Malinda Words: Following children and their smiles

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A song wandered through the yellows of October and through random conversations in a coffee house. It came from a different century and a different war. It is from one of my favourite musicals, ‘Hair,’ where one of the central characters, Claude Bukowski, following a tumultuous few hours in the company of a group of anti-war, LSD-popping young people in New York’s Central Park, ponders his life as he proceeds to an recruitment interview with the US Army.

The lyrics for the musical were written by Jerome Ragni and James Rado based on their observations of the hippie counterculture and the sexual revolution of the late 1960s and of course the Vietnam War or rather the peace movement opposed to the war. The title of the song: ‘Where do I go?’

So Claude asks (himself) whether he should follow the river or the gulls. He wonders if there’s someone to tell him why he lives and dies. Should he, he asks, follow the wind song, the thunder or the neon in young lovers’ eyes and if so go down to the gutter or up to the glitter and into the city where the truth is supposed to lie? Should he follow his heart, should he follow his hand? Where should he go?

All metaphors which make for fascinating interpretation no doubt, but the lines that I find most memorable are the ones about children:

He offers these answers as well: follow the children, follow their smiles. And yet he returns to the fundamental question when asks, ‘is there an answer in their sweet faces that tells me why I live and die?’

It is fashionable for adults, especially adult politicians, to talk about the young. They acknowledge, ‘the future belongs to the youth.’ They say and do things in the name of ‘the next generation’ or ‘generations yet unborn.’ They say, ‘we want to make the world a better place for our children,’ or ‘we want a world that is safe for children.’ Some even write children’s stories that are nothing more than adult tales along adult themes featuring children. Prescriptive. Sybil Wettasinghe would be an exception.

The objectives are not entirely ignoble of course. The problem, perhaps, is that the premises upon which futures are imagined are essentially ‘adult’ in character. Advocacy from above, much like development, even when it is made out to be inclusive with the interjection of the word ‘participatory.’

So we ask ourselves: Who am I? What am I? What should I become? What should I do? Where am I? Where should I go? We try to locate and relocate ourselves, pondering primordial questions about our existence. And we prescribe for ourselves and for others after self-diagnosis and diagnosis.

It occurred to me that the problem probably begins when we become fixated with the most troubling element of all punctuation, the question mark.

Children don’t concern themselves with providing answers to adults about their existential crises. There’s no ‘come on’ anywhere in their smiles. Their faces are not sweetened so that adults can figure out who they, the adults, are.

There’s joy amid sorrow and vice versa. The same star can drive one to despair or exultation. A child’s face or smile may exacerbate or alleviate essentialist angst or any other ‘malady’ that one may believe one’s suffering. A child’s face or smile or tear may tell us something we didn’t know about ourselves or confirm some truth we were afraid to face.

There’s nothing in a child’s face or smile that forbids or sanctions. You want hope? You got it? You want despair? That’s there too. Indeed, do you want to see a child in a flower, a star, a cloud formation, something someone said, a conversation-snippet, passing hours, a moment or an eternity? Done!

The world is a child, I like to think. Born just the other day, still trying to figure out its position in the universe and its uncountable food chains, the world invites us to follow and smiles as the invitation is offered.

It is not my task to define ‘child’ or prescribe which child with which smile is best to follow. There's a child I left behind in a long ago when nothing was known of centuries or decades or war or peace, though. He is smiling. I think he’s onto something. I will ask.

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is the 251st article in the new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given below]

24 October 2023

Following children and their smiles

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