Self-analysis? Why not? Write and see where the words lead. Besides this is a relief from the book, from writing the new book.
Place your soft toys in a circle on the front lawn. How are old you? Too old for such toys, perhaps. Is that why you place them in a circle in the front garden for other children to see and perhaps steal? As if exposing them to this risk was already to expose your own youth (but you are still young: seven or eight, perhaps) to the same risk. But youth, here, is younger still – there are always children younger than you and there is always a child within the child. But what does this mean?
Texts for Nothing: ‘I held myself in my own arms’. I held myself. No: I held my childhood. And had to risk my childhood by laying it around me like a magic charm. R.M. tells me that one diagnosis for abuse is for an observed child to play with toys alone in a room. The child is watched for the actions it would repeat with those toys. What horror!
David Lynch often speaks of his happy childhood. Is this why, surrounded as it were with his circle of toys he can write of such horror? Kant’s sublime, Aristotle’s tragedy requires the spectator steps back from the spectacle. So too if the inner child, the farthest, childish core needs to have grown up safe if it is to enjoy the thrill of wagering, if only in the imagination, that same safety.
M. tells me of a book he has read on the topic of children. ‘They need such care’, he says, ‘it’s frightening’. But in caring for a child you are still caring for one you cared for when you were a child – the one you risked in placing the toys around you in a circle. In a circle – exposed to other children, risking thereby the one within you whose secret you kept. Within you? Not unless what is inside could also be outside. Not unless it was the outside enfolded, the alveoli of the lung, the glove turned inside out (see the new category: A Child) …