paper for Child and Young Adult Lit.

John Nehring
Child and Young Adult Lit.

Lost in the Extraordinary
“The almost sensual bliss, the intoxicating blend of excitement and surrender we feel when someone says ‘Once upon a time…’ Any education that neglects this dimension of experience will be dry and tasteless with no nourishment in it. People-children especially-need this experience of delight.” Phillip Pullman
Giving oneself over to the extraordinary is complicated webbing that involves above all things art. By art I’m not framing a thought that invokes the Mona Lisa or Starry Night yet these might come to mind, but a plethora of art that is made up of the Mona Lisa but not limited to this one small piece in the larger web which includes subjects as literature, theatre, sculpture, music, opera, and so on. The arts are a way for an adolescent to start at an early stage to not forget what he/she is about on the inside.
The extraordinary isn’t something you need to search for, except for in yourself, it is in everyone and only needs to be awoken inside; this awakening goes hand in hand with the arts, negative compatibility, and a willing suspension of disbelief. For the purpose of this paper I am going to start off with the child and his connection to the extraordinary, move to the possible fall or unimaginative adulthood, and finish with a possible portal ‘back’ into the extraordinary.
A child, though open to many interpretations of what actually makes up a child, for the purpose of this paper, we will define a child as innocence. The child is innocent because the child isn’t searching for the ‘right’ meaning or even for a meaning at all, it is just there, taking what comes and forgetting what goes. The child is void of reason, truth, and an ‘un’-imagination. This is what is so beautiful about a child, it has no set path, and is free to find out through mistakes what life is asking of it. In Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Lyra’s journey, her destiny, can only come true if she is allowed to make mistakes: “…she must fulfill this destiny in ignorance of what she is doing, because only in her ignorance can we be saved…what it means is that she must be free to make mistakes” (Pullman 130). This is not only a statement that explains the concept of a child and how we must let them understand the world through their own eyes, but it also contains one of the key problems with society today, something I will refer to as interruption, but I will come back to that later. The idea of allowing children to make mistakes, I feel is rooted in Pullman’s lecture on “the school of morals,” which is planted in the belief that “we can learn what’s good and what’s bad, what’s generous and unselfish, what’s cruel and mean, from fiction” (East Anglia Lecture, 4). In a sense the ‘school of morals’ is the experience of life when you live or suffer it.
As we have talked about in class, a child loses innocence when he/she starts to read. As innocence starts to turn into experience the path of life becomes more concrete, by our own will or by societies is something I will leave you to decide. Yet, it happens none the less, and this is the deciding moment when what we read and the structure set up around what is being read is on the tip of a ball point pen. At this point in life-a foggy, unclear point in life- is where, at least in present day society, most paths are set for us by grown-ups-parents, professors, ‘mature’ people. Through my own experience’s growing up, art wasn’t even near the center of my life, which seemed to be the case for most around me. By this I merely am stating that what we define as the arts (from above) was usually looked at in a negative light, full of ridicule for the people trying to follow this path, or it was just shoved aside to make room for more ‘important’ things like geography, algebra, gym class. Through this construct I feel the common path leads away from the arts into a more concrete, closed world where fact is the forerunner into experience, but why? Pullman states in an article, Theatre-the true key stage that the arts are a viable and necessary companion in life, a companion that helps in the journey to create a ‘grown-up’ that isn’t an automated working machine without imagination or emotion; he feels that if you do limit these things from a child “they perish on the inside, and it doesn’t show” (Theatre, 1). This closing of the mind is what leads us away from the extraordinary.
As I talked about above, the key principle here is ‘interruption.’ I would say that this fall from the extraordinary is a type of interruption of John Keats’ idea of Negative Compatibility. In one of Keats’ letters to George and Thomas Keats, December 22, 1817, he states that “…Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Isn’t this the exact type of interruption that I touched on earlier, a path that leads away from uncertainties, a path that is full of fact and reason. By this time it might feel that I am an advocate against fact and reason, but this just isn’t the case, I am merely stating that if one’s life is solely concentrated on fact and reason, the child is gone forever and life would consist of nothing as mentally stimulating as the imagination.
I am regressing; this idea, Negative Capability, is seen when reading anything with fantastical elements in it, Pullman’s His Dark Materials, Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, or even Keats Ode to a Nightingale. The most impressive part of this suspension is when writers like Keats and Carroll emulate this idea in their writing. In Alice in Wonderland the reader sees Alice stuck in a room with a door so small she can’t get through. She is stumped on how to get out of this room, until a key appears on a small table in the room, yet she is still too big. Shortly after this realization she finds a small unmarked bottle with a paper label tied to the neck that says “drink me.” After she drinks the elixir she eventually reaches the desired height to go through the door (Carrol 15-17). In Keats Ode to a Nightingale the narrator also drinks a type of potion: “My sense as though of hemlock I had drunk, or emptied some dull opiate to the drain” (Keats, 2-3). In both examples the person drinks something to reach or explain the desired affect. This in a sense is the extraordinary, it has been there all along, in front of our eyes. Now don’t go drinking everything in site to try to reach the extraordinary; it is a type of portmantou where the drink is the imagination, the innocence which is lost in so many people. Earlier in this semester I created a displacement of the Bozeman Police Reports where by using reality as a basis I created a type of portal for the listeners imagination into the world of pretend, a place to suspend the beliefs and instead fill it with the uncertainties and mysteries which make up a good story. Yet, even though it was made up, no one doubted or questioned, but just listened with attention, with imagination, with their negative capability.
If we are all on the path described earlier, the concrete, closed path or if the journey on the path is over and the arts have been forgotten or closed off deep inside, the following is the savior of the extraordinary. Everything in the arts is embedded with the extraordinary, it is just a point of looking at the stories themselves, believing in them for what they are, using our willing suspension of disbelief-our imagination-to give oneself back to the extraordinary. The willing suspension of disbelief is a term invented by William Taylor Coleridge which is basically momentarily, possibly for only a few seconds, minutes, or longer if not interrupted, stopping the thought process and giving oneself to the innocence of the imagination; the pretend (Holland 1).

When you get the chance drink the hemlock or the unmarked bottle with only the words “drink me” on them, let your daemon find out who it is, say open sesame-once upon a time-in a land far, far away, don’t stop yourself at the limits of your mind, but let it go, let it find the imagination, regain this thing that is your own, move forward into the extraordinary and feel the wonderous power of life. As with life you need to delight and only do things that are worth doing for yourself or your imagination. The extraordinary isn’t far from any of us, it is just the will or ‘willing’ that can bring you to it.