Child as Child, Child as Adult, Adult as Child

One of whiskey river‘s gems over the past week was Stephen Dunn’s poem, “Our Parents” [source]. Its last stanza reads, in part:

We try to say what happened in that first house
where we were, like most children, the only
needy people on earth. We remember
what we were forbidden, who got the biggest slice.
Our parents, meanwhile, must have wanted something
back from us…

Almost inevitably, this put me in mind of Peter Handke’s “Song of Childhood.” I’ve featured this a couple of times before here at RAMH; it forms the basis of the opening voiceover monologue of Wim Wenders’s 1987 film Wings of Desire, like so (in part):

When the child was a child
It walked with its arms swinging,
wanted the brook to be a river,
the river to be a torrent,
and this puddle to be the sea.

When the child was a child,
it didn’t know that it was a child,
everything was soulful,
and all souls were one…

(Hence, of course, the video at the top of this post. I’ve never included a clip from the film’s opening before — mostly because all such videos seemed to be taken down regularly. This one, though, has been up since 2015, so maybe…?)

Of my two earlier references to the poem, I much prefer the “indirect” one, from 2011; it’s not particularly philosophical, but it is a bit more, y’know, written… thanks to the cue of Handke’s refrain. (It’s a post about the music imprinted in me by the mass media of the 1950s — e.g., “When The Boy was a boy, he imagined that each story, verse, and tune had been crafted just for him and for people like him, all within the last few years.”)

But then thinking about all this also brings to mind — yes — a maxim:

#19: As children, few of us were as innocent as we like to imagine. This lack of innocence continues to dog us into adulthood. (Surely one must doubt the hand of coincidence at work here.) What we call — what we imagine to be — “memory” does a nice job of smoothing the rough edges of our experience of youth. Unfortunately, no one has yet invented nostalgia for the present time. Maybe it’s time someone tried; at least then we could wind down our time on earth free of the burdens of conscious guilt.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)