MIND MOVES Marie Murray The experience of childhood is encapsulated in vivid and visceral terms. What we see, hear, taste, touch and smell, the details of these early experiences in our childhood lives, remain with us forever.
Physiological psychology tries to explain the intricacy of the neurophysiology of our memory of these experiences, the internal wiring and pathways to the brain. But life is not theory. Life is lived. And it is, perhaps, never lived more intensely than in childhood.
Young children inhabit the present with a level of intensity that the adult world forgets. Life is immediate. It is now. Life is experienced in sensate detail; it is the strength of smells, vibrancy of colours, gruffness of textures, and the softness of a parent's hand brushing distress away.
Childhood is the intense eye-wrinkling, nose turning taste of disliked foods or the heady cool of ice-cream. It is the indentation on a school desk, the texture of a toy, the sweet mouldy smell of the pages of a favourite book. The picture on its cover. It is the slap of the wind on the face or its swoosh within the ear. It is the pattern on the ceiling unseen by the adult eye, the monster on the wallpaper, the movement of the imagination across the darkened room at night.
To the adult eye, childhood looks simple. But this belies its busyness: its inner life of intellectual intensity, collating and assembling the jigsaw of experiences into a coherent pattern.
There are messages to be understood, an identity to be assembled from the comments, compliments and criticisms of the adult world. You are good, you are bad: witty, intelligent, funny, stupid, lazy, the best, the worst and old enough to know better.
From these cascades of communications selfhood, self-esteem and self-worth are formed. "I am good, I am bad". These summations of adult communications to the child, are not just intellectual, they are felt with every fibre of the child's being. Children believe that they are what we tell them they are. They feel our approbation.
All of the senses participate in delight, terror, pain or sadness. Life is visceral, lived moment by moment so that in the future times past can be re-evoked by the most minor firing of a memory. Just as in Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, memory triggered in adulthood by the taste of a morsel of Madeleine cake soaked in tea, recharges vast tracts of recollection, so too, childhood memory and sensation provide a bridge, an arc from childhood to adulthood.
A smell, a touch, a colour may suddenly melt the past of childhood into the present of adulthood.
The memories of childhood, therefore, are memories of detail; a chip of paint, the fragrance of a mother's perfume, the stench of cabbage, a brilliant colour, a dazzling day, a black night, an interminable wait, a vast ocean, a long, long road, a huge mountain, an endless journey.
In the city, there is the choking clutter of adults on a busy street: gigantic shoes, jacket buttons, eye-level jagged zips, the only anchor an impatient adult hand in this Gulliverian journey through the land of the giants. They are big and you are small. Childhood is as simple and significant as that.
Childhood is the strange smell of adult hugs; whiskered aunts and tobacco covered uncles, grannies and granddads and the suffocation of big-bosomed embraces. There are uneasy inane adult questions about what age you are now, what class you are in, what subjects you favour and what you want to be when you grow up.
Childhood is rescuing animals, the open beak of a stunned bird, the marbled coldness of dead things, the cry of a trapped cat, and the chomping chewing scrutiny of the big-eyed cow. It is the soft fur of creatures, the warm lick of a grateful dog. It is an extraordinary empathy with animals: together dependent in an enormous universe.
Childhood is preoccupation with issues of justice and injustice, where arbitrary adult judgments are unacceptable and fairness is the first principle. It is outrage at being wrongly accused; devastation if privileges are unequal, bedtime must be relative to age, biscuits counted carefully, meticulous measurement of liquid into a glass and the careful division of sweets and treats.
Time, too, has different dimensions. Time in school distinguished by the light and sounds of a classroom, chanting of letters, incantations of tables, contours of crayons making their slow squiggly journey across a page, the tongue twisting, sniffling concentration of copying, carefully, exactly, without any mistakes. School is the supplicant bowing of heads over a passage to be read or the bobbing of transcription from the board. It is holding the too small piece of chalk to write upon the too high blackboard, the fine rising of chalk-dust loitering in a sunbeam, tickling the face or clustering on the sleeve, refusing to be beaten away.
Yet despite the many commonalities of childhood, each child lives out his or her individual, unique and special life differently and within different family, school and social structures.
The shape of that life: the memories of childhood depend on us.
mmurray@irish-times.ie
Marie Murray is director of psychology at St Vincent's Hospital, Fairview, in Dublin.