Jung contended that the way to maturity was to find what you lost from your childhood and regain it. There is a certain mystery and allure to this idea. It speaks of paradox. The complete man is he who is still a child at heart. Jesus told us we must be as children to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. In a similar vein, Jung says men must incorporate their anima (and women their animus) to be complete. Aristophanes (through Plato) speaks of people once being two-headed beings which were then split apart, two souls made from one. Many mythic figures of old time (Akhenaten, Osiris) and new (I think of Paul Atreides from Dune and Griffith from Berserk) seem to lie thoroughly between man and woman.
There is certainly truth to these things. But we ought not become childish or androgynous. The mature man is he who has taken on both adult and child natures, but with the child’s nature properly fed. The complete man is not he who blurs the line between the sexes, but who has fully realized his manliness, and can sing and dance like David unfettered. The goal is unity, not confusion.
With this in mind, what have I lost, I wonder?
Speaking of the word, wonder is perhaps the chief thing. It is a commonplace to describe wonder as childlike. Truly, this is something I, and probably many others, have lost, or at least felt dampened, as I have become a man.
I think of the poem by R. S. Thomas:
I am a man now.
Pass your hand over my brow.
You can feel the place where the brains grow.
I am like a tree,
From my top boughs I can see
The footprints that led up to me.
There is blood in my veins
That has run clear of the stain
Contracted in so many loins.
Why, then, are my hands red
With the blood of so many dead?
Is this where I was misled?
Why are my hands this way
That they will not do as I say?
Does no God hear when I pray?
[…]
—R. S. Thomas, “Here”
I too feel like a tree. The path that finishes at who I am now—I can see the steps of it. But they are so far away, so low. My mind has been clouded by guilt, and even God seems far away. Did Adam, in the Garden, see like a child?
There is a beautiful enchantment with the world we have as children. Small things—city lights, a sign for a grocery store, a policeman in dire need of lemonade—stick with us. They become more than they are to us. The world seems alive. The very rocks speak.
Hopkins calls this kind of thing inscape. Children can see it, and some grow and still do. We call them mystics: those who can see the hidden things.
In the novel Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, the main character has this kind of vision. He is in a strange world, and calls himself a scientist, but he is unlike our idea of the materialist scientist today. He speaks to stones and brings water to the dead. He names the years after the birds that come to him. Half the things he speaks about are christened with Capital Letters. He is a thoroughly premodern man.
I wonder if we are not all premodern until the demons of our time catch up to us. But that is giving too much credit to the noble savage. And if we are going to make the comparison, most children are not too noble either—but they have the sight.
Owen Barfield calls this poetic diction. It is speaking about the world in a unified way—sense and language as one. And poets, perhaps mostly those of earlier times, do speak this way. Perhaps, then, a unified language is the outpouring of a unified soul.
In Piranesi, the way to enter the endless House where the titular character resides is to revert oneself to a state of childlike wonder. One must go to a place where the world feels most alive.
One day, after reading this, I found a way to do just that. It does not create a magic doorway to another world, but, actually, maybe it does. It just requires unfocusing your mind, like you would your eyes. You need to forget the manifold cares of this world. It is hard to describe more clearly. This is not the unfocus of drugs, nor even quite that of a camera lens. After, things seem more alive.
Strangely, seeing the world in this way, alive, does not seem to present any problem for men of science. Aldo Leopold and Lewis Thomas shine brilliantly in their writings. Reading Piranesi, I couldn’t help but think of A Sand County Almanac and The Youngest Science as I took in the reverence and wonder one can have even in the fight for survival and the quest for knowledge.
Perhaps this will help me mature. Perhaps it will not. The irony of Piranesi is that our protagonist is deeply fractured himself. I know one thing: that I feel like I am taking life more seriously when I enter into wonder. Without it,
I have nowhere to go
The swift satellites show
The clock of my whole being is slow,
It is too late to start
For destinations not of the heart.
I must stay here with my hurt.
And again, R. S. Thomas enters my mind, answering himself:
I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
the treasure in it. I realise now
that
I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
—R. S. Thomas, “The Bright Field”
