Tag: Giovanni’s Room

Looking Back on Childhood’s Eden

There is much debate in Buddhist circles (at least among the unenlightened) as to what enlightenment or nirvana would look like.  There is a similar debate in Christian circles about the nature of heaven.  Carl Jung had no doubt that it consists of going back to the childlike wonder we had about the world when we were very young, and Jung maintains that this is particularly important in our elder years.  “Proper development in the last part of your life is to rediscover the child you left behind when you commenced your apprenticeship.”

Who is the “child you left behind” before you embarked on your apprenticeship of fear and sophistication? How far back do your earliest memories go?  Psychologists used to say it was four or five years old, but now have pushed it back as early as two and a half.  Lots of us have what we think are very early memories, but turn out to just be recollections of experiences we were told about in our childhoods.  A more important question might be: what did your earliest memories consist of?  For most of us, the world of our childhood was full of bright colors and smells and fascinating experiences. While childhood is a world that fades, it is surely worth recalling.

Wordsworth famously struggled with this in his “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood:”

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

       The earth, and every common sight,

                          To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light,

            The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it hath been of yore;—

                      Turn wheresoe’er I may,

By night or day.

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

Novelists too have tried to grasp what has been lost in the accumulations of time.  In the beginnings of both Great Expectations and David Copperfield, Dickens has his main characters struggle to recoup old memories:

This may be fancy, though I think the memory of most of us can go farther back into such times than many of us suppose; just as I believe the power of observation in numbers of very young children to be quite wonderful for its closeness and accuracy. Indeed, I think that most grown men who are remarkable in this respect, may with greater propriety be said not to have lost the faculty, than to have acquired it; the rather, as I generally observe such men to retain a certain freshness, and gentleness, and capacity of being pleased, which are also an inheritance they have preserved from their childhood. (from David Copperfield)

Then there is James Joyce at the beginning of Portrait of an Artist, talking about memories of “moo cows” and recalling his earliest sensations: “When you wet the bed, first it is warm then it is cold.”  Recently, I read Donal Ryan’s Queen of Dirt Island, which begins with the major character’s earliest memories, when “she was four…, or maybe just turned five.”  The memories then presented are technicolor scenes of grass and cherry blossoms.  Early memories are often magical in sight and sound.  The world was new to us.  In many ways, children are all Adams and Eves waking up to the delights of Eden.

And then there is a story in Sigrid Nunez’s new book, The Vulnerables, about a mother who started to act differently just before her totally unexpected death, in her premonitions acting in a childlike manner:

Whenever I [her daughter] came to visit, we usually took an afternoon walk, and that’s when I noticed something else…Mother kept stopping to point things out – Christmas lights on a neighbor’s house, clouds, squirrels scampering – as if she had never seen such things before.  It reminded me of going out with the kids when they were small and all the world, even the most ordinary things, made them gape. (31)

How wonderful to return to a world where everything can make us gape.  But how to do it?  We all, sometimes, want to return to our childhood Eden, but it is not easy.  James Baldwin puts it best in Giovanni’s Room:

Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden.  I don’t know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword.  Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it.  Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both.

Jung says it is worth the effort to remember. He claims it is the way we were meant to live – not in childish ignorance, but in child-like wonder.  As Wordsworth goes on to say:

 Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

                      We will grieve not, rather find

                      Strength in what remains behind…

It is there, this child-like wonder, in all of us.  It sometimes surfaces in dementia, sometimes a brain injury loosens the gears.  I knew a middle-aged physics professor who had a bad bicycle accident and suddenly began singing the Polish lullabies of his very early youth, before Hitler’s Nazis drove his family out of Europe.  But it is not entirely a matter of memories, I think.  It is a matter of attitude, of what stance we take in this world.  Or refuse to take.

My story, “Like Heaven,” is about an old woman conflating her childhood with her current situation.  Perhaps, in her case, childhood turns out to be the better place to be.

Eden

Many dementia patients – including my mother – revert to the past. In my mother’s case, she escapes to a time before she had a husband or children. Experts in dementia say that age eighteen or nineteen is often where such patients end up. She looks for her parents, for houses and gardens she lived in long ago. Wonderful places. Gardens of Eden where she has no worries, where there is no shame or aging or death. And perhaps we are all looking for such a place. Perhaps we are all trying to return to Eden.

Before the era of progress, all of western culture looked back to Eden. Man had degenerated from the original Eden, from the original Golden Age. And so had the earth. Erosion of mountain peaks and the shortening of the life span from the amazing Biblical ages pointed to a world in the state of slow but continual degeneration. But then, somewhere along the line, we started to look forward rather than back as a civilization. The shift on the macro level, however, has not seemed to make a difference to the old demented person who is sure that her mother is waiting for her somewhere with a bowl of warm tapioca pudding.

Admit it. We all do a little of this backward-looking – we all remember Christmases that had a special glow or a magical childhood hiding place. We all, sometimes, want to return to Eden. But it can’t be done – or at least not easily. James Baldwin put it best:

Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden. I don’t know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both – Giovanni’s Room.

In order to go back, one has to toss aside all that has been accumulated through the years. Renounce it. Religions say that this is one way to come to fulfillment:

The purpose of all valid spiritual disciplines, whatever the religion from which they spring, is to enable us to return to this native state of being – not after death but here and now, in unbroken awareness of the divinity within us and throughout creation… that state, is the Eden to which the long journey of spiritual seeking leads…. (E. Easwaren)

And some say that to grow up, we must leave Never-never Land behind us. In the old and confused, though, it is perhaps a safe haven. They go back to what doctors sometimes call a “reminiscence bump” from earlier life. Faced with physical and mental infirmity, the specter of death and the loss of a familiar world, these elders can go back in their minds to the haven of their youth. And perhaps we should be glad they can.

Where (and when) was your Eden? And have you tried to get it back through effort and acquisition (buying a house like the one you grew up in) or by renunciation? Have you forgotten it? Or are you one of Baldwin’s heroes who can acknowledge it and yet move on?

The story for this week (“Back to the Garden“) is not about elders, but it is about those who are facing the end and the garden where things start and things stop. It is also a tribute to Joni Mitchell and her exhortation in “Woodstock”: “We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”