A Mirror Floating in Water
Childhood, Freedom and Innocence
by , 09-16-2009 at 09:37 PM (766 Views)
You know, I've been thinking, how interesting it is that children really are the only people who are actually free. It seems that once innocence is lost, freedom is lost. We set ourselves up into our own private prisons once we hit adolecense, and then we set ourselves up in our sociological prisons once we become adults. We get up, we work, we get paid, we eat, we sleep, we die. That's all there is to the average person's life most of the time.
This hypnosis of apathy cannot be found in children, for obvious reason of course; growth development and so on. But it seems, that if one were to place a person in an isolated state his or her's whole life, wouldn't he, upon coming out, still be like a child? Of course he would have gone through all of the natural biological stages of puberty, adolesence and adulthood, but, since he would have no knowledge, nothing, wouldn't he retain his own inner unconscious behavior? It would be as if he had come out, lacking a super-ego.
All psychology aside, it most certainly seems that the freesest people on earth are the ones who smile at the sight of puppies and who chase each other around for no reason what so ever. There is no purpose in a childs life, no sort of meta-imperative, they just act. This lack of purpose does not come out of any sort of depression or Hamletian pondering. It comes out of ignorance, a lack of knowledge of knowledge (and thus a lack of anxiety) and a lack of knowledge of action (and thus a lack of dread). They possess no self-conscious super-ego, shaming them for mistakes they make.
Dostoyevsky once said that "consciousness is the root of all suffering", and so many people in the world know this. Many people also know the Nietzschean postulation that the more you suffer, the more knowledgable or powerful you become. But what is knowledge in the face of blissful ignorance? In literautre, writers have dreamed about creating an archetype for their nostaliga, though no archetype is better, than Shakespeare's Falstaff, who was himself a big raputious child. He seems to achieve a Christ-like level of innocence, but a lack of moral assumtions. Falstaff was a child in an adults world and he loved those adults who had one thing he didn't, which was physical pre-maturity. But since adults live in a world of time, of schedules and of nine to five work days, Falstaff was abandoned to lonliness, he being the only child left who had not grown up.
The only other figure in literature who surpasses Falstaff's ideal of innocence, is Christ, who paradoxically had no superego, but had moral imperitives and judgements. In the gospels what seemed to make Christ God was not that he healed the sick or made the dead arise, but that he had the inachievable perfection of having complete innocence and freedom, and be thirty-three. It was as if he had surpassed knowledge and had remained as young as a child.
Maybe this is why Hamlet died so tragically, for he had reached a point of total conviction and self-absolution, he died with the memory of his sufferings and the nostaligic memory of the childhood past that we all have. Hamlet too, could escape everything, but he couldn't escape the scar of "to be or not to be", the scar of truth.
But life really is just that; it is the question that underlines all of life. Childhood memory seems to exist in a different world, an eternal world, perfect, like Plato's forms, unmoving, unattainable, for simply thinking of it, makes it disappear in the voidness of thought and time.
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