Was this verse typed out and sent over in a 26-word Word document? Or did Kei just call in and provide the text over the phone? Was there a lengthy editing process? What opposites or rhymes were initially proposed, only to be nixed by a persnickety guardian of quality control at Cartwheel Books, an imprint of Scholastic? I would love to know what went in to Bernstein’s writing process. This is a situation where I think it is okay to just decide the book was written by staff. It was “written by Kei Bernstein.” Here is the entirety of the text: “Written.” I use the word because the book has a writer byline on the back, in addition to the illustrator, Caroline Jayne Church (the illustrations are adequate if lifeless and uninventive). Horsey Up and Down is the worst book ever written. I would always love her, but there was some part of that baby that I could never truly know. This opened a chasm of otherness between us. It was one of her favorite experiences, a peak of her young life, to have me read Horsey Up and Down. Her response was a kind of completely unqualified delight and ecstacy that even babies rarely reach in quite this measure. She insisted we read it again and again, even as I openly discouraged the idea. I just remember that we started reading it to our daughter and she loved it. This was when we wound up with the book Horsey Up and Down. Love depends on it, on that separateness and that inaccessibility.įor me, my daughter’s otherness emerged, almost fully formed, when she was around one. Mamas and papas, listen: It will be difficult, but you will love it, in time. The baby gets older and private thoughts become fueled by language and agendas. Newborn dads, I think, likewise feel basically attached in this way, like their babies are a part of themselves.īut eventually, the otherness will emerge. I like the analogy of the fourth trimester as mothers ease babies into the world in those early weeks. In the case of mom, they literally were attached just a bit before. Indeed, early on, they are nearly always attached to one of their parents’ bodies. They need so much help that they don’t yet feel like autonomous beings in any meaningful sense. But as soon as I try to think about it I find my thoughts employing language and logic that a baby does not have.Ĭonsciousness aside, it’s hard to think about babies as wholly separate beings. (A famous philosophical argument notes that it’s pretty hard to even begin to imagine what it’s like to be a bat-maybe impossible.) If we try to conjure a general sense of the subjective experience of a human baby, we can at least get closer than trying to conjure the subjective experience of echolocation, probably. I don’t think it’s quite as extreme as the bat example. In this case we can’t even remember what this form of consciousness was like for ourselves. This gets weirder still to think about when you have a baby, since they have such a different sort of consciousness than adults, or at least it seems that way. The little frictions in what you can know when you know someone so deeply: That’s love. So even if she doesn’t surprise me on a given day, the day is littered with surprises. But a thousand times a day she does or says something that I couldn’t have scripted or predicted just so. I know my wife more deeply than I’ve ever known anyone. It is why the memory of someone can never compete with the real thing. And the part that is the most beautiful of all is that it is precisely this unbreakable border that creates the little edge of difference-the resistance and static-that makes the experience of connecting with another autonomous soul so transcendent. It’s deeply beautiful, when you think about it a little more, that you are nevertheless able to share such astonishing closeness with someone. I’m using my wife as an example because it’s heavy, when you first start to think about it, that there is this kind of hard limit on how much you can truly know another person. It’s then no longer me, so there’s no sense in which I know what it’s like to be her. If you somehow turned the knob so that I literally was her and having her conscious experience, you’ve given the game away. Consciousness isn’t occupying the vessel. Even in some sort of sci-fi Being John Malkovich situation, as long as it was me tooling around in her mind or walking around in her body, that’s still me and my subjective experience observing what it’s like to be in her head and body. I am very good at estimating how something might make her feel or act-but I cannot know precisely what it feels like to feel those feelings as her. The subjective experience of being her is not and cannot be directly available. Even if I used all of the information available and did everything I could to imagine it and walk a mile in her shoes, it would still be me, with my own dumb consciousness and subjectivity, doing the imagining.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |