You Were a Child Prodigy

You were a child prodigy. I was a child prodigy. We all were child prodigies. Marla Olmstead is definitely a child prodigy.

“Four,” her latest exhibition, opened at Anthony Brunelli Fine Arts, one of Central New York’s premier galleries, in August, 2004. Marla’s works attracted unprecedented thousands to the opening and is the Gallery’s most lauded exhibition to date. - ArtDaily.com

Marla is four years old. I can't even think back to when I was four years old. But I am sure I was carefree. Carefree is liberating is free of cares is free is absorbed in the moment is lost in the present is right here right now.

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once one grows up. - Pablo Picasso

'I think Marla is as gifted as any child I have ever seen,' said Mr Anthony Brunelli, owner of Fine Arts gallery in Binghamton, who is displaying her work. 'I don't think she is aware of what she is doing. I think it comes from within.' - The Strait Times

As David Wolfe called me a docent to the deeper spaces of humanness and of the mature mind, it feels like I should explain that just this sense of nostaglia for the creativity of the child may itself keep us stuck in looking back over our shoulders instead of reaching forward to a higher state of creativity as a mature adult.

Often the nostaglia is embodied as regret and a deep mourning which keeps us firmly rooted in the lifeless past - and certainly not where a creative mind dwells. This regret implicitly assumes something about the future. That we've lost something that may never be regained. One thing that seems lost is spontaneity and spontaneity is enveloped in the present.

"Since we are brought up to make sense of ourselves, and to be able to account for ourselves, we are always expected to be able to rationalize our actions in words. When we try to accomplish this we develop a kind of second self inside us, which in Zen is called the observing self....[This second separate self will often] run a commentary on who we are and what we are doing all the time. It asks, "What will other people say? Am I being proper? Does what I am doing make any sense?"

The sociologist George Herbert Meade called this "the interiorized other." That is to say, we have a kind of interior picture, a vague sense of who we are, and of what the reaction of other people to us says about who we are." - What is the Tao? by Alan Watts

George Herbert Meade's "interiorized other" sounds similiar to Charles H. Cooley's Looking Glass Self theory (see also Human Nature and Social Order):

We see ourselves through the eyes of other people, even to the extent of incorporating their views of us into our own self-concept.

This interiorized other, our self-concept, is highly adept at anticipation which distances us from immediate here-and-now aliveness. In addition to trying to anticipate other's reactions from reading the slightest of cues this separate self is constantly ensuring a sense of self-consistency: this is what I am, that is not what I am.

Try to imagine having to describe water to someone who's never tasted it in your own words. Or what standing on a path deep in a lush green mist-drenched rainforest looks like to a blind person or a what a waft of music mingling with the wind rustling through aspens in a mountain setting sounds like to a deaf person. Even the best wordsmith will always come up short. Yes these are all simple experiences that are quite slippery in the realm of words. What we've forgotten is that the map is not the territory. Our self-concept is not our self. We feel torn apart from the present in becoming (stern) spectators and navigators of ourselves.

Very very young children haven't developed this "interiorized other" yet that's sandwiched by the past and the future. It's hard to say when Marla will start to worry about where she puts that dab of midnight blue or if the brushstrokes are too wide. Last time they liked the brighter hues...

Our eyes stare intently on the map and often fixate on the map. Our eyes barely lift off the page. We lock ourselves up to study the map and if we venture we are still clutching the map looking down at it fervently paralyzed we'll be lost without it. Have you ever considered setting the map aside (we weren't hot-shot cartographers when we drew it up anyway) to explore the terrain with our own two feet?

Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training. – Anna Freud

There's a way forward and higher that doesn't cling to nostaglia. Alan Watts asks an interesting question if you believe kindergarten was the peak of your effortless, spontaneous creative days: "[I]f we are enjoying life without knowing we are enjoying it, are we really enjoying it?"

Lao-tzu says that the greatest intelligence appears to be stupidity... And of course, this is a kind of paradoxical way of saying that true virtue, Te, is the living of human life in such a fashion as not to get in its own way.

This is the thing we all admire and envy so much about children. We say that they are naive, that they are unspoiled, that they are artless, and that they are unself-conscious. When you see a little child dancing who has not yet learned to dance before an audience, you can see the child dancing all by itself, and there is a kind of completeness and genuine integrity to their motion.

When the child sees that parents or teachers are watching, and learns that they may approve or disapprove, the child begins to watch itself while dancing. All at once the dancing becomes stiff, and then becomes artful [in sense of trying too hard], or worse, artificial, and the spirit of the child's dance is lost. But if the child happens to go on studying dance, it is only after years and years that, as an accomplished artist, the dancer regains the naivete and the naturalness of their original dance. But when the naturalness is regained it is not just the simple, we could say embryonic, naturalness of the child, completely uncultivated and untutored. Instead it is a new kind of naturalness that takes into itself and carries with itself years and years of technique, know-how, and experience.

In all this you will see that there are three stages. There is first what we might call the natural or the childlike stage of life in which self-consciousness has not yet arisen. Then there comes a middle stage, which we might call one's awkward stage, in which one learns to become self-conscious. And finally the two are integrated in the rediscovered innocence of a liberated person...

For this reason we admire the people, whether they be sages or artists, who have the ability to return in their mature life to a kind of childlikeness and freshness. - What is the Tao? by Alan Watts

The words prodigy and portent are intertwined in meaning. If every moment is portentious and inspires wonder, then you aren't a was or were but you are "something amazing or marvelous; a prodigy."

Only the most highly disciplined artist can recapture , on a higher level, the spontaneity of the child with its first paint-box.- Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy

Comments

[aleah]

This is a very thought-provoking post, Evelyn. I had never correlated creative ability with that internal slit we all develop as we mature. It's almost as if we're all disassociative, as that's how we monitor our own behavior in an unhealthy, 3rd party sort of way. That shift in "in the moment, innocent" thinking is what causes us to police our every action for fear of being seen as "other." It amazes me how deep that goes and how debilitating!

[Jory Des Jardins]

This beautifully articulates something I've been noticing in myself. As a child I created by writing all of the time--poems, plays, books. My second stage was not barren of creativity, but it was consumed by creating for a practical end--for money, for praise. If I didn't achieve these ends I stopped creating. A few years ago I started writing again for sanity's sake, and I found out that I never stopped being creative; I simply stopped caring about how my work would be perceived. The act of creating became a joy in itself.

[Avi Solomon]

See Masuro Ibuka's (Sony founder)book 'Kindergarten is Too Late'-It is, unless we reconnect back to our inate creativity!:
http://www.wizardacademy.com/showmemo.asp?id=127
An exercise that helps in this regard is to find a photo of yourself as a child engaged in some absorbing activity and meditate upon the potential in that young life-and bring it back to your present life, no matter how 'old' you are:)

[Michelle]

thank you. You have put into words beautifully something I have never understood. I was linked here to see the artwork of the little girl. I have a 6 year old with Down syndrome whose art teacher has tried to tell me this in less capable words. That my daughter paints beautifully because she doesnt THINK too hard, she just PAINTS. I will keep your article to remind myself why not to tell her how to do it "better" and to just let her be her carefree, innocent little self.

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