Infant Joy

(from Living by Wonder, by Richard Lewis)

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If you look at Pieter Brueghel the Elder's great sixteenth-century painting Young Folk At Play, you will see more than two hundred children engaged in eighty different games. Aside from the extraordinary visual impact of the painting, there is, if you allow yourself to hear it, a great din of children's voices - yelling, teasing, and laughing. This is no different, of course, from a contemporary playground filled with children moving everywhere in the midst of their most important undertaking: play.
 
If you look more closely at the Brueghel painting, you find a few children with gentle smiles on their faces, smiles that express the good pleasures of play itself. Certainly, you might remember those absolutely pure moments when your playing felt like you were at the very center of the earth. You had become the axis on which the rest revolved. Why not smile, since what you were doing was as delicious as drinking a long-awaited glass of cold water on a hot day?
 
When my children were very young, during summer vacation in the country they used to disappear after dinner with the neighbor's children. Sometimes the only way we knew where they were was to listen for their laughter. And such laughter: wonderful glissandos of delight rolling over the fields. It was a sound, high-pitched and vibrant, that if you didn't know it was coming from children, could have been a wondrous new species of bird excitedly singing.
 
Nothing was more awkward than reminding my children and their friends that it was getting dark and perhaps they should be coming home. There would be a few words between us, during which their laughter would stop - a compromise agreed upon - and then their laughter would rise up again into the treetops and remain aloft until they came home. In this connection, I am reminded of William Blake's poem "Nurse's Song":
 
When the voices of children are heard on the green
And laughing is heard on the hill,
My heart is at rest within my breast
And everything else is still.
 
"Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down
And the dew of night arises;
Come, come, leave off play, and let us away
Till the morning appears in the skies."
 
"No, no, let us play, for it is yet day
And we cannot go to sleep;
Besides, in the sky the little birds fly
And the hills are all cover'd with sheep."
 
"Well, well, go & play till the light fades away
And then go home to bed."
The little ones leaped & shouted & laugh'd
And all the hills echoed.
 
When one thinks of a child's laugh, one is confronted by the enormous variety with which children laugh. Perhaps, as we get older, our laughter begins to find its character - and its tone. We recognize another person's laugh as we recognize the way the person speaks. But with young children, the modulations of their laughter are still part of trying on different sizes of feelings, attitudes, and expressions. Just the other day, while waiting in a crowded airport, I heard a child laugh - and everyone, including myself, turned around to look. We looked not because we were concerned but because the laugh itself was riveting. Like a bell, the child's laugh rang through the crowd of people and brought another reality.
 
I thought: no matter how chaotic things are, there is the laugh of well-being and good-honored innocence. It seemed like the feeling we once had when we played vigorously as children and all that mattered was play. As Dylan Thomas describes in his story "The Peaches," "There, playing Indians in the evening, I was aware of me myself in the exact middle of a living story, and my body was my adventure and my name."
 
So too with the child's laugh at the airport. The child invited us into his world, just as his laugh emanated from his body. Because young children are fully in touch with their sensations, and the intellectualizing characteristic of later years has not yet occurred; their laughter, like their play, springs from their whole body.
 
But prior to the peals of laughter of children playing after dinner or a child's hypnotic laughter in a crowded airport, there is another bodily response in children that is an enigma to experts on child development: the smile. How do we learn to smile? What is its meaning? What we know, of course, is that the smile is a common expression in infants -almost from birth. is this first smile the beginning of a sense of humor, or has it more to do with a child's pleasure and contentment? Surely the smile of the Inuit child in this lullaby expresses the latter:
 
.....LULLABY
 
It is my big baby
That I feel in my hood
Oh how heavy he is!
Ya ya! Ya Ya!
 
When I turn
He smiles at me, my little one,
Well hidden in my hood,
Oh how heavy he is!
Ya ya! Ya Ya!
 
How sweet he is when he smiles
With two teeth like a little walrus.
Ah, I like my little one to be heavy
And my hood to be full.
 
We might even, as does William Blake, call this kind of pleasurable smile the embodiment of joy itself:
 
........INFANT JOY
 
"I have no name: I am but two days old."
What shall I call thee?
"I happy am, joy is my name."
Sweet joy befall thee!
 
Pretty joy! Sweet joy but two days old,
Sweet joy I call thee:
Thou dost smile,
I sing the while,
Sweet joy befall thee!
 
Learning to smile, like learning to walk, must be one of our first great linkages to what exists around. We might speculate that the smile, whatever its meaning, is the infant's way of communicating to someone else. Be it a mother, father, or stranger, we respond in kind when the child's open face slowly begins to change into a smile, and the urge on our part to continue to make the child smile is contagious. How many of us have become instant buffoons, getting on hands and knees, barking like a dog, squiggling our faces into a talking ice cream - literally anything to prompt the smile to show itself on the child's face once more!
 
But the smile, for all its tranquillity (and perhaps mystery), is only a prelude to a larger burst of joyfulness when the child finally laughs. it is a laugh that can come from the child's simply being lifted out of her crib and gently tossed about in another's arms. Oh, for us to be that child again - absolutely relaxed and trusting, knowing that each time we will land safely in a warm cushion of arms and comforting words. The whimpers, gurglings, and hardly-able-to-catch-her-breath laughter the child shares with as she feels the luxury of moving way, way up high - and then all the way down - is a laugh to greet the physical universe. Issa, the Japanese haiku poet, has this in mind when he writes:
 
Crawl, laugh
Do as you wish
For you are one year old
This morning.
 
Indeed, the ability to laugh is, as suggested in this Apache Indian myth, essential to living:
 
The creator made man able to do everything-talk, run, look, and hear. He was not satisfied, though, till man could do just one thing more-and that was: LAUGH. And so man laughed and laughed and laughed. And the creator said: "Now you are fit to live."
 
Within the very structure of the new laughter is a particular ingredient which, for the child, is of utmost importance if he is to move on to further levels of laughter. We might call this ingredient the human gift to play with the expected and unexpected. When small children are tickled, for example, they laugh, sometimes with great hilarity. The hilarity stems from what James Sully, in his Esays on Laughter, calls "attitudes of indefinite expectancy. " The child does not know when he is going to be tickled next - and the waiting for the touch of fingers on his stomach becomes a moment of wondrous expectancy. This is also true of the laughter-provoking elements when we play peek-a-boo. When will mommy show her face again? - and when she does, often disappearing, there she is - like magic, all over again.
 
To laugh at the moment that wasn't quite expected is at the core of turning the expected into the unexpected. In other words, we take reality and change it - turn the world topsy-turvy just enough so that it is "funny." I suspect this making of "nonsense" out of what is supposed to make sense is one of the great lessons of play - the child's growing aptitude for transforming.
 
What a fascinating education in humor it is to talk to a group of four- or five-year-old children and tell them about the day I once saw chickens walking down the street with umbrellas, in order, of course, to keep from getting too much sun, and every time it rained, the chickens would flutter their wings and wobble down the street, and their umbrellas would wobble down the street, too.
 
The image of an incongruous series of events sets the children giggling and laughing, full of expectations of what will happen next - when the sun comes out again. The genius of the child to feel comfortable with the anthropomorphic, to the extent that anything can have ears and eyes, can talk and have feelings, opens up vast possibilities of humor. But we must remember that what a child will find absolutely humorous may not necessarily strike adults with much hilarity. Here are a few thoughts of kindergarten children about a special imaginary worm they adopted for their classroom. When the children shared these thoughts with each other, there were many moments of instant and empathetic laughter.
 
This bus is going to the zoo. This bus goes very fast. The school bus is going to go to the garden, make a turn, and park. The worm is driving the school bus. - Sbamarie
 
The worm opened his door and saw his flower.
He lost it but then he found it again. - Omar
He didn't know how to get up so he made a squiggly turn. - Sarah
He's squiggling because he has an itch he can't scratch. - Cbristopher
 
One can assume that without play the child cannot learn to balance the various realities of her world. Certainly, without play that sees things in a humorous, slightly off-centered way, the child is unable to make sense of a world that (we know all too well) is definitely not a stable mechanism of consistency and contentments. Much of a child's sense of humor, and some of her most boisterous laughter, is created when she tries to make sense of one of the most complex issues in her life: adults.
 
......GROWNUPS
 
Grownups are silly,
They never drink coffee
When it's served To them.
They just talk
And never drink it
Until it's cold.
Isn't that silly?
 
I haven't grown
Since I was five
I haven't grown at all
Grownups are just getting shorter.
 
-Marc Duskin, age 10
 
..... A TEACHER
 
A teacher's got a temper
Like a bull.
He growls and roars
Like a tiger,
He stamps and gets mad
And sometimes he's glad
He did it.
 
-Bruce McGregor, age 11
 
1 have read the teacher poem many times to children of all ages - and the sheer excitement of hearing another child challenge authority (and often so true) brings children to their feet, yelling: "Read it again, read it again!" And each time I read it, the room fills with more and more laughter. 1 realized at one point that sometimes when I read this poem I become a bit like the teacher: my voice deepens, and my eyes bulge somewhat. This for the children is equally as mesmerizing as the poem, for I have become, without realizing it, a clown. In the mind of every child the world must sometimes be played out as a circus so that they may find a suitable equilibrium within reality. As Margaret Lowenfeld says in her book Play in Childhood:
 
Buffoonery is an essential element of good education. To be able to enjoy the unexpected, to perceive the incongruous, and to welcome the grotesque, is to start out with a good equipment to make sense of so strange a world as ours; just as the best of Zen teaches us to laugh, so too do children teach us to not take seriously all that is serious. R. H. Blyth, Zen translator and scholar, says:
 
Laughter is a state of being here and also everywhere, an infinite and timeless expansion of one's nevertheless inalienable being. When we laugh we are free of all the oppression of
our personality, or that of others, and even of God, who is indeed laughed away.
 
One evening I went out to have dinner at a restaurant. I sat near two children, about six or seven years old. Amidst the refinement of a beautifully set table, the voices of these children were about to alter the mood of the setting:
 
First child, Why did the girl blush when she opened the refrigerator door?
Second child- Because she saw the salad dressing.
 
Grins, a burst of giggles, and a warm laugh from everyone within hearing - and the world, for the moment, had somehow righted itself again,
 
We grow from our laughter as much as from our seriousness - and the child, discovering the magic of humor, finds a new plateau from which to view his experience. What new expectations await the child who has begun to laugh, if only with his eyes. What unexpected moments have yet to happen. What a time we had when our playing was a smile over the face of our lives.
 
Click here for a review of Living by Wonder by Chris Mercogliano
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