I had an experience recently which really summed up my frustration with the problem of “growing up.”
It happened when I went to a museum with my friend. We had just picked up some audio guides when she saw a sign saying “Magic Candles”. She was super excited and picked one up, asking me, “What do you think they’re for?” Before I could answer, the lady working at the museum interrupted. “That’s for the children”, she said. Immediately, my friend dropped the candle back in the box, as if it had been tainted. She blushed and looked down at her toes as the lady explained, “it’s for the children to go around and solve little problems, and when they come back they can get a prize after.” The lady went back to work, and we walked away. “That was awkward,” she said to me, clearly feeling like she had made some kind of social blunder, or done something wrong. I didn’t know what to say at the time, but I felt very sad at that moment.
Why was it so wrong for my friend to be excited about an activity that was “meant” for kids? Why should she be made to feel so ashamed for feelings which had come so naturally to her? That example really confirmed the frustrations I had about “growing up.”
Clearly, a line has been drawn between what is meant for children and what is meant for adults. It’s also been made an unspoken rule that it is wrong for adults to step over this line. When a child tries to cross over, though, it just comes across as cute. I’m interested in exploring the foggy landscape of this zone between adults and children. I imagine it is a place somewhere between dreams & reality. Exploring this foggy zone, I will be looking for answers on how we can bring together adult and child.
Before I go any further though, I would like to clarify what I mean by the words child and adult. This is how the dictionary defines a child:
1. a person between birth and full growth; a boy or girl
2. a son or daughter
3. a baby or infant
Those all apply, but what I mean more specifically by the word “child” is a person who is still growing both physically and mentally. The dictionary defines an adult as:
1. a person who is fully grown or developed or of age
2. a full-grown animal or plant
3. a person who has attained the age of maturity as specified by law
I find these definitions a bit vague. I understand the physical part of being fully grown, but can we ever be fully developed mentally? Before I started thinking hard about all of this, I thought of the child and adult as two completely separate things.
I was an unknowing believer in the line between what is meant for children and what is meant for adults. Here, I made a chart:
This is not a definitive or complete chart. Instead, I’m treating this as a starting point to generate questions. To question my own preconceptions of what being an “adult” vs being a “child” means.
I’ll explore the creatures that live in the foggy zone between “adult” and “child”, and I hope to find some answers there on how to bring the two together. Uniting imagination with reality, and combining play with work.
Most of all, I’ll be exploring how combining silly and serious can make for a powerful force.
Silly, meet Serious. Serious, meet Silly. Get ready to love each other.
Making the Normal become Strange
highly scientific chart
When we’re young, everything is exciting and new. We pop out into the world, and see all the things going on and try to figure them out! As we grow older, it feels like there is less and less to discover.
“If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic.” — Viktor Shklovsky
A huge part of “growing up” is about developing habits and getting used to things. In the essay, “Art as Technique” Viktor Shklovsky gives an example of how it feels holding a pen for the first time, compared with how it feels holding it for the thousandth time. The skill required to use a pen eventually becomes automatic. This makes sense. I mean, imagine if every single time we used a pen it was like we were discovering it for the first time. We would literally never be able to get anything done!
It saves energy to be automatic, especially about things that are going to be repeated over and over. It would be a waste of precious human energy to create a new route of perception for things we are going to do daily. Once we’ve built up routes of perception, such as ‘pen is a tool used to write or draw’, we tend to slide down these pre-made routes. But not all problems can be solved with the pre-made routes of experience.
Over time, these pre-made routes tend to become stale and mundane. A pen is quite a mundane, boring object, but there’s magic in the mundane. This is something children naturally see, partly because they don’t have many routes of perception built up yet.
That’s why a cardboard box can be a million things for a child. Spaceship, time machine, house, friend, fort. But for “adults” to see it, we have to look a bit more. To see something new, we have to unlearn what we already know. This is where art comes in! “The purpose of art is to increase the difficulty and length of perception.” By slowing down perception, we avoid being on autopilot.
In this way, art gives the sensation of things as they are truly perceived, not as they are known. In fact, there’s a word for all of this — it’s called defamiliarization. The term was coined by Viktor Shklovsky in his 1917 essay “Art as Technique.”
Defamiliarization is all about taking the ordinary, and making it strange, in order to change our perception of it. I’ve realised that defamiliarization is something we’ve all experienced as children!
Golan Levin (inventor/media artist/coder/etc.) recounts a childhood experience which he’s never forgotten. The first time he saw Hebrew, he thought something was wrong with his eyes. As a child, he’d known languages other than English existed, but not that there were other writing systems. That was the first time he saw a writing system other than English. Levin explains how since that time he’s been thinking about how “abstract forms can connect us to a reality beyond language.”
As an “adult”, Levin created the Alphabet Synthesis Machine, “an online interactive artwork which allows one to create and evolve the possible writing systems of one’s own imaginary civilizations.” It’s a machine which generates imaginary languages and writing systems! So how do imaginary alphabets connect us to our childhood? They remind us of that feeling of first discovery.
As we get used to things, perception becomes a habit, instead of a new discovery each time. So it makes sense that as we get older, more and more things become familiar to us. In turn, there is less that is unfamiliar. So anything which makes us feel unfamiliar and strange — brings us closer to the feeling of being a child. It has potential to make us curious, and challenges us to slow down and focus on what we are truly perceiving.
Defamiliarization is essentially seeing the strangeness of the ordinary, which is a step of unlearning.
Take the following example of art revealing the strangeness of the ordinary. It’s an excerpt from the (BEST EVER!!!NO BIAS) animated tv series Rick and Morty. In season 2 episode 8, the main characters are watching a “How it’s Made” parody on interdimensional cable (tv which broadcasts channels from all possible realities/universes). Kind of like alien/alternate-reality tv.
Plumbus: How They Do it
“Everyone has a plumbus in their home. First, they take the dinglebop and smooth it out with a bunch of schleem.
The schleem is then repurposed for further use.
They take the dinglebop and they push it through the grumbo where the fleeb is rubbed against it.”
As the narrator is saying this, you watch alien factory workers assemble a plumbus. I know it sounds like gibberish now, but it’s actually quite genius…
To explain this, imagine how an alien would feel viewing a video of how a household object is made. For example, let’s say the aliens are watching a video of a scissor factory. It might go something like this:
“You probably have a pair of scissors in your home. First, they heat the steel to a high temperature. Then, they shape it using an industrial hammer. They cut the steel using a pressured press…”
Sounds a bit like how the plumbus is made, right? Let’s see what happens when we replace the scissors with words from the plumbus video.
“You probably have a fleeb of plumbus in your home. First, they heat the dinglebop to a high temperature. Then, they shape the dinglebop using schleem. They cut the dinglebop using a grumbo…”
Only those aliens know what the plumbus is for, and only humans know what scissors are for. The plumbus makes me wonder, how would it feel to be an alien landing on earth and experiencing human culture for the first time? The aliens would land and see how humans make objects in factories, objects only we know the purpose of. So, in this way, even though we are seeing the aliens in the video, it’s really a mirror reflecting what humans do.
By exploring a fictional “alien” world, we change the perspective of the “real” world we live in. Defamiliarization!
It really points out how weird we are. In order to see this weird aspect of humanity though, we had to see it through a different lense than the usual one. We had to defamiliarize our perspective. Imagine if someone had tried to prove the same point, that humans create objects only we know the process and purpose of, but did it by presenting a normal video of how scissors are made. The audience wouldn’t understand the point, because it would seem normal already. In the plumbus example though, key words representing “objects” and “processes” are replaced with nonsense words, highlighting how arbitrary these words are.
(This is a plumbus my boyfriend made me as a present. It reminds me everyday of the symbolic importance of… schleem.)
Shklovsky gives a similar example of defamiliarization, where instead of replacing familiar objects/actions with nonsense ones, an object/action is described as if seen for the first time. “For example, in ‘Shame’ Tolstoy ‘defamiliarizes’ the idea of flogging in this way: ‘to strip people who have broken the law, to hurl them to the floor, … and, after a few lines, ‘to lash about on the naked buttocks.’”
Defamiliarization has the power to reveal the truth about a situation, to show it’s real core.
By avoiding the familiar names for things, we are forced to describe them in a more honest and direct way. It’s really just a simple re-labeling, but it holds so much power to change perception.
In the book, The Brain That Changes Itself, Norman Doidge discusses mental routes of people with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). He looks at how re-labeling, and slowing down perception can help OCD patients. People with OCD have a constant ‘mistake feeling’ which won’t go away. Doidge explains how the part of the brain we detect mistakes with, the orbital frontal cortex, is more activated in people with OCD. Once this part of the brain has fired the “mistake feeling,” it sends a signal to the cingulate gyrus. This triggers the anxiety that something bad will happen if we don’t fix the mistake. The “automatic gearshift” of the brain, the caudate nucleus, is what allows our thoughts to flow from one to the next. In OCD, this gearshift becomes extremely sticky. This is described as brain-lock by UCLA psychiatrist Jeffrey M.Schwartz.
Schwartz wondered whether patients could move the gearshift and un-lock it “manually” by actively paying attention and focusing on something besides the worry, like a new and fun activity. This is similar to what Shklyovsky says about slowing down perception and seeing things as they truly are. Doidge explains how this can “grow” a new brain circuit, which will eventually compete with the older one. A new mental route challenging the old pre-made one! Defamiliarization! In Schwartz’s therapy for OCD, the first step is for the person having an attack is to relabel what is happening to them.
“As a therapist, I encourage OCD patients to make the following summary for themselves: ‘Yes, I do have a real problem right now. But it is not germs, it is my OCD.’” — Doidge and Ivonne
By relabelling the situation, it is puts into a different context, just like we saw with the plumbus! A new way of looking at the same thing. Putting together what Shklyovsky and Doidge are saying, I’m realizing that in order to change our routes of perception, we need to bring automatic thoughts and actions into consciousness. From there, we can observe and question the habits.
“Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.” — Viktor Shklovsky
The plumbus makes us see how weird we are.
So, remember this chart?
Maybe it really looks something more like this..
It’s probably more like this…
I wish it was as clear and simple as the first one I drew…but I think the process of learning and unlearning is a constant struggle and squiggle in life.
The Foggy Zone
Going deeper into the foggy landscape between adult and child, I’d like to introduce you to one of the residents there. Calvin, a six-year old boy who is the main character in the comic, Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson.
The stories are about Calvin and his best friend/toy tiger Hobbes. I started reading the comics when I was ten, and I didn’t know that Bill Watterson studied political science. I didn’t know that the characters are named after John Calvin, a theologian, and Thomas Hobbes, a political philosopher. I didn’t care about this when I was young — I just loved reading it because it was funny.
If you’d given me a book about theology or political philosophy at the same age I would have absolutely no idea what the heck you were talking about. Actually, I still don’t. But Calvin and Hobbes makes sense to so many people. Even though the comic ran from 1985–1995, people are still relating to it today. Bill Watterson boiled down huge, existential-crisis-inducing ideas into a medium that is simple, funny, and easy to understand.
He made the serious silly, and the silly serious.
But how did he do it? And why do “adults” enjoy reading a comic about a 6-year old?
There’s a lot I could go into here — the drawing skill, Calvin’s imagination, his relationship with Hobbes… but I’d like to bring our attention to the character of Calvin. He has the body of a six-year old, but his mind is a different story. He’s not quite child, not quite adult, but he can speak on behalf of both. With this mixed perspective of adult and child, he seems to communicate better than either of them could on their own. Here’s how Bill Watterson describes Calvin:
“I use Calvin as an outlet for my immaturity, as a way to keep myself curious about the natural world, as a way to ridicule my own obsessions, and as a way to comment on human nature. I wouldn’t want Calvin in my house, but on paper, he helps me sort through my life and understand it.” — Bill Watterson
So what does Calvin have to say about “growing up” and going to school?
Maybe if Calvin had a teacher like Keith Johnstone, he would’ve liked school.
In his book Impro, Johnstone talks about his time as a new teacher, where he was given the class no one else wanted, a mix of “ineducable” eight to ten-year-olds. Some couldn’t even write their names properly after five years of schooling. He wanted to get the children excited about writing, but nothing worked until one day he took his typewriter and a bunch of art books into class. Johnstone told the children that he’d type out anything they wanted about the pictures — and he’d even type their dreams.
Suddenly, these “ineducable” children were all wanting to write, and the pressure was coming from the students, not the teacher. In his own way, Johnstone defamiliarized what education meant to the kids. He established a different relationship with the children so that they weren’t thinking of themselves as ‘being educated.’
He made the serious silly! Just like Bill Watterson!
Johnstone talks about how Anthony Stirling was the first teacher to really change his life, and how important this moment was — influencing everything after. In Stirling’s first lesson, he asked the students to imagine a clown on a unicycle who’s peddling through the paint and onto their paper. “Don’t paint the clown, paint the mark he leaves on your paper!”
This exercise annoyed Johnstone. He’d always been “good at art” and wanted to show off his skills, but how could he when he was painting random scribbles? So instead, he tried to be original and mixed up a blue paint instead of using black like everyone else. Stirling was scathing about his inability to mix a black paint, which only annoyed Johnstone more. Then, Stirling asked everyone to put colours in the shapes.
“What kind of colours?
“Nice colours, nasty colours, whatever you like.”
After Johnstone put the colours in, he found his outline disappeared and had to retrace it in black. This annoyed him even more, and at this point, everyone’s paper was a soggy mess. Stirling asked them to “put patterns on all the colours” — and everyone got confused.
“Was he teasing us? What sort of patterns?”
The students wanted to get it right. Their filter of “right or wrong” was so strong, they couldn’t imagine any other possibilities. At the end, they wandered around gloomily looking at their messy pages, but Stirling didn’t seem bothered. He went to the cupboards and took out paintings from the same exercise done by other students.
“The colours were so beautiful, and the patterns were so inventive — clearly they had been done by some advanced class…Then I noticed that these little masterpieces were signed in very scrawly writing. ‘Wait a minute,’ I said, ‘These are by young children!’ It was just an exercise to encourage them to use the whole area of the paper, but they’d done it with such love and taste and care and sensitivity. I was speechless.”
Stirling believed the teacher was not superior to the child.
Instead of art being something to be imposed by an adult, he believed that art was already in the child. Instead, the teacher’s skill lay in bringing out this art from inside them, and presenting experiences in a way where the child was bound to suceed.
Johnstone continues, “Stirling recommended that we read the Tao te Ching. It seems to me now that he was practically using it as his teaching manual.”
What is the Tao Te Ching, and how does it relate to children? Well to explain it quickly, one of the principles of Taoism is to do and perceive rather then explain. Children just do.
The idea that we must “get things right” becomes so ingrained in us “adults”, that to just do without thinking becomes difficult. Imagining anything outside of the two options of “right” or “wrong” becomes frightening because it’s unknown. It is a foggy zone just like the one between child and adult. Another foggy zone which confused me was the question of “Is Hobbes real?”
Reading the comics as I got older, I wanted to know the answer to this so badly. I understood but I didn’t at the same time. Whenever someone other than Calvin came by, Hobbes would turn into a stuffed toy.
In the next section, I’ll explore this question through an example from South Park.
The Realness of Imagination
South Park does things in it’s own way. They animate extremely roughly compared to the Disney-style, but their stories and characters are just as real and absorbing. This is due to the coherence of style — as explained by David O Reilly in his essay — Basic Animation Aesthetics, which you can download here. Coherence of style is what helps make a fictional world believable. Because South Park’s animation technique saves so much time, the creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, with the help of the production crew, are able to create entire half-hour episodes in just 6 days. Their insane production schedule is a huge advantage when it comes to staying relevant with current events. They can make social commentary as things happen. Adam Curtis, director of Hypernormalisation, explains how the traditional documentary is failing to portray what the world is really like.
“Documentaries shouldn’t just reflect the world, they should try and explain why reality is like it is.” — Adam Curtis
Curtis argues that South Park is the best documentary of them all.
After reading his article, I went to watch some South Park to find out for myself. I started with “Imaginationland”, the three-part episode that Curtis recommended. It’s about how terrorists have taken over everyone’s imaginations — visibly shown in “Imaginationland”, a place where all imaginary creatures live, from Cinderella and Totoro, to Jesus and Harry Potter.
When the terrorists enter, everyone’s imaginations freak out and go out of control. So the US government makes a plan to nuke Imaginationland. The government are about to send the nuke when Kyle convinces them to stop with this epic speech:
“I mean, whether Jesus is real or not, he’s had a bigger impact on the world than any of us have. And the same can be said for Bugs Bunny, and Superman, and Harry Potter. They’ve changed my life… Doesn’t that make them kind of real?”
The line between reality and fiction, like all lines — is just in our minds. As Adam Curtis says,
“what we imagine inside our heads is more real, and has had more effect on the world throughout history than us as just physical beings.”
Rick and Morty, Calvin and Hobbes, and South Park all make this point. They can all turn silly into serious, and serious into silly, because they realize that the line between the two is imaginary.
Combining serious and silly is a very special power. So far we’ve seen how this power can be used to reflect the real world, help us unlearn, and make us laugh. But what if this power was in the hands of someone using it for his own benefit? This can be observed in the contemporary political atmosphere of Russia. In Hypernormalisation, Adam Curtis shows how Vladislav Surkov is also a master of sillying the serious. He acts as Vladimir Putin’s whisperer of sorts. Surkov’s background is from theatre, and he used these techniques to put on a great big show in Russia.
“…sponsoring nationalist skinheads one moment, backing human rights groups the next. It’s a strategy of power based on keeping any opposition there may be constantly confused, a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it’s indefinable.” — Peter Pomerantse
Surkov basically organised rallies and protests on opposing sides of politics, letting the public know that “nothing was real”. In this way, Surkov made the serious silly. By blurring the media so much, the public couldn’t distinguish reality from fiction. No one was able to take reality seriously anymore.
Surkov used the power of sillying the serious to manipulate minds and causes confusion and fear. What I’m interested in is the type of sillying the serious that opens people’s minds and encourages them to explore.
So back to the question of is Hobbes real?
Well, Calvin’s imaginary world is definitely real to him. In fact it is even drawn more realistically when compared to his cartoony “real-life”, as seen in the comic above.
Hobbes is part of this imaginary world of Calvin’s. But as we learned from South Park, just because it’s imaginary — doesn’t mean it’s not real. I’m realising the question of “Is Hobbes real?” asks for an answer that can’t be answered simply with yes or no. Hobbes is both real and not real at the same time. It depends on who’s looking. Of course, he’s real to Calvin. But other’s don’t have the same reality Calvin does.
Bill Watterson explains how he shows two versions of reality, and each make complete sense to the person who sees it,
“None of us sees the world exactly the same way, and I just draw that literally in the strip. Hobbes is more about the subjective nature of reality than about dolls coming to life.”
Just like South Park’s Imaginationland, Calvin’s imaginary world is part of his reality. In asking the question “Is Hobbes real?” I was really asking the question of what reality is. I guess it’s just our individual perceptions, which is why it is so important to know how to create new routes of perception. To distance ourselves from the normal, and perceive ordinary as strange is a big step towards unlearning.
So what have I learned and unlearned?
After diving into the foggy landscape between adult and child, I have seen the power of sillying the serious and seriousing the silly! All the residents of foggy-land are masters of mixing serious and silly. Rick and Morty can flip from philosophical questions to butt jokes in less than 10 seconds, while Calvin and Hobbes can criticize the education system and make us laugh — using only pen, paper and four squares. On the surface, South Park may seem like a crude cartoon with little kids swearing, but we have seen how it holds up a mirror to humanity in a way traditional documentaries can’t.
What all three examples have in common is the bravery to venture into the fogginess. They know the world isn’t black and white, and they aren’t afraid to question the grey and laugh at how confusing it can be. They constantly question what reality is, and show how each person views the fogginess differently.
In Rick and Morty, we see the reality of humans through alien eyes, reflecting our own weirdness back at us. In Calvin and Hobbes, two versions of reality are shown through Hobbes, and both make sense. South Park and Surkov shows us how imagination is reality. Keith Johnstone shows us how to defamiliarize education. All three of these examples are made by people who know the line between imagination and reality is just in our heads. They are masters at balancing and mixing between the lines, especially the one between serious and silly.
This power of sillying the serious and seriousing the silly is quite wordy… I think it should be given a new word to describe it — something like serilly…or sillerious! Or however you want to spell it or call it ;)
The sillerious communicates heavy topics in ways which are easy to understand. The sillerious can make us laugh and cry and question our existence all at the same time. It can make the normal strange. It combines play and work. It blends imagination and reality. It requires help from both the child and adult.
The sillerious is a unique power like no other.
As for having to “grow up”?
Before, I thought “growing up” meant losing the awesome ability to create freely and explore all the possibilities.
Now, I’m realizing the term “growing up” doesn’t make much sense when it comes to our minds.
I don’t think we can ever truly be done growing. The only time we stop growing is when we die. One of the questions which really cuts a line between adult & child is
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
This is the first non-question we’re asked.
The problem with this question is that it implies “growing up” is a final destination — an ending to be reached where we join all the other “grown-ups”. And there’s an illusion that once you’re there, you’re supposed to know what you’re doing — generally have life figured out.
Also, why is it “grow up” and not in all directions? Growing up does describe the physical part — literally getting taller and bigger. But our minds don’t stop growing when our body does.
quote from Golan Levin
What if we instead thought about the whole thing as bursting out into space and exploring?
I’m not so concerned anymore about the line drawn between adults and children. I’ve seen how the line creates an in-between space which can be explored. Pulling aspects from both the sides of the line can create things that relate to both adult and child. The place between dreams and reality, silly and serious, impossible and possible — it does exist. I hope people will venture into the land between adult and child, less afraid of the fog, and embrace the sillerious.
Let’s dinglebop all the schleem!!!!!
Thank you to Dilruba, Peter, Nathan, Saliym, and Andrea for helping me write and edit and assure me that I am making sense :)