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Safe to Wander and Explore

Safe to Wander and Explore

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Not too long ago, I was asked by a publisher if I might consider reviewing a children’s book. We corresponded a little bit and I said I would take a look. If I liked the book, I’d say so, and I’d run it by our little boy as well to see what he thought.

Well, I got the one book, but then I also received two more books directly from the author. They were all signed, with the date, and inscribed to Ben with message “Follow Your Dreams.” Ben was very happy with that, and so was I. Thank you, Stephen!

I opened up Creatures of the Night, and scanned the inside flaps as I normally do. There was a sweet photograph of Stephen J. Brooks holding a cute little girl – I’m guessing his daughter – but this is what send an arrow to my heart:

He has served as a Federal Agent for over a decade and writes to comfort children. He has always escaped into the magical world of word: comforted through poetry and prose alike.

In The Fairy Ball (which was I think intended for ME {smile}), there was more:

Now, more than ever, he sees the need to reassure children. He works to provide them a magical setting where they can escape the tribulations of their environment. Mr. Brooks writes books that provide enchanting worlds where children are safe to wander and explore.

Because this is a set of concerns very close to my own heart, I have to admit that I am predisposed to like the books. And I did like them. He has worked with different illustrators, some better than others. They are written in the kind of basic poetry found in many children’s books. The recurring theme is a child who wanders out to explore and experience a magical place, is able to navigate the environment and find new aspects of reality, and then returns to the mundane protected with a touch of spirit to help and guide them.

Part of the value of such books is to feed the imagination of children so that they can activate ways of seeing differently using their imaginations.

This sort of imaginative “inner space making” has survival value. I have experienced it for myself and I am convinced of the aching need most children have for it. Children who have experienced difficult realities have even more need for this than the more protected children do. This is how we learn to make sense of our experiential worlds and to multiply the possibilities for making our way along through them.

Ben’s favorite was Alexander Asenby’s Great Adventure. The young boy knight rides a dragon through the starry sky, helps a fairy king protect a town from trolls and other frightening creatures, shares in the celebratory feast and rides the dragon home – all the way back through the closet door. As a girl who would hide out in the closet at times, that rang well with me, too.

I also liked the metaphorical scent of lilac that permeated The Fairy Ball. It’s my favorite flower, and it has always made me feel that all was well. Oh, to dance with the fairies in a glen full of lilacs!

My favorite, however, was the one that I had opened first. Creatures of the Night is a bedtime story that opens up a meditative awareness of all the night-time lives that can surround us. The books constructs a privileged viewpoint that sees what no child can see. That in itself is very fun, but the story goes further in that it evokes an almost mystical sense of place in which the child can feel that he or she really is part of it all, belonging to the surrounding world of all the nighttime creatures. Nicely done.

Alas, I am also a teacher, and one who loves poetry, and so I cannot resist making a couple of suggestions for bringing future books to the next level.

If Mr. Brooks would pull more visual texture into the vocabulary, they could become extraordinary books.

It’s a matter of personal preference, of course, but I also think he could rethink the poetry’s meter. If he keeps the basic four-line stanza, the poetry would be better without the extra syllable in the last line. When you read it out loud, it is difficult to decide where the stress should be. I suspect many parents and children stumble there.

The majestic coyote makes his way
Through the woods each night.
He calls his friends to come and play
As he howls in the moon’s bright light.

I would prefer the last line to have the same beat, something like “Howling through the moon’s bright light.”

I enjoyed the books very much and so did Ben. My suggestions here are intended in a spirit of support.

I look forward to reading new books by Stephen Brooks. Writing gets better and better with the right kind of heart, and he has that in abundance.


A Day for Gustave Flaubert

A Day for Gustave Flaubert

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I’m in a mood for Flaubert. I love the way he searched endlessly for le mot juste (the exact – uniquely correct – word, the most precisely accurate language). Sometimes he found the words that evoked and carried more truth than any fact could possibly do.

Love art. Of all lies, it is the least untrue.

For none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

But it was above all at mealtimes that she could bear it no longer, in that little room on the ground floor, with the smoking stove, the creaking door, the oozing walls, the damp floor-tiles; all the bitterness of life seemed to be served to her on her plate, and, with the steam from the boiled beef, there rose from the depths of her soul other exhalations as it were of disgust.

But the disparaging of those we love always alienates us from them to some extent. We must not touch our idols; the gilt comes off in our hands.

The thirst for carnage stirred afresh within him; animals failing him, he desired to slaughter men.

Perfection is the enemy of the good.

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.

Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity; the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion.

Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.

A thing derided is a thing dead; a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man.

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.

Who is there to talk to now? Who is there in our wretched country who still ‘cares about literature’? Perhaps one single man? Me! The wreckage of a lost world, an old fossil of romanticism!

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

The author, in his work, must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force.

A memory is a beautiful thing, it’s almost a desire that you miss.

Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution.

One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.

Madame Bovary, c’est moi.

Fun with Watchtower Covers

Fun with Watchtower Covers

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Fun with Watchtower covers, from TruthBook Blue (this is number ten in a series!)

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=4l3WNTu1oZk[/youtube]

If you read this blog, I am quite sure that you already have an idea of what I might have to say about the following question:

Does “the faithful and discreet slave” endorse independent groups of Witnesses who meet together to engage in Scriptural research or debate?

This question – and its answer by the Governing Body – appeared in the September “Q&A” section of the Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Ministry publication.

It’s a great example of Watchtower-speak. They start off with a simple question about endorsement. Of course,there’s no reason that they should feel they have to “endorse” independent studies. However, they gradually move into a prohibition against reading anything but the Society’s publications – even suggesting that learning Hebrew or Greek might not be such a good idea.

And people still try to argue with me about the way the control their members and take the god-position.

Tightening the leash: the Watchtower’s attempt to put an end to Jehovah’s Witnesses’ apologists is an excellent point-by-point analysis and rebuttal posted by The Apologetic Front.

Before this talk, I didn’t really have much of an idea as to the extent to which the Watchtower has control over its members. Now I can sadly say that I do.

Transcending JW Abuse

Transcending JW Abuse

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It’s such a familiar narrative now, and it’s almost comforting to me to see more and more people testifying to it – to know that what I observed and experienced is pretty much the same from congregation to congregation, and not just a matter of my own family or community in the Jehovah’s Witnesses: the fantasies of a paradise earth devoid of all but other Jehovah’s Witnesses, the fatalism toward the coming apocalypse and the lack of engagement in the world, an almost total lack of compassion, paranoia and fear of others, spankings and beatings “out back” at the Hall, the abusive and sometimes predatory nature of many of the elders, the way small slights divide families while larger issues are ignored, the hypocrisy, the mind-numbing repetition in the many meetings – the smallness of it all.

Joy Castro is now a literature professor – it is very heartening to find that so many of us, who were not irretrievably damaged but instead went on to thrive, were able to save our sanity and navigate a different path if we had something else – like intellectual curiosity, a higher sense of ethics, compassion for others – some private treasure to hold onto like a mantra while redefinining faith and value for ourselves.

Bits from the article “Turn of Faith” by Joy Castro
August 14, 2005, New York Times Magazine

Three times a week in the Kingdom Hall in Miami, my brother and I strove to sit perfectly still in our chairs. Our mother carried a wooden spoon in her purse and was quick to take us outside for beatings if we fidgeted.

…
My loneliness was nourished by rich, beautiful fantasies of eternal life in a paradise of peace, justice, racial harmony and environmental purity, a recompense for the rigor and social isolation of our lives.

This bliss wasn’t a future we had to work for. Witnesses wouldn’t vote, didn’t involve themselves in worldly matters, weren’t activists. Jehovah would do it all for us, destroying everyone who wasn’t a Witness and restoring the earth to harmony. All we had to do was obey and wait.

Shortly after our return to the States, my father was disfellowshipped for being an unrepentant smoker — smoking violated God’s temple, the body, much like fornication and drunkenness. Three years later, my parents’ marriage dissolved. My mother’s second husband had served at Bethel, the Watchtower’s headquarters in Brooklyn. Our doctrines, based on Paul’s letters in the New Testament, gave him complete control as the new head of the household; my mother’s role was to submit. My stepfather happened to be the kind of person who took advantage of this authority, physically abusing us and forcing us to shun our father completely.

After two years, I ran away to live with my father. My brother joined me a tumultuous six months later. We continued to attend the Kingdom Hall and preach door to door; the Witnesses had been our only community. Leaving was a gradual process that took months of questioning. I respected all faiths deeply, but at 15 I decided that I could no longer be part of a religion that condoned inequality.

…
I love my mother, but I also love my ”worldly” life, the multitude of ideas I was once forbidden to entertain, the rich friendships and the joyous love of my family. By choosing to live in the world she scorned — to teach in a college, to spare the rod entirely, to believe in the goodness of all kinds of people — I have, in her eyes, turned my back not only on Jehovah but also on her.

Joy Castro is the author of a memoir, “The Truth Book: Escaping a Childhood of Abuse Among Jehovah’s Witnesses,” to be published next month by Arcade and from which this essay is adapted. She lives in Crawfordsville, Ind.

Here’s a bit from “Farm Use” in Without a Net, in which she writes about mealtimes:

“Food becomes a measured thing. Each mealtime, my stepfather dishes himself up from the pots. Then my mother may help herself to half of what he has taken. Then, while he watches, she can spoon half of what she’s taken onto my plate. A portion half the size of mine goes to my brother. If my stepfather wants a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, my brother gets one-eighth. If she gives us more than my stepfather calculates is correct, he beats us with his belt.”

What is it with the belt, anyway? I remember my mother asking my father to hit us with his hand, so that he could feel how hard he was hitting us – but he preferred the belt, followed by a biblical lecture which might well have been a reading from some back issue of the Watchtower magazine. Of course we had all the bound volumes. I remember being beaten one time for standing near to the stereo and looking to him as though I might be thinking about touching it. He wanted his children to be perfect in Jehovah’s eyes – spare the rod, spoil the child. Myself, I always wondered what exactly a “rod” was… I mean, in that context (ha). It always sounded like it might have been a bad translation – anyone know?

Thanks goes to H.K. for alerting me to this.