to do with major struggles between the fantasies of different characters and generations, such as following in the father's business versus getting an education, staying on the land versus moving to the city, marrying the one chosen for you versus marrying whom you chose. And the heart's image of those old days could announce itself only as stubborn refusal to follow or by open rebellion against the parental fantasy that was engraved in a collective social code. The codes have changed, the collective pressures differ, but the heart must still find the courage to make its choices.
The minor gesture toward the unapproved, the half step into rebellion, says "I am not Mother's little helper," "I am not a bookworm nerd," "I am not a lazy layabout," "I am not a bright little career girl." The family fantasy that has a child typed and pinned and wriggling on the wall forces fateful choices on the heart, choices to find another kind of fantasy, anywhere. In the Loud family one son took more than a half step, and he was diagnosed and medicated. The repression of fantasy in them returned full flood into him, into his music, his language, his habits, including cross-dressing.
For it is not ultimately parental control or parental chaos that children run away from; they run from the void of living in a family without any fantasy beyond shopping, keeping up the car, and routines of niceness. The value of the parental fantasy for the child is that it does force it into opposition and into a beginning recognition that its heart is odd, different, and unsatisfied by the shadow cast upon it by the family's view. Far better for parents to wish the new baby were a boy, call her Harry, Sidney, or Clark, and cut her hair short, than for them not to have any wish at all. At least the acorn is challenged and has a reality to contend with, the reality of the parental fantasy, which can result in seeing through the parental fallacy itself---seeing that I am not conditioned by and the result of my parents.
As a parent is not a mentor, so a parent is also not a nut---which brings us to the second necessary nutrient for the acorn: odd fellows and peculiar ladies. The acorn needs living personifications of fantasy, actual people whose lives seem pulp fiction, whose behaviors, speech, dress carry a whiff of pure fantasy. For me, an "extended family" means not simply more interchangeable caretakers among the many relations; it means extending relations beyond the perimeter of what is customary, an extension of imagination from the familiar to the fictional, to those figures talked about, told about, but rarely seen---in jail, in a foreign land, disappeared years ago. Fictions of faraway folk conjure up images of possibilities for the potentials in the acorn. Sometimes these possibilities are directed straight at the child, as if in indirect recognition of latent character: the wayward drunken uncle whom you "take after"; those look-alike cousins from Texas who never went anywhere and never married, who wear strange dresses and shoes and quote Scripture---"so if you don't watch out, you'll grow up to be just like them."
From Mr. Magoo to Big Bird, the peculiar figures of pure fantasy play on this desire for the extraordinary personage. If Dr. Spock for the parents, then Dr. Seuss for the child. Every evening's prime time brings in odd neighbors with strange behaviors that come in and out of the sitcom family set, extending the family with far-out fantasy people. How strongly the child longs for parents to break their roles, dress up for halloween, put on something wild. What is the attraction to theater, to the costume trunk, to make-believe with false faces and greasepaint kits in front of the mirror? Is the point to escape the form I have been put in and by magic disclose the image in the heart? Can I release the genie from its entombment in adaptation by a sudden vision of who might also be here? Is the camcorder in the hand of the child an attempt to restructure the usual into the fantastic?
Primary caretakers who cannot be mentors on the one hand or crazies on the other can at least keep the door unlocked for invasions from the other side, for abduction by the alien imagination, for reminding a child of its essential belonging to the call of the angels.
For the third necessity---that a child's obsessions be given courtesy---I want to draw upon Mary Watkins's intelligent observations of imagination in dreams, in fantasy, in madness, in creative writing, and in children. While imagining is going on, you are somewhat out of yourself, in another zone. Sometimes the state is no more than a daydream, a staring, an absence; sometimes the unfolding of an entire future project; sometimes a hallucinatory terror at night; sometimes an ecstatic vision such as saints enjoyed. There are various intensities---but the more thoroughly engaged you are, the more real the imaginative fantasy, its scenes, its voices, its beings, its feelings and insights. Its reality possesses you and the words "fantasy," "imagination," "vision" do not really apply. It feels all too real and too important. Children under ten, and adolescents too, and of course the very old, find themselves again and again drawn away from the usual into this condition.
Imagining demands absolute attention. The mind in the imagining zone cannot tolerate interruption any more than you can when trying to rewire a circuit breaker or prevent a sauce from curdling, or while preparing notes for tomorrow morning's meeting. Yet when a child sits on the floor in the middle of a mess with three dolls and a slopped pan of water, or runs wild around the yard, in and out of bushes, it is just as thoroughly engaged in its task as you are. Probably more. Its play is its work. Play is a child's job. To pick the little worker up and carry it off, to call the child away to get dressed or clean up before the task is over, breaks right into the middle of its work. Can your obedience to the fantasy of the clock and its kind of reality accommodate the child's reality of fantasy?
The acorn is obsessive. It is all and only concentration, undiluted, like a drop of essence. A child's behaviors elaborate this condensity. The child puts into play the germinal code that pushes it into these obsessive activities. By means of its concentration, a child gains breathing space and practice for the homunculus (a very small human or humanoid creature) of its innate truth, allowing this truth to articulate itself into styles and forms and facilities which it can perform only obsessively, repetitively, exhaustively. Courtesy is called for. Knock before entering.
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