Of Childhood Innocence and Rice Fields

I think that intensity is both my gift and my flaw. I am passionate about those things in which I believe but sometimes the passion is so intense that I forget to breathe. I think that I'm perhaps too hard on my fellow humans. I get frustrated with our disdain for the pursuit of the intellectual and angered by our obsessive selfishness. Every now and then I realize that it's time for me to stop and smell the roses, to embrace the moments of joy, to be awed by our creativity instead of appalled by our destructive impulses.

My nearly 19 month old great nephew is the joy of my life. I entertain him by blowing bubbles; he lets me know when he wants more bubble blowing by walking over, placing a small hand on each of my knees and announcing, "Bub." He never tires of trying to capture those spheres of soap and water, and I never tire of blowing them.


When he's at my house, he likes to follow me around whenever I leave the room. Generally the trip is to the kitchen in response to his announcement, "Eat, eat," his shorthand for, "I'm hungry." He makes me laugh at the way he walks close to the open refrigerator and peers inside as if seeking hidden treasure. His new favorite thing is to drink out of my cup, a blue and white 28 oz monster cup. My job is to hold the cup as he sips out of my straw. Most of the time, it contains water, but once it was a bit of mango juice. His face lit up and he did a little jig as he tasted it.


I hope that he will be creative. His grandfather Bob, my sister's husband, is a talented musician, so he's got creative genes.


The creative impulse may be humankind's saving grace. We make grand wars but we also make grand music and art. We paint masterpieces on ceilings and walls. We write operas with music so sweetly beautiful that it makes us weep with joy.

I saw an interesting story on the CBS evening news about rice art in Japan. Artists create images that are transferred onto computer generated grids and enlarged on a massive scale. Then the entire town comes together to plant the images in rice. How wonderfully awesome that hundreds of people work to create these transistory works of art. The rice is eventually harvested, but before the harvest tens of thousands of visitors come to town, boosting the local economy, as they view the rice fields in all their glory.

Inakadate Village, where this creative endeavor began has a population of 8,400. Last year there were 170,000 visitors to the village's rice field. Other rural areas of Japan have also created their own rice art.


I felt uplifted by this story. It seems that I may be wrong about humankind. Perhaps there is hope for a better us, a hope born out of the innocence of childhood and rice fields.

Alice Miller 1923-2010

By Elizabeth

Alice Miller, a psychoanalyst who repositioned the family as a locus of dysfunction with her theory that parental power and punishment lay at the root of nearly all human problems, died at her home in Provence on April 14. She was 87. Her death was announced Friday by her German publisher, Suhrkamp Verlag.

Dr. Miller caused a sensation with the English publication in 1981 of her first book, “The Drama of the Gifted Child.” Originally titled “Prisoners of Childhood,” it set forth, in three essays, a simple but harrowing proposition. All children, she wrote, suffer trauma and permanent psychic scarring at the hands of parents, who enforce codes of conduct through psychological pressure or corporal punishment: slaps, spankings or, in extreme cases, sustained physical abuse and even torture.

Unable to admit the rage they feel toward their tormenters, Dr. Miller contended, these damaged children limp along through life, weighed down by depression and insecurity, and pass the abuse along to the next generation, in an unending cycle. Some, in a pathetic effort to please their parents and serve their needs, distinguish themselves in the arts or professions. The Stalins and the Hitlers, Dr. Miller later wrote, inflict their childhood traumas on millions.

“The Drama of the Gifted Child” struck a chord with mental health professionals. “Clinically, she is almost as influential as R.D. Laing,” the British psychologist Oliver James told The Observer of London in 2005. “Alice Miller changed the way people thought.”

More (via NYT).

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I would say that Alice Miller was the most influential living psychologist, at least in my estimation. Her insights into childhood, with its joys and miseries (mostly the latter), are unparalleled.

Unfortunately, her work is not as well known as it deserves to be. If you want to read only one book on psychology, consider Miller's For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence. And if you don't want to read any psychology books, still read this one. It should be required reading for all prospective parents, teachers, and anyone who spends time with children in any capacity, as well as anyone who ever was a child him/herself.

Our own Octopus referenced Miller's work in his fine post THE SOUL MURDER OF MICHAEL JACKSON AND THE CULTURE OF VICTIM BLAME

Cross-posted from The Middle of Nowhere.

Simple-Dino Observations on Human Personality and Learning for Make Benefit Glorious Epoch of Tertiary Time

When I was a wee but precocious dino, I recall observing my fellow students closely. I noticed a few things, which I here put in terms drawn from an adult sensibility and intellect, that have stuck with me all these years:

1. People’s character takes a set very early in life: the kids to whose speech, actions, and attitudes I attended seemed like little adults already. Some were cynical and jaded even at eight, ten or twelve years old, some were mostly innocent and cheerful, some were dishonest, some curious, some shy, some assertive, etc. It wasn’t too hard to imagine what sorts of adults they might become. Whatever innate factors and external influences make us who we are had already endowed them with recognizable personality traits. As Wordsworth and then Freud said, “The child is father of the man.” It’s certainly true of me: by the time I was around eight, I was pretty much who I am now. – bookish, eccentric, moody, a bit shy but also honest and charitable towards others; unambitious; interested in philosophy, literature and languages; always on the outside of things and events looking in, and preferring it that way. (And, of course, a khaki-hued predatory dinosaur.)

2. For the average bloke and blokette, “Truth” seems to be what Nietzsche says it is in his 1873 essay “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense” (Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn): a species of error – or perhaps today we would prefer the Foucauldian term “discourse” – that has become useful in terms of comfort and power relations. When a teacher puts kids in small groups and gives them some question to work on or a problem to solve, the cleverest one can blurt out the answer right away and it probably won’t make a significant impression on the others: to them, what matters isn’t the answer but rather the social process of arriving at the answer. In Nietzsche’s terms, they aren’t interested in Truth; they are instead trying to make friends, to belong, to demonstrate their power to the group, and so forth. Truth is only the means to such ends, not their goal.

You are welcome to make of these observations what you will, or nothing at all, with regard to the wider political concerns that we so often take up at the ZONE.

I should mention that by the first point, I don’t mean to negate the observation made by Baudelaire and others that most of what humanity has accomplished has been done not because of our nature but rather in spite of it. We have the capacity to change our ways and our thinking (we are not, to use the modern metaphor, hard-wired), to go against nature – it’s just that it’s usually difficult to do that, and much easier not to bother trying. By the second point, I infer only the difficulty of changing people’s minds, of disabusing them of error, and so forth -- not the absolute impossibility of the task. We want to return to the safety of the cave, as in the Platonic parable that in part underwrites Nietzsche’s Über Wahrheit und Lüge – to return to our perceptual, intellectual, and moral comfort zones along with our fellows instead of really thinking things through and doing what honors our own potential and does right by others.

But what do I know? I have a brain about the size of a walnut in a three-foot-long noggin (including the toothsome snout), so perhaps others will have much smarter things to say….