Childhood

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The greatest poem ever known
Is one all poets have outgrown
The poetry, innate, untold
Of being only four years old

Still young ebough to be a part
Of nature's great impulsive heart,
Born comrade of bird, beast and tree
And unselfconscious as a tree

And yet with lovely reason skilled
Each day new paradise to build
Elate explorer of each sense,
Without dismay, without pretense!

In your unstained transparent eyes
There is no coincidence, no surprise:
Life's queer conundrums you accept
Your strange divinity still kept...

And life, that sets things all in rhyme
May make you poet, too, in time -
But there were days, oh tender elf,
When you were poetry itself!

Christopher Morley.

What happened to my childhood? What happened to the innocence, and the joy, the sweet unselfconscious play I enjoyed as a kid? What happens to us when we grow up? Why do we become selfconscious, and fearful of spontaneous play and such? Is it that our minds get filled with fears, and our imaginations sent in the wrong direction, so often?

I can remember as a kid being told about monsters, and being absolutely terrified by them. I remember not knowing what to believe, and realising that I needed to be careful what I listened to and took in. Life became so arduous after that. But what a shame it is that we can't remain in that innocent place for our entire lives. Would it be so bad? Or would we be as gullible as the people in Brave New World, who just saw life as a time for hedonistic pursuits. we depend on morals, don't we? And aren't morals learned, rather than innate? Morley speaks of children as though little boys don't innocently pull the wings off butterflies, or leave tadpoles out in the sun, or cut worms in half, just to watch them wriggle. Children have a fascination with life and death just as they do anything else. I can remember killing my pet frog as a kid and feeling desperately sorry afterwards. But the frog was still dead.

One wonders if innocence can be responible for some of the worst atrocities in life. Just as the children in Lord of the Flies behaved atrociously, isn't it in our natures to do so? Or are some children just naturally murderous, and others naturally gentle?

I was very much the lonely nature boy. I never made friends easily. I found boys rough and awful, and frankly still do. There's something about their ignorance that's just boring. I always found boys - and many people, in fact - just stupid. I was far happier playing in my imagination, or with nature: butterflies, the stars, birds, animals and such. But I never made friends really easily. Not at all.

I suppose it's why I grew up to be the oversensitive individual I am now.

I was thinking earlier, too, about that saying Show me a child when he's seven and I'll show you the man. I wonder how true that is. Am I the same person I was when I was seven? I do hope not. But the documentary Seven up pretty much showed us how true it was.

I'm feeling so lonely at the moment. Really missing company. I just would so like to have a friend whom I was close to, could play with and love, just the way a child does. I so miss that. Men get so pushed away from the idea of simple play, I'm sure it's why we end up aggressive. I can remember, I swear, my father forcing - or trying to force - any simple childish play out of me, and making me take on a role in life of "a man". I think I could tell it all the time. I used to be aware of him, and think to myself that I could read him mind somehow, and reluctantly go along with him just to appease him.

I really do think that many men go through the whole male companionship thing with a very strong sense of emptiness. I used to feel it at soccer matches. It was like and unspoken boredom, a forced love of the game. That men were bound by a camararderie of fear, rather than simple joy. That's at the root, I believe, of the whole competitive thing.

I dunno. Maybe there are competitive types, and non competitive types, just as there are supposedly hunter/gatherers and farmers, burned into our DNA over eons of living as human beings. Maybe our behaviours are as distinctive and as innate as our blood groups.

Didn't I hear something about blood groups being rooted in ancient tribal something or other?

Anyway...I miss the whole childhood/ companionship/ play thing. I miss it a lot. Right now I just want a friend to play with. I'm sitting in my Austin apartment and I just want to lark around with someone innocently and beautifully. I need that so much. Sad, innit? But I've done the solitude thing. You can only go so far with it.

I'm sure this feeling will pass...

I was thinking earlier that what I want and need is kids of my own. I look around my "home" and I think to myself "Is this it?" Is this how my life will go from now? Just be alone, and do stuff now and then, and live this monastic life?

Fuuuuuuccccckkkkk. Surely not? But I'm not seeing, at the time of writing this, anyone that I'm going to be loving in that way.

Frankly, I just think I'm broken hearted, plain and simple. My heart was broken years ago, and I've never really gotten over it. Only one person ever really got that close to me, and I've never been able to forget her. She was a pain in the arse, fucking annoying, but she was, without any doubt, the funniest person I've known and the most loving person I've known. Problem was, I wasn't going to let myself love her at the time, because I was still broken hearted ( or so I thought) about a previous one.

So is that my destiny, to always be one lover behind? Be stuck on some past one, rather than be able to be in the present with one?

Thing is, it really is the child in us that makes the bond with a lover, isn't it? so there's little we can do about it when it happens. It just happens, because that loving, innocent child that Morley talks about finds a meeting with another child. Certainly when it's real, and it isn't a case of proving to your friends that you can have a trophy better than theirs. And I've wasted a lot of time doing that one...

I know that my inner child is my salvation. My poor, neglected inner toddler. It's the youngest child in us that holds the greatest power over us, I'm sure. The toddler in us has greater control, I'm certain, than the inner teenager. It all comes down to the youngest child in us. Right now, my inner toddler is wanting a woman to cuddle and play with. God, is he!

I remember the clarity of my heart when I felt real joy in my life. It's the most wonderful feeling.

But my own childhood memories of friends aren't good. There are so many clouds in my memories of friends. I had one friend, Stephen, who lived around the corner from me when I was about 8. We had a big falling out when he stole (although he later denied it) my telescope. I remember my mother taking me away from him, and the sense of losing my friend right there, so suddenly. It was horrible. I cried, and felt so powerless against my mother, who was just hijacking my life right there, never letting me discover how to build or break friendships myself. My mother had no idea how to do stuff like that. I can remember her stopping me from playing with a girl across the road from my because we were doing sexual stuff like touching bellies together. She was always interfering in my life. Is it any wonder that I found it so difficult to find a sense of identity?

Going on from the shame post, I still have feelings of shame around my childhood. Isn't that bizarre? To carry feelings of shame around that are probably 40 years old or more? Is there anything I could have done as a child that I should feel ashamed of now? That anyone could do as children?

I wonder what the lives are like of people like the boys who killed the 5 year old in Liverpool a few years back. They were only ten when they did it, and were released just a couple of years ago, much to the disgust of many people in the UK.

How terrible that is, that a population want to punish children for such things? I mean, what is a childhood if it isn't a time to discover what innocence is or isn't? I wonder what those young men's lives are like now. Do they keep blogs, I wonder?

What would their stories be like? What's their perspective on life, having spent the best part of their lives in penal institutions? How are they ever going to form relationships, with their own set of experiences?

I wonder, too, about the children of mass murderers, like Fred and Rose West. What's it like to know that your parents murdered and chopped up not just your own sister, but lots of young girls?

These are the kinds of childhoods that some people grow up with. And I thought mine was weird or bad...

But it is so sad that we lose that wonderful place of innocence. Or at least that some of us do. I do hope that I only misplaced mine, because I do have some happy memories of pure joy.