THE MIND DABBLE
Crafting a Character from Out of the Depths of His or Her Unexplored Mind
Delving into the commonality that Faulkner’s Benji, Steinbeck’s Lennie, and a child named Helen shared
“What is life? — A novel. Who is the author? — Anonymous. We read haltingly, laugh, weep… and sleep.” ―Nikolai Karamzin
I’m going to start with a joke — not just because it’s a cheap way to get your attention. It is that. But also, its punchline has everything to do with the theme of my story.
It’s an old joke. You may have heard it. Some may not even think it’s particularly funny. Not in a ha-ha, spray-your-screen-with-coffee sort of way. But as punchlines go, it has a certain staying power. At least it does for me.
We’ll talk about it on the other side.
Now this took place back in the old days when fathers-to-be weren’t allowed in the delivery room to watch the miracle of their child’s birth. Mr. Smith is pacing in the waiting room when the doctor walks in. The doctor lays his hand on the young father’s shoulder and looks deep in his eyes.
“Mr. Smith,” he says, “I have finished delivering — ” And his voice trailed off.
“Our baby?”
“Yes. Laura gave birth to a nine-and-one-half pound — ” He looked to the ceiling.
“A — a what? A boy? A girl?”
“A — a — a nine-and-a-half pound …” He took a loud, deep breath. “ … eyeball.”
Mr. Smith threw up his arms. “Oh, my Sweet Jesus! No! What — what could be worse than that?”
“I was afraid you’d ask, son … It’s blind!”
On Punchlines
I remember the first time I heard that joke. The only time, actually. It was much abbreviated then, as most jokes are that don’t profess to be stories. I recall startling myself with my spontaneous laughter because it was funny without my having to think about it; morbid, dark, but funny. And it was removed just enough from possibility that it wasn’t a cruel joke. The football player who catches the baby dropped from the second-story window, then slams it to the pavement and does his victory dance — now, that’s a cruel joke. Also, sadly, it is funny. But cruel.
Anyway, the punchline stuck in my head. Was it the eyeball being born that was so compelling? I mean, there were no ears on it, to enable it to hear; no mouth so it could make baby sounds. If, instead, the doctor announced that Amy gave birth to a globby something that had no mouth (only a breathing hole), and no ears, and while it had — well, it was, after all — an eyeball, it was blind! Well, that, indeed, would be a cruel joke, if a joke at all. And certainly not ha-ha funny.
What makes the joke I heard funny was that the only relatable characteristic of the newborn eyeball was that it was blind.
And that was what gave the punchline such hanging power in my brain after my laughter ended.
The newborn nine-and-a-half pound eyeball in that joke — I mean, before the delivery of the “It’s blind,” punchline — became an instant metaphor in my mind for the river of consciousness I dealt with in my story:
Then it followed, as night follows day, that the blind eyeball became a metaphor for something akin to the unconscious mind. I say “akin to” because it is more a state of the PREconscious mind which is in the healthy, just-born infant.
Preconsciousness that initiates the two-year-long twilight before the dawning of self-awareness.
One of America’s first Psychologists gives us his impression of what goes on in the preconsciousness of the newborn this way:
“The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion …” William James.
I needed that joke, and especially the existential conclusion I derived from the punchline, to help me grapple with an idea with which common sense won’t allow grappling. You see, as a writer …
I was just a fledgling, dealing with an unwieldy concept with which the great writers of the raw, uncharted mind’s internal processes were forced to grapple at understanding—writers like William Faulkner and John Steinbeck.
The joke’s greater purpose
It was during the month of February 1882. A child, a mere slip of a thing, was suffering through an illness so severe that the doctor prepared her mother and father for the horrible probability that their daughter would not survive.
She was only nineteen months old. The doctor’s pronouncement struck her mother a particularly bitter blow. Her child was at her feet nearly every waking hour. Her precocious development amazed everyone. She walked at an age when most infants were crawling. Her vocabulary was growing daily. She could say the word wah-wah, for example, and connect it with water.
I think, therefore I am
As bright as the child was, studies by today’s science of child development⁶ show quite clearly that in all likelihood she had no self-awareness. She recognized her mother and father, in a care-receiving sense, and felt anxious when she was separated from them. She was perfectly aligned with her developmental timeline. But at nineteen months, there would not have been even the most rudimentary self-reflection.
How is that relevant?
I hope we can answer that soon.
Kindly slip with me for a moment, won’t you, into the toddler’s nineteen month-old brain?
We find ourselves squirming with the heat from the fever that ravaged the poor child’s brain on that February evening in 1882. Mama was at her bedside when the fever broke, several hours after midnight, and she watched her daughter drift into blessed sleep.
It is morning. You and I are on duty now. In a sense, we become her surrogate awareness. We experience only what she experiences, but later only we will have the ability to evaluate them.
We open our eyes. To darkness. We move our arms and legs, reaching. Gentle pressure on our forehead. Mama smell. We can smell Mama. But we want Mama. Where is she? Mama can say words that are soft and make us smile. Why is she not talking? Something slides beneath us and we are now floating up, and now our belly and our face press into a Mama-smelling something in the dark. Except that … Mama would sing and laugh and spin around and we would laugh ourselves, and press against the pretty flowers on her dress. We can feel we are spinning now through the dark and there is the sweet smell of Mama all around. But where is she? Where is her singing?
Exploring the experiment
Okay, we can slip out now.
If you didn’t know all along, by now you probably figured out that the child was Helen Keller, who was not born blind and deaf, as I (who had never seen the Hollywood or Broadway version of her life story), had believed.
As my little mini-bio of her suggested, at nineteen months she suffered what doctors now think was scarlet fever, and though the doctor thought she would die, she miraculously recovered, but without sight and hearing.
What I hoped to capture in our time in the child’s preconscious brain was just an inkling of what the young Helen Keller must have felt upon awakening in utter darkness and absolute silence on that morning in February of 1882. Our imagination, in trespass, allowed us to feel it. To a degree.
But to explain it to the reader was a different matter. That was why I chose the metaphoric device of inviting the reader to climb with me into Helen’s brain. (The simpler empathic approach of suggesting we look out from her eyes and listen through her ears, wouldn’t work, for obvious reasons.)
Some might ask, why was I so secretive about who our subject was? Simply, because I was afraid that the moment I wrote the name Helen Keller, most readers would think, “Oh, yeah, she’s the one who was blind and deaf.” Then they couldn’t experience the epiphany that I was hoping my experiment would produce — that is, if I had possessed just a tad of William Faulkner’s genius when he created Benji, the “idiot”, in “The Sound and the Fury,”¹ or John Steinbeck, with his Lennie in “Of Mice and Men”² (Some few of you may have experienced a few paragraphs of my own experiment with the autistic Jeremy’s inarticulate thought/dialogue in “Jeremy and the Magic Place”.³)
Read, with me, Helen Keller’s own words from pages 3 & 4 of her biography, “The Story of My Life.”³
“Then, in the dreary month of February, came the illness which closed my eyes and ears and plunged me into the unconsciousness of a newborn baby. They called it acute congestion of the stomach and brain. The doctor thought I could not live. Early one morning, however, the fever left me as suddenly and mysteriously as it had come. There was great rejoicing in the family that morning, but no one, not even the doctor, knew that I should never see or hear again.”
And a few paragraphs later…
“Gradually I got used to the silence and darkness that surrounded me and forgot that it had ever been different, until she came — my teacher — who was to set my spirit free.”
What an inspiring story Helen Keller had to share with her readers. But even after I read it, I found it impossible to comprehend those four and a half years before her teacher, Anne Sullivan, appeared — four and a half years she existed as from the bottom of a deep, black, capped well that admitted no light or sound.
She was one year, seven months into her sojourn on Earth when the disease had crept in and stolen away everything but the thin thread of life itself. I can’t help but wonder: five month’s later … did her brain — on time at about two years of age — send Helen its first neuro-electrical signals …only to have them bounce back, unanswered?
We’ll never know, of course.
From age six onward, her life was well documented by Helen herself. And while not enough can ever be said about Anne Sullivan, who devoted her entire life to her pupil, it will have to be enough for me to doff my hat in passing. Both were remarkable human beings.
A parting thought
Whether there is anything to be gained for a writer to visit the raw, uncharted, unarticulated mind of a Helen Keller (before her astounding transformation), a Benji, a Lennie, or even my own Jeremy, I’ll leave to your own reckoning.
It will have to be enough for me to finish with a quote from Mark Twain.
“I need not go into any particulars about Helen Keller. She is fellow to Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon, Homer, Shakespeare, and the rest of the immortals. She will be as famous a thousand years from now as she is to-day.” — From Mark Twain’s Autobiography (Kindle) Pg. 465.⁴
Thank you for reading, for highlighting whatever was meaningful to you, and for leaving your thoughts in the comments section.
References:
¹Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury.
²Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men
³Squires, Jay. Jeremy and the Magic Place.
⁴Keller, Helen. “The Story of My Life.” (Dover Thrift Editions) (p. 1). Dover Publications. Kindle Edition.
⁵Twain, Mark. Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1: The Complete and Authoritative Edition (Autobiography of Mark Twain series) (p. 465)
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