“Grownups always say they protect their children, but they’re really protecting themselves. Besides, you can’t protect children. They know everything.” -Maurice Sendak
Just the Right Amount of Darkness
My daughter, Abby, was a big reader growing up. She binge-read a never-ending supply of chapter book series, beginning with Clementine, Ivy & Bean, and an epic eight-book set about cat warriors. Next came the pre-dystopian books that let kids peer into the darkness, but always end with order, light, and justice. I remember her hands seeming tiny holding those big books.
Abby’s childhood best friend was a voracious reader, too, and she lived right down the street from us. Their playdates could be campy made up musical numbers that acted out the plots of the books they were reading. Or they were silent and monastic as they read all day on the bed with the cats.
When they discovered Harry Potter together, their commitment to the books was total, and, at first, communal. But knowing the girls’ different natures, fears, and inclinations, I imagine now that each had her own emerging existential business to take up with those books. They read at different paces, too, and so there were spoilers to consider. Eventually and gently, they grew out of sync as readers, and in other ways, too. It feels bittersweet to think about even now.
A Funeral for Cedric Diggory
I was doing the dishes when Cedric Diggory was murdered. I heard the thud of a book hitting the floor in the next room, and then Abby ran into the kitchen wailing. We sat on the floor and she buried her crying face in my legs. I turned off the water, dried my hands on my shirt, and wormed my fingers through her curls to feel for the wetness of blood. Just the tears.
This was her first encounter with a good character dying young. Cedric Digorry, kind and fair, was dead, and no spell would be bringing him back. I knew that her sense of the world was drifting and shifting in a fundamental way right then and there, as it does for all of us (a shift that for many of us happens much earlier, more frequently, and more gravely, I realize, than the story I’m telling here. I know that’s sheer dumb luck.) But she was my first kid, and this unwelcome, dark re-ordering of the rules was a sad shock. I hated J.K. Rowling in that moment.
Maurice Sendak
I love Maurice Sendak for obvious reasons, like Where the Wild Things Are. But also because Terri Gross adores him and he loves her back in a way that is such a sweet departure from his usual gruff impatience with life and its adult people. His last interview with her before he died made me pull over and cry.
Maurice Sendak thinks we should tell kids everything right up front with no candy coating or soft-pedaling. Life is creation and destruction. Good do-ers can get killed in the end while bad, dumb meanies keep their power. Maybe I should have warned both my kids from the beginning, like Sendak would have. I don’t know. There were many times growing up where I could have used some advanced prep and guard rails. But there were also times I knew stuff that I knew I shouldn’t know yet.
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Teenagers in a World that Can Burn
Most of the time, teens look like normal grown people. Maybe because of this, we put too much on them, tell them too much, ask too much. And questions about innocence and revelation are more complicated now that kids get a 24 hour buffet of shit talk, school shootings, hate crimes, climate calamities, aggression, pettiness…Scrolling alone, they make what sense they can of the world and their place in it, whether they’re ready or not. Meanwhile, truths that kids do need to know– how their neighborhoods came to be so segregated; how to have a healthy relationship; the existence and rights of all kinds of people and families–are now being redacted. Teens are getting both too much truth and not enough.
So what’s an adult in a screwed-up world to do? Filter and reframe, like this Billy Collins poem faux-suggests (before ending in bleak truth)? How do you respect teens’ adultness without dark-filtering their world view?
Maybe the Harry Potter series was too much, too soon for my daughter. She’s 21 now and says it wasn’t, but she also says the Cedric Diggory moment is a vivid and searing memory. I’m glad I was with her that day in the kitchen. To say yes it is so sad about Cedric Diggory, and how it’s true he didn’t do anything wrong and was a good guy and still died…yes, I know, murdered. To hold her and reassure her that it all works out, even if I didn’t believe it.
Today’s poem, “You Begin” by Margaret Atwood, gives us some ways to think and talk about some of this. Here it is:
You Begin Margaret Atwood
You begin this way: this is your hand, this is your eye, this is a fish, blue and flat on the paper, almost the shape of an eye This is your mouth, this is an O or a moon, whichever you like. This is yellow.
Outside the window is the rain, green because it is summer, and beyond that the trees and then the world, which is round and has only the colors of these nine crayons.
This is the world, which is fuller and more difficult to learn than I have said. You are right to smudge it that way with the red and then the orange: the world burns.
Once you have learned these words you will learn that there are more words than you can ever learn. The word hand floats above your hand like a small cloud over a lake. The word hand anchors your hand to this table your hand is a warm stone I hold between two words.
This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world, which is round but not flat and has more colors than we can see.
It begins, it has an end, this is what you will come back to, this is your hand.
Atwood’s poem acknowledges the predicament of navigating a child’s dawning awareness that the world is complicated, often sad, sometimes murky, and that adults don’t have answers. For me, the poem offers a pretty clear strategy: Don’t turn away from a kid's darkness. Honor and comfort their pain. Point them back to those elemental things that can anchor and ease them: their own creative authority, the power of words and art, and the love of those who will bear witness to it all.
The poem reminds us in its beautiful and ruthless way to keep our kids company no matter what. And it reminds us of our limits. In the end, maybe all we can really do is hold their hand in our hand.
Here are some of the things the students and I wondered, said, and wrote about “You Begin:”
There is hesitation at first, as usual, after our one silent, private reading and our three communal ones. Silence in the wake of a good thing. Silence maybe because kids want not to be the one to state the obvious…Can the poem’s immediate “scene” be as simple as this? Yeah.
What’s the action? What’s happening? maybe I ask, or a kid does.
Is it a teacher or parent kind of overseeing a little kid doing a drawing…of the world, a window, fish, something on fire? Dave asks/says. Kids agree. Yeah.
But also there’s stuff about language and what you can know, Ranna says.
Becca responds, Yeah and how the speaker is warning the kid about how much worse and complicated it’s gonna get.
He’s gonna need more crayons, hahaha.
We notice lots of shapes, and ways of interpreting those shapes…2D, 3D, and maybe how your perspective on what’s even available to see and think changes with how many crayons you have, or words you have.
So much discussion about the relationship between form and content. My students think I talk too much about this, and maybe they’re right. The form and content playing off each other in the poem, or working in tandem, or symbiotically. How the poem is what it says.
And the recursive nature of the poem itself…How it’s kind of the shape of a circle, too…Like, you start here, and go out and come back. One kid says something about it being like a board game…
We wonder about when and where the shift in insight happens, like a fulcrum on a see–saw (we had different takes on when the poem turns…) Lake says the poem moves like seasons…
Students talk about the warning tone of the poem. Melanie says it evokes a feeling of when your parent realizes they have to have “A Talk”….
And why…why warn? Especially if the kid only has the capacity to work within their own perceptual field. Should we warn kids of upcoming danger? Should we give kids just bite-size pieces of hard things that we already know? Or do they already know everything, as Sendak insists? We talk about the pros and cons of the different kinds of approaches our own parents took with us. How, as Sofie writes, too much warning makes us anxious, premature knowledge makes us cynical, but too little and we end up doing stupid things, or being shocked too hard when we learn the truth.
Later, after the Cedric Diggory experience with Abby, I ask them about it. The Harry Potter readers among them remember being shocked and upset by his murder, as Abby was.
We wonder who the “you” is in Atwood’s poem. Is it the kid? Us, the readers? Both? And we discuss how this use of the second person calls attention to itself. It’s a little like wearing a really loud belt, Shurron says. We laugh. Excellent.
The tone…it’s a little confrontational or something, isn’t it? Mimi asks.
We talk about metaphors and how kids think in metaphor. I share the story of a friend’s niece, Hannah, who grew up in rural Vermont with her mom who was a dressmaker. And how the first time Hannah came to the city, she saw an escalator and called it “corduroy stairs”...Kids use what they know to describe things they don’t yet have a schema or reference for…
I wonder aloud if the speaker is suggesting that more language means more complication. Or is it that with more complication, more language is required. How does language complicate v clarify…Moving on…
And we talk about hands…how we do so much connecting and expressing with our hands. I remember and share that in so many of the images immediately following the 9/11 attack, people are holding their hand to their mouth.
It’s like a holding back…
Like an “it can’t be…”
Primal, or something.
And we wonder: Why is the hand what we come back to and what we start with? Because we really only have the body, the immediate? That when we focus on the micro, the macro will take care of itself?
Students discuss and write about the third-to-last stanza quite a bit:
The line about the word hand floating above your hand prompts much discussion. Semiotics, letters as shapes, whether we see a desk and think D-E-S-K? (Some of us say we do, and some don’t.)
Like a small cloud over a lake. So lovely. So much more gentle language in this stanza than the world burning stanza. Even the smooth sounds “floats….clouds…lake…stone…” Soothing.
And the last two lines of the stanza…They anchor us, the poem, the kid, the experience— and then the line about holding the warm stone of the child’s (or the reader’s?) hand between two…words (H-A-N-D-S?)
Zohar notices that it’s also weird kind of that the speaker is giving the drawer permission…not just validation, but permission to see the world a certain way…how the kid wants…like, you can see this circle as an O or a moon. “Whichever you like…”
Yeah- I’m not sure you need permission from an adult to see things as you see them as a child…responded Grace. Yeah.
We sometimes put “Upon a Child that Died” by Robert Herrick alongside St. Geraud’s/Bill Knott’s “Minor Poem” and write about the effects of the very different approaches to presenting/framing the death of a child. (Also, see First Death in Nova Scotia). The comparison really pairs and enriches discussions of “You Begin” with regard to the Sendak approach vs. the more Mary Poppins approach (Sugar/medicine); Creation and destruction in Where the Wild Things Are…and “You Begin”…
Any of the usuals: emulation, start a new poem with last line (or any similar but fruitful and revelatory manipulation of the original), musing (short, informal response with word limit), short fiction adaptation, soundtrack, more formal essays on role of any of the tools employed by Atwood and the effects/effectiveness of those tools…
Personal essay on how student writers came to know hard truths they know, and how the delivery method and messenger and timing affected their integration of the hard truths into their world view.
xo
“In light of recent events, the bonds of friendship we made this year will be more important than ever: Remember that and Cedric Diggory will not have died in vain. You remember that, and we’ll celebrate a boy who was kind and honest and brave and true right to the very end.” -Albus Dumbledore
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