Pretend for a moment, or for however long it takes me to tell you the following story, that I am four years old, not far past the start of my fourth year. I know that it might be difficult, all this make-believe–especially at our age–but still, indulge me if you can…for you must if we are to get through to one another. Life is hard, hard for a child with thoughts and a manner of speaking like I have, with memory and even something left over for the future and future dreaming like I have room, but hard like things are hard for a child. You know this, yes, you, all grown up as you are? How we cry when we’re children–I could do it for you now if you like, throw down all these pompous expressions and start whining in fits you would be hard-pressed to stop or soothe–but even the sorest pain has a certain lightness and gaiety to it, like play. Like hard, heavy play–like a fairytale, with all their monsters and strange, heart-wrenching quests. You see, we are going to have to play this together–I am already getting ahead of myself.
Life is hard and you know why? Not because of this unchildlike manner of speaking and my even more cheerless forethoughts and rear-thoughts, but because I wonder, as the adults are looking down on me, trying their hardest to coddle me or to pretend with me, or to make sure that I am safe in their presence, and the wonder does not cease as I keep moving away from year zero and towards year five and beyond: Are you ready, parents? Are you yourselves ready for what you yourselves have brought into the world? Not only the children you have reared as best you could to deal with the things of the world, not only me–for I feel it would be presumptuous to gather myself as any such focal point of history, especially this childish history of things I am proclaiming–but the world at large, that world of your other children, the mementos and monuments you have erected on the earth, the world of your responsibility? Sometimes I feel–and I wish I could say that this sometimes were not oftentimes or always–that human beings, the adults and so-called responsible ones among us foremost, have a certain defense mechanism, like a long-practiced habit, that aids them in forgetting the pain they leave in their wake and abandoning their responsibility. As though it were too hard to do otherwise, the first inclination, like perpetual baby steps, is to move towards this forgetting as towards an oasis, where they may drink and drink from the river Lethe.
And what do WE do, we children, at least one of the children of our forgetful parents, of our wickedly forgetful parents? We add pain to pain, soreness to soreness, and layer forgetting like a miracle of transparency and openness upon transparency and openness, like membranous layers. We make it no easier on them, even when we have the nerve, let alone the ability or the refinement, the brashness to speak up and tell them the truth.
Now we may put away our game, our childish game–for the time being, or for good it doesn’t matter. But you must see now why I had to pretend the way I did: only a child could speak in such a way, despite its being hackneyed eloquence; but only a child could say what I said to you, when I was four, what that four-year-old dared say to you: such truths and misunderstandings and errors at once; such idiotic ramblings cloaked in a speech fit for a committee; such play mixed with hardship and reflection on hardship; such glimpses of terror and hard-hitting questions, intermixed with play, child’s-play.
Love the Dust 