Not Unplugged

Bucky Fuller was an important other for me along the way. I went to some of his talks in Boston while I was living there and I just loved his presentations - the spontaneity, the child-like enthusiasm for his subjects, the openness and uninhibited passion - as much as the words. He had all these astonishing inventions and ideas, but he explicitly rejected the suggestion that he was “a genius. ” He said that, in fact, he was “very ordinary.” He said that we are born with all kinds of faculties, abilities, but we get “unplugged” from those capacities as we grow older. “I didn't allow myself to get unplugged,” he said.

There are four children in the adjacent houses in my neighborhood who are five years old and who are just alive with possibility. Bright as can be. I was talking with one of them about Cinderella and I could see that all the neurons were firing, none unplugged. She did, I must say, seem to think that the Disney version was the story. Cinderella in my understanding exists in some form in most cultures and my version changes each time I tell it, although I am definitely partial to the Grimm brothers' telling of it. The Grimms begin the story (Manheim's translation):

A rich man's wife fell sick and, feeling her end was near, she called her only daughter to her bedside and said: “Dear child, be good and say your prayers; God will help you, and I shall look down on you from heaven and always be with you.” With that she closed her eyes and died. Every day the little girl went out to her mother's grave and wept, and she went on being good and saying her prayers. When winter came, the snow spread a white cloth over the grave, and when spring took it off, the man remarried.

Now, even that bit right there has so much in it for conversation with a five-year-old or a not-unplugged adult that I just can't stand it. Too much.

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Here is a nice passage from Reading With Children, by Anne Thaxter Eaton, first published in 1940, on the subject of bringing books and children together:

It is not a simple task. It means knowing children and knowing books so thoroughly that we may help the dreamer see the wonder and romance of the world around him, and the matter-of-fact child to enter the realm of imaginative literature...We must have retained or we must recapture for ourselves something of the child's own attitude toward life and the world.

Something close to that was very much at the center of what I was trying to do in my ten years of teaching and then my ten years of book-selling. I think it's not usually understood that it is not a simple task because the reader should believe, if you've done it correctly, that it was all just an unfolding of what was already within her. It looks as if it was all done by the student, which is true in a sense, yet setting that up by a teacher or book-seller or book-giver or book-recommender is often a task requiring immense reading and experience and empathetic ability. And in the academy, particularly, you have to fight against the widespread but mistaken view that education is the filling of a container rather than the kindling of a fire, as Plutarch put it.

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If you've had a look at Frances Yates' bibliography, to which I linked in my last post, you could get some sense of hers being a not-unplugged mind. Here is my favorite photo of her.

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