When my daughter counts, she recites all the numbers in order, until she reaches “12, 13, 14, Fixteen, 17, 18, 19….” Soon enough, I’m sure she’ll separate fifteen and sixteen and recite the teens in the boring way that the rest of us do, but for now, she unwittingly exhibits her genius there, and marks this past year, for me, forever, as Twenty Fixteen. I can’t keep up with all the wonderful things she says and then forgets having said, though my wife and I write them down here and there. But all her small, unforgettable, forgotten improvements on verbal human language and its facial expression repertoire are my favorite things of this past year. A runner-up along these lines–the best poems I’ve read all year, besides the published pieces from Andy Grace’s unpublished and destined to be prize-winning manuscript The Last Will and Testament of Said Gun—are the child quote illustrations of Martin Bruckner.
“Daddy I just love your bellybutton. It’s so deep a fairy could live in there,” is the first quote that greets the visitor of spaghetti-toes.tumblr.com, where Bruckner showcases and sells prints of his work, illustrations of quotes sent in by parents from around the world. Some of them work on a more direct level of similarity, such as “Mommy, when you wake up, sometimes you look like your face needs to be ironed,” and “Why do these mosquitoes think we’re hot dogs?” The illustrations express the appreciation of, and love for, children and their innate genius, their ability to effortlessly break language into beauty in ways that we adults, exiled from paradise, can only imitate through considerable struggle.
Many of the Spaghetti Toes quotes, perhaps unsurprisingly, since they come from two-year-olds, are in the form of commands:
“Daddy, move the sun.”
“Have a good day at work, don’t lick your boss.”
“Do not come downstairs when I’m kissing Spiderman.”
Some are straight-forward declarations:
“I’m not cute. I’m Batman.”
“When I grow up, I want to be in charge of circus goats.”
“I not done being bad yet.”
“My taco is not as hairy as yours.”
Others are the highest expressions of love and affection:
“I love your tiny pants, Dad.”
“If love was measured in weight, I love you as much as a big ol’ semi-truck full of elephants.”
“I love you with all my butt.”
“Mom, this means I love you. And this means spinning web action.”
My favorites of all these quotes—visit the site to see the illustrations, which are as profound, in their own way, as any art can be, for the way they respect the wisdom and freedom of the speaking child—are the ones that work on the level of the non-allegorical, where metaphor cannot be broken down, a realm of expression that a post like this would never be able to fully explain, situate meaningfully in historical and social contexts, explicate. They can’t be explained because they are the purest form of metaphor. There is an aspect to them that resonates with Hannah Arendt’s discussion of Walter Benjamin’s thought and writing, an operation of metaphor so ancient and original it can only be described as mystical. His thesis on the angel of history is her point of departure, and she uses it to illustrate why Benjamin’s work was never appreciated in traditional academic contexts. In her view, he was not most fundamentally interested in the theories and ideas that captivated the professional scholars of his day, but rather was intrigued by the “wonder of appearance” (more on this in a future post). He, like a mystic, like a child, knew that “Metaphors are the means by which the oneness of the world is poetically brought about.”
The stand-out quote/illustration in my eyes, the one that if either of my daughters ever bought for me I would prominently and proudly display, is one that best embodies the deep truth in metaphor, where it breaks into a realm that is no longer figurative, but absolutely immediate. It also captures the essence of love. For the reality we perceive is certainly an illusion, but it is not utterly divorced from the reality that truly is—they are both wrapped up and entangled with one another, each wholly contained in the other. I’d like to think of everything as in love with everything else; and in this quote is an expression of the love that we can all aspire to, a love that we must try to remember, for we all once had it in us, when we were young:
“Daddy, I love you past the moon and Mars and all the stars where there’s nothing. I love you where there’s nothing.”