I was reading "Rabbit Redux," the Ramin Setoodeh piece in this week's Newsweek.
He was talking about the imagination—those who use it splendidly well—and I was remembering my friend, Cuileann, who is one of the most imaginative people I know (we met in San Francisco, late last summer). Oh, what she does with words and photographs. What she does with heart.
So I was thinking about her, and then I kept reading, and I was thinking about my own book about the imagination (Seeing Past Z: Nurturing the Imagination in a Fast-Forward World) and then I thought, I wonder what my blogger friends would say about these thoughts Mr. Setoodeh is expressing? So I put them out there, for your comments:
"The only way to understand Alice is to use your imagination. Do you even remember how to do that? In our society of Web links, Wikipedia, Facebook, and reality TV, everything and everybody comes with a label and an exhaustive definition. There's scant room for ambiguity and interpretation. The genius of the 145-year-old Wonderland is that it forces you to bring your own creative juices to the tea party....
"Compare Wonderland with the great children's stories of our time: the Harry Potter series. As inventive as J.K. Rowling's seven books are, they're meticulously detailed (the intricate rules of Quidditch, the class rituals at Hogwarts, all the wizard paraphernalia) to the point of being encyclopedic, which is why the movies work as well as they do—they're road maps of the plot.
"Let the Kid Be." That was the headline topping Lisa Belkin's essay in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine. Perhaps, the piece suggested, we've at last moved beyond "Get-them-into-Harvard-or-bust parenting," perhaps beyond, even, the bad mother confessionals that Ayelet Waldman and a host of bloggers have lately been promoting. Indeed, writes Belkin, a "second wave has taken hold—writers are moving past merely venting and trying to gather the like-minded into a new movement" that some call "slow parenting" and some "free-range parenting" and, if one were to bottom line it, might be defined simply as giving children room to be themselves, as opposed to the resume-building, fear-rattled citizens of a dog-eat-dog world.
Just five years ago, when I published Seeing Past Z: Nurturing the Imagination in a Fast-Forward World, there was, I will be frank, little public interest in the argument that I made within those pages—that it was time to let our children be, that it was our job as parents to open doors, not prescribe pathways, that stories and storytelling were the gifts that we parents must pass on. "I want to raise my son to pursue wisdom over winning," I wrote. "I want him to channel his passions and talents and personal politics into rivers of his choosing. I’d like to take the chance that I feel it is my right to take on contentment over credentials, imagination over conquest, the idiosyncratic point of view over the standard-issue one. I’d like to live in a world where that’s okay."
Perhaps we've entered that era now. Perhaps, with new books such as The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising Kids (Tom Hodgkinson) leading the charge, certain freedoms will be granted—less Suzuki, for example, more afternoons spent wandering along the banks of the mud-rimmed creek. At least until, as Belkin points out, the next parenting movement edges onto the horizon.
I've never been very good at letting moments go. Not skyscapes. Not heartaches. Not eighth-grade talent shows or that moment at graduation when the caps are frisbeed to the sky and the dividing line has been drawn between the future and the past.
So that when I taught young writers for seven consecutive summers, I was, always, in my mind, with those young writers—traveling with them back and forth, trying to see past their page, thinking myself into their process and back out of it again—for their sake, in both directions. And when, today, I was joined on the second floor of a favorite local coffee shop by nine young women, I knew I'd go home with an ache in my heart—they'll all grow up; I'll never know where their lives now will take them.
Their talent runs deep, as does their capacity for thoughtful mutual critique. They listened—they heard—the fragments that I read out loud, some even asking later for titles so that they might read the wholes. There were among them the philosophical and poetical, the one who could write through time and the one who embraced the one moment, the one with a talent for original saturation, the one who knew how to suggest the possibilities of a character's life within the stretch of a single sentence. There was joy as we walked the streets with our cameras in hand. There was compassion for the child we found sitting near a grate, waiting for her mother to come to—well, what, we wondered: to rescue her?
Remain who you are, I urged them, at the session's end. Keep living: whole. And then I read them "Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver, a poem every true heart must know.
The closing lines:
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
I could begin in so many places with this. I'll just begin here: A little past midnight two nights ago, my college freshman sent a long, jostling email full of joyous news and fine explorations (midnight volleyball games, a shot at field reporting for campus TV, an evening out that was just "so much fun"). He wrote the note and sent it; a half hour later, he wrote a second. Just after I sent you the last email, it began, I figured out that I want to minor in writing.
Yes. My heart stopped.
When it started beating again, I had to dance.
Today's email, then, is an open love letter to a guy who has taken this writing journey with me and who will now formally embark upon it on his own. I retrieve a bit of history, a passage from my memoir, Seeing Past Z: Nurturing the Imagination in a Fast-Forward World. In celebration of what was and what becomes.
Can you read the world like you read a book? Can you see in stalks and cows and sheep and rock a telling narrative? Can you teach a child? Can a child teach you? In southern France, we have been thinking of Thoreau: “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” We have been hunting for details, patterns, and surprises, making lists and trading them, working on our capacity to bear witness: Not just to the moon but to the haunting power of the moon. Not just to the dying of the sunflowers but to the fact of so many embedded seeds. Not just to the thick, stone, age-old houses but to the way those houses come alive.
I want my son to grow up poking his fingers through the web of mysteries, hoping for the unexpected, taking pleasure or conviction or understanding from what he finds. I want him to build the bridges we all must learn to build between the world we are taught and the world we read about and the world we will only ever guess at. Curiosity bolsters knowledge, and knowledge feeds intelligence, and intelligence helps us navigate our lives—that is the way it works—and so we are here looking for the cloud of flour above the baker’s shop. For the miniature dogs in the baskets of bikes. For the color of river water to change depending on the light. For the cows to crowd into shady wedges, for boys to head off with fishing poles, for the rain to come at night. We have gone from town to town in southern France, teaching ourselves to pay attention, to see—the domestic and the sacred, the glorified and the wasted, the crumble of a castle and the wedding in the street. Reading the world like a book so that tomorrow or the next day the stories we imagine, tell, act out, or write will pay homage right back to the world.
I was reading "Rabbit Redux," the Ramin Setoodeh piece in this week's Newsweek.
I checked out her blog, and can tell she is imaginative! What a great picture. I have to agree with what he said about so much detail being at our fingertips ... I've found myself Googling a topic to come up with ideas for this or that, when I could probably just think something up on my own!
I had never thought about that - the utter open-endedness of the Alice story and the disregard of explanation throughout.
That may be why the story rattles me so.
Then again, I'm not great with fantasy. It's all I can do to keep a grip on the rules of the "real" world.
;-) A.