Embryonic

Once upon a time in Uzbekistan there was a boy named Faroukh who had the soul of a poet. His mother had died giving birth to him. His father, inconsolable, drank until he too died. Soon after, the boy Faroukh awoke to the hypocrisy and meanness of his neighbors, and set off into the wilderness. Before he left, a beautiful girl he knew begged him to marry her and take her with him, but he turned her down and left with his best friend, Khalib, to strike out into the vast mountains of the Caucasus. He wanted to be free.

They carried a bag, a Qur'an, and a comb. Faroukh looked like a twelve-year-old boy, Khalib, fifteen. It was the time of Saint Francis, when people tramped the Silk Road back and forth, carrying merchandise for sale.

The boys were good boys. They wanted to be happy and to do no violence to humans or nature.

They didn't want to meet danger or experience it. They were idealistic adolescents, like medieval beatniks.

Faroukh read the Qur'an aloud to his sleeping friend by the fireside at night. The book was his map.

So this classic folktale (it could be told in any culture; and has been) sets out to show whether self-realization is possible for two teenage boys who have nothing and seek nothing.

In so many folktales, it's like this. A struggle on the part of a youth to transcend and escape the ugly fate of adults. A belief in heavenly rewards, even an earthly utopia where justice reigns, so the child can safely remain a child.

This utopia cannot include parents. An acceptable grown-up must be a failure, wanderer, street person, or artist. This vision is an open field with its horizons blurring into great shining cities and parapets that are not silver, not gold. Justice, fidelity, irony, and sincerity are the prevailing moods of this paradise that the kids can sometimes glimpse in nature, movies, poems, drugs, songs, and games.

An adolescent believes in great wonders and despises adult bitterness and is capable of heroic delinquency. The news from around the world only fuels his rage for justice.

An adolescent needs one selfless teacher or belief system to turn his disillusionment into art as the Uzbek movie The Man Who Loved the Birds shows.

This is the movie I am describing now.

The Uzbek filmmaker Ali Khamraev made it. Khamraev's films are poems, with dark pauses between scenes operating like blinks of the eyes of God, like seconds of mercy given and withdrawn.

In the middle of his film we see the joy of first love under the almond trees where birds the children call "the angels of life" hover. Birds in almost all religions are the angels of angels. They are divine messengers, and in Islamic literature they come as direct messages from Allah. This scene in the movie is part of a tradition dating way back, even to Noah's Ark. The birds in this film are harbingers, with long heavy tail-wings unlike the little flocks that spin across horizons.

These birds are a forewarning of children molested and slaughtered. Only one of them survives through the intervention of a martial artist and poet who turns the boy's fury into a dance.

Faroukh's story takes place in the fourteenth century when the historical Tamerlan was a Mongol sheep rustler and bandit in Uzbekistan. His wife was descended from Genghis Khan, and Tamerlan mobilized a huge army and slammed his way through Damascus, Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria, and Turkey into Baghdad, where he had 90,000 citizens beheaded, thousands more buried alive, women raped and children kidnapped. At the same time he was a great patron of the arts and architecture.

Likewise the British Colonial Army invaded and occupied India and Africa, killing along the way, while British citizens built monuments, wrote poetry, cultivated gardens, and composed drama. What is dragged along and dropped after the brutish footsteps recede is a dream, a word, and the déjà vu of a child with a wooden sword in his hand.

Khamraev made another film about this notorious warlord Tamerlan, whose name is also the name of the older brother at the marathon bombing in Boston, 2013. Tamerlan's followers and his legacy coincide with the time of Faroukh and the girl who is now traveling with them, a girl who may be all of twelve years old, around the age of the Virgin Mary. Her face and loose clothing are that of a child who is still in formation. A plain garment pulled from the water on her, snow-white and rough.

As an adolescent, Edgar Allan Poe wrote a poem called "Tamerlane," about a warrior who regrets choosing to be violent instead of staying home and loving his childhood sweetheart.

Poe remembers that storm of ambition closing in on him, as a fifteen-year-old child.

He was, he said:

The infant monarch of the hour — For, with the mountain dew by night, My soul imbib'd unhallow'd feeling; And I would feel its essence stealing In dreams upon me — while the light Flashing from cloud that hover'd o'er, Would seem to my half closing eye The pageantry of monarchy!

Poe loathed Boston, the city of his birth, for its didactic writers, snobbery, Transcendentalists, and provincialism. He read this poem aloud to an audience in Boston in a teenage spirit of rebellion.

A few days before bombs went off at the Boston Marathon, the newspapers and screens showed five Afghan babies looking as if they had split open their colorful cocoons, ready to fly. They had been struck down by NATO planes. The picture came and went until a few days later when a little boy, Martin Richard, was blown up at the marathon. Then the pileup of babies seemed to span the earth and there was no border that could not be measured by the bodies of children with round closed faces.

The two brothers, who lived a few blocks from Harvard, and who seemed typical of the kids we all knew pretty well for half a century, were poor but educated, bilingual, politically conscious, some of the time stoned, sometimes disciplined and athletic, first-generation American kids whose parents were still enflamed and tormented by the recent past that drove them to America.

You'd see these kids skateboarding away from crowded households. With sisters they cared for, and parents with broken hopes and talents. Single mothers, angry men, and tenement living, political ideas switching into religious ideology. Divorce into abandonment. Chicken on the stove, greens in a pan.

The children assembled their own tribes, where they knocked around basketballs and stole candy and smoked weed, crawled over pocked black snow and got help in community health centers. They tagged at night and stole chips and Twix by day. They dealt drugs, purchased guns for quick robberies, did their homework, laughed inside the Broadway Supermarket after school, and planned to return to their homelands. Hatred of capitalism was a common theme.

Remixing of races and house music in the garage, beans, rice, burritos, and spaghetti dinners, bags of vinegar chips and slopped tins of soda. School discussions of class and history, fiction, the failure of music videos, and the genius of freestyle and hip-hop. After-school pizza delivery, sweeping and working the cash register, driving cars at high speed and fixing engines and shoveling snow.

The front yards in East Cambridge, under the spectacular silver-eyed walls of MIT's spanking new technology buildings, are tacky and torn. The kids still walk down to the Charles River to watch the black water flow while they joke and smoke, with cars whipping at their backs. The compromised jargon of neoliberalism is tossed around pharmacies and coffee shops. The kids lie by the water at night: egg-shaped lights, reds and blues, Shell and CITGO, pass joints and go to school by day. Then they would change into someone else completely on leaving high school, become schoolteachers and rabbis, entrepreneurs and jailbirds, mothers and community workers, poets, musicians, and insane solitaries.

The outrage that tightens in the chests of teenagers is strengthened daily: contrasts between rich and poor, citizen and immigrant, labor and management, and then the unavoidable world news stories of occupation, invasion, destroyed cities and rivers, blasted wedding parties and family picnics in the high mountains of Afghanistan. Prisons as orphanages for grown men, caged in alien odors. These are the images the teens see.

In America if someone is condemned to life in prison for killing someone, the children know that the killer will be killed too. Gang warfare is collective suicide. As Poe remarked, about prisons: "the sudden extinction of life formed no part of their most horrible plan."

The madness of Poe is the madness of suspended adolescence: his disbelief just won't stop. Rimbaud had written all his poems by age nineteen and headed toward Africa to make money in the colonial trade.

* * *

Once, back in the eighties, in the Caucasus, a boy was born to be adored and pampered by both of his parents. He was dressed in fine clothes, his hair smoothed out, and was sent to music school to learn the piano. He was the first-born. Two girls followed and then a fourth, a boy who arrived too late to be pampered or noticed much at all, except to be adored, kissed, stroked, and forgiven for being in the room. He was the youngest and so pretty.

This boy, Dzhokhar, was named after a Chechen leader and hero, Dzhokhar Dudayev, blown up by the Russians through a telephone.

Dzhokhar and Tamerlan (who heard voices) assembled a pressure-cooker bomb, seven IEDs, an M4 carbine, two handguns, and a BB gun. At least that much, according to the FBI. A pipe bomb was hauled from the Charles River a few days after the marathon. Nails, nails, nails.

Amost as much as the detonation itself, the following days of sirens and helicopters, shut-in and lights, the full force of American surveillance produced a collective trauma, culminating with a thermal image of a boat in dry dock. All day evening was descending over the city.

In those hours we learned that thermal imaging supplies night vision. Warm bodies stand out against cooler ones and are made visible in the dark. It's very useful in military situations and in domestic surveillance. It's infrared and spreads abnormal colors.

So we were treated to a spectral image of an ordinary teen sprawled inside the pale outline of a boat in dry dock with its white cover ripped aside like a collapsed sail.

It was an image that put the final touch on the explosive four days. No one could have thought up such a stunning and ethereal conclusion to the massive show of police and military force we saw on television and outside the window.

That brief flash of film captured something reminiscent of a myth: a boy in a boat, his naked belly and ribs exposed to the night sky and its satellites.

Dzhokhar was strangely, throughout all the ordeals, like a person from another, as yet unexplored, nation: like one sent to translate his own words. He hovered back and over. He was formal and restrained. Now a beautiful boy, now a zombie, a doper, a sweetheart, now a migrant washed up on the banks of the Charles River in Watertown. Then a child who cried for three days in the hospital.

It's strange how postures at rest assume an archetypal, even religious glaze. It's as if, despite all history to the contrary, the stranger — or the child — wins the afterlife.

Head and Helmet

My head was a gold helmet with bites in it.

Reverberating voices and fighting parents.

My head lay in the moss of marijuana where I prayed Don't let me murder in my brother's name!

My head had a name on it: Remember. Mine said: Patience.

Enemies give each other strength, we whispered, and hated our pity for each other.

My ancestors carried swords and shields in the Caucasus.

Mine heard their stories and recorded them.

One brother had a wing in place of an arm.

The sisters had stopped sewing way too soon and no one loved them or knew where they went to school.

The other brother had a helmet all banged up in place of a skull. People spoke to him from inside it.

Help, help! he called.

You can't imagine the hell of not being heard.

Pandora

It is thousands of years since Epimetheus and Pandora were alive; and the world, nowadays, is a very different sort of thing from what it was in their time. Then, everybody was a child. There needed no fathers and mothers to take care of the children; because there was no danger, nor trouble of any kind, and no clothes to be mended, and there was always plenty to eat and to drink. Whenever a child wanted his dinner, he found it growing on a tree; and, if he looked at the tree in the morning, he could see the expanding blossom of that night's supper; or, at eventide, he saw the tender bud of tomorrow's breakfast. It was a very pleasant life indeed. No labor to be done, no tasks to be studied; nothing but sports and dances, and sweet voices of children talking, or carolling like birds, or gushing out in merry laughter, throughout the livelong day.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne, Tanglewood Tales

A Thought

To return to infancy: to be without speech.

The threshold between Eden and Heaven.

Ground and cloud.

Hollowed out, each image will lose its definition bit by bit.

An infant in Purgatory still covers her head with swaddling Or is it the sunlight lying on the floor?

We try to domesticate our spirits like children.

We chase and chastise them until they change.

We spend our lives trying to release them again.

Kristeva and Me

The Judeo-Christian paradise is an adolescent creation. ... The adolescent believes that the Great Other exists and is pleasure itself. The slightest disappointment of this ideality syndrome casts him into the ruins of paradise and heads him towards delinquent conduct.

— Julia Kristeva, This Incredible Need to Believe

Can something unknown be in-known at the same time by the same person? Can our dreams carry us to an alien but earthly place? Is the new horizon the sky if no one sees the hills anymore or the bend of the sea?

Some people believe that we go through a series of resurrections in our lives. If only the youthful years were set aside for the children to try out being a boy one day, a girl the next, an angel the day after, a monk or an astronaut on the following days. If only Kristeva didn't use definite articles so often.

Adolescents take pleasure in imagining worlds where there is meaning because thought is their most precious possession, and like a secret trove of carnelian, oranges, and emerald, each thought is aflame though inactive. No wonder the kids believe that they will get to Paradise, no matter what. And so do the old people because the longer they live, the more incomprehensible any permanency becomes. Thought bounces on their shoulders like an infant traveling wherever they do and arriving too.

Kristeva suggests that an adolescent is by nature a believer. Out of disappointment, disgust, or rejection of his parents, he sets up a more marvelous object to revere, and imagines an actual paradise without grown-ups.

Sometimes a person will believe (without being conscious of this) that she and God are alone together in the world and this will carry her through the loneliness of her life.

An adolescent may feel this way also. Metamorphosis is the girl's condition. She knows all about sex and pollen, pupae and butterflies, and is happy to play with them. She is also at their mercy.

Goethe noticed that the Greeks didn't yearn for eternal truths, but felt at home on earth. So did unknown women who stood up from their labors to watch the sun go down. They looked on the present as if it were a cemetery teeming with full-bodied spirits who hadn't noticed they were already gone. These women cooked for everyone whom they welcomed into their house. And washed the bodies that would be buried in dirt.

Isn't remembrance part of childhood too? The air, like short sucks of helium, is lovely and soft, and the children are always trying to capture this breath with poems and paint.

The unformed mind at play is the most interior, half-submerged, and elusive figure we have, expunged and redrawn. What is always left is the longing for the figure, to be able to locate it with the words "I recognize you."

As if this submerged figure is still watching us through the thickets of experience; through the physical body that has covered it over and shed its cells by the seventh year.

The child becomes a new person between eight and twelve years old, years that are often hard for people to remember.

That's because the figure of this child, as empty as it is light, is renamed, reconstituted, sexualized, and hardened bone by bone into a man or woman.

The figure of the divine child is sometimes an infant, but not always; the divine child can continue as a preteen, an international boy or girl poised before vanishing into the lost years between nine and thirteen.

The child's resistance is futile, no matter how hard it struggles to stop its evolution into a grown-up.

To this child we pay homage with our deeds and our choices and tasks, because it remains forever potential. It haunts us not as the fixed past but as something we gave up too casually because there was no other way.