Findings

I’ve always liked Ralph Ellison’s ideas about invisibility in Invisible Man. Here’s a sample from the opening pages:

I am an invisible man… I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me… When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination — indeed, anything and everything except me… I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.

He goes on to describe the anger that boils up out of the “doubt that you really exist” as a result of being unseen. So being invisible is a mixed bag. Sometimes it’s an advantage, but ultimately we’re meant for visibility, and his book explores this rich metaphor on many levels.

Here’s Eudora Welty’s comment on the subject:

My temperament and my instinct had told me alike that the author, who writes at his own emergency, remains and needs to remain at his private remove. I wished to be, not effaced, but invisible — actually a powerful position. Perspective, the line of vision, the frame of vision — these set a distance. (One Writer’s Beginnings 87)

It’s invisibility (boy do I have a hard time typing that word!) in a different context than Ellison’s, but similarly double-edged; on the one hand it’s “powerful,” but on the backside is the potential of tipping into “effacement.”

At a level much less significant than either of these writers, I can affirm the psychological truth of what they’re saying. It brings back the memory of experiences as a child with an older boy down the street from us. Jimmy was really a sweetheart of a boy, but he was about 3 years older than I and when he would come over to play with my brother, he was convinced that he had to talk baby-talk to me. It used to infuriate me. So what did I do?

I pretended I couldn’t talk.

I remember that complex inner awareness of frustration at being regarded as less than I was, mixed with a sense of superiority that I knew more than Jimmy did, mixed with the knowledge that I could make him feel silly any time I wanted to by revealing that I could speak quite well. But I chose not to, I suppose because it felt powerful. I think the danger lies in the chance that you might play the role for too long, and forget the hidden truth of who you are.

Sometimes our mistakes can be revealing. The way we read books can be instructive about the way we read others, ourselves, life in general. My thoughts returned to my mistaken reading of Robert Louis Stevenson’s dedication of A Child’s Garden of Verses often yesterday. It seems so obvious, looking at the poem now, that it couldn’t have referred to his mother. Here’s the poem in entirety, with boldface on the parts that plainly indicate that he’s speaking not of a mother, but a nurse:

To Alison Cunningham
From Her Boy

For the long nights you lay awake
And watched for my unworthy sake
For your most comfortable hand
That led me through the uneven land:
For all the story-books you read:
For all the pains you comforted:
For all you pitied, all you bore,
In sad and happy days of yore:—
My second Mother, my first Wife,
The angel of my infant life—
From the sick child, now well and old,
Take, nurse, the little book you hold!

And grant it, Heaven, that all who read
May find as dear a nurse at need,
And every child who lists my rhyme,
In the bright, fireside, nursery clime,
May hear it in as kind a voice
As made my childish days rejoice!

There’s more on Alison Cunningham here. 

The interesting question is, how did I reconcile these clues in the poem to my notion that Stevenson was describing his mother? And perhaps more interesting, why did I assume it was his mother, and wrench the text to fit my preconceived notion?

The answer I come to is the longstanding perfectionism of my inner world. Along with his reference to himself as “her boy,” I assumed this was Stevenson talking about his mother because:

• She meets a standard of selflessness that’s part of my ideal of motherhood;
• She’s kind, forbearing, pitying, enduring;
• She’s a healing presence, a “nurse”;
• She’s (simply put, and Stevenson says it himself) an “angel.”

If these are my criteria of motherhood, is it conscious? Well, no; my conscious criteria have more to do with being honest and real and loving and human, not a celestial being. But at the deeper level where I really live, yes; this must be what I’m aiming for, or why would I have interpreted the poem in the way I did rather than scratching my head and asking, “Who’s he talking about?”

Because I assumed this to be a description of motherhood, I was willing to work pretty hard to twist the text. I never questioned that “nurse” was always a synonym for “mother”; the reference to a “second mother” I wondered about but assumed it had some private meaning to Stevenson; the reference to “first wife” I assumed was an Oedipal thing; the blatant fact that she had a different last name I assumed meant his father had died and she had remarried — all of this without any investigation of the facts.

Good grief!

All of this matters to me as a reader not just of poems, but of life. How often to I perform mental gymnastics rather than realize my assumptions need questioning and revising? How often do I settle for confusion without even thinking about it? How often do I aim for an ideal, and let perfectionism blind me?

By the way, Stevenson’s poem for his actual mother is here — and strikingly devoid of the rhapsodic devotion of the lines to Alison Cunningham.

Summer Pony by Jean Slaughter Doty is the latest in my read-aloud syllabus for my horse-loving 7-year-old. It’s a story about Ginny, a middle-school aged girl whose family rents a pony for the summer. Though she has dreams of a sleek and beautiful pony, the one she ends up with is an underfed, shaggy, unimpressive pinto with unmatching eyes, rented from a pony farm that badly neglects its animals.

The story has lots of great ingredients: rescue and restoration of an animal in poor condition, a heroine who’s learning the ropes of pony care along with the reader, and the overcoming of first impressions to form a friendship (as Ginny does with her neighbor). Best of all for the young horse fan is the winning combination of understanding parents, and the conversion of a garage into a pony stall. What pony-lover hasn’t entertained that dream? I know I did.

Ginny, the story’s heroine, is plausible. She has her issues with negative attitude and self-doubt, but she grows a lot over the course of the story and gains confidence in the process. The reading level of this book is probably 3rd-6th grade, but my first-grader was able to work through the text herself. I read it aloud, but often she’d get the jump on me by taking it to bed with her and reading before lights out. (So far she hasn’t discovered reading under the covers with a flashlight…)

The question now is where to go from here. I found this list of 30 best horse books, of which we’ve read four: Summer Pony, Old Bones the Wonder Horse, Misty of Chincoteague, and Black Beauty. What next? I notice Ruffian is on this list, and it’s out of the question… I’m still wrenched every time I think of Eight Belles put down after her second place finish at the Derby last week. I dimly remember a book called A Pony for the Winter; maybe that would be the next logical choice. I’m open to suggestions. Meantime it’s back to watching my daughter pore over her well-worn Breyer’s horses catalogue, checking the boxes of… well, pretty much every model ever made and making plans for saving her money.

Yesterday we were busy with the annual suburban swap: the neighborhood yard sale, in which many of the folks in my subdivision spill the contents of attic and closet out onto the front yard and put a price on it. It’s kind of like musical chairs, but “musical belongings” would probably be more like it, as people sell their stuff and buy others’. And of course it’s so well publicized we get lots of traffic from outside the neighborhood. Our family did well, including my two young entrepreneurs who had no problem at all mastering suggestive selling (”Would you like to buy this nice toy for your baby?” “Like this pretty dress?” “This ‘Bob the Builder’ video is really good!’). And we didn’t leave our own yard, so the attic is pleasantly spacious now.

All of this to say I didn’t get a chance to read much of The Saturday Review of Books, but here it is anyway — better late than never.