Childhood Happiness and the Substitute Baby

On March 28^th 1995, I was pushed out of my mothers vagina and thrown into a world of mayhem. I suppose the same could be said for any other person's birth, the world is chaos for everyone after all, but what I mean when I say this is that I was born into a large family, a kind of chaos that had already been going on for a while by the time I arrived.

Looking back I am grateful for my upbringing in so many ways, I was of course ostentatiously privileged, as anyone lucky enough to be born into a wealthy country is, I had everything I needed to pursue a good education and happy home life, and I had parents who loved me, and if that wasn't enough I was showered in luxuries. I had a playstation, a gameboy, some toy guns to play with outside, and everytime I wanted a book my mum would enthusiastically buy me it, there are people in this world born without a chance of basic health care, where they work so hard and make so little that they never experience a single luxury in their lives. Indeed I'm a very, very lucky person.

But as a child, I was never happy. It's not too hard to believe, happiness is the strangest thing in the world next to love, just like love it is completely and utterly alluding, and just like love anyone who tells you that they have found the method for it is either lying or trying to sell something.

When I look back at my sadness (and it really was that, I didn't know what happiness was until I was sixteen,) the only thing that I can specifically identify is that I was constantly annoyed. It sounds trivial, but growing up it was always noisy, and not in the usual childhood way, I had three older siblings and two very stressed parents, and I happened to have been born an introvert. All I ever wanted was some peace and quiet, for people to leave me alone. It felt like everything was being pushed onto me, and I just wanted it all to go away so that I could breath and do things for myself. It's silly, I know. As a kid I had a great sense of self-respect, I don't know where it came from, but I couldn't stand people talking to me like a child, even though, y'no, I was one.

As well as creating four crazy children, my parents also owned pets, as a result I've been around animals for my entire life. Even as a very little boy I would fuss over the cats and dogs, I would stroke them and tell them that they're cute, I babied them in the exact same way that my three older siblings incessantly babied me, in fact I think I still emulate the exact same kind of babbles that she would use on me as a toddler. It felt good being on the other end of it, and figuring out why isn't exactly brain surgery, I was the youngest of four children, of course I wanted to be in charge for once. Babying the pets was a good way of doing that, I felt so joyful fussing them, because they were stupider than me and therefore mine to look after.

This never really went away, and it probably never will, I've always been extremely maternal. Pets are perfect for childless parents like myself because they never grow up, they can be a baby forever, and they don't even need to be taught anything because it's not like they're going to go out into society and be left to their own devices. They're the easiest form of baby, nowhere near as rewarding, upsetting, joyful, depressing or insane as the real thing. That's where I came up with the title of this article, the Substitute Baby.

The dog pictured above is named Charlie, he was my substitute baby for a very long time. I found him eight years ago, and strangely enough these have been the hardest eight years of my life (for reasons I won't go into now,) he was my little rock, no matter what was happening or how trapped I felt, the one joyful consistency in my life was that he would always be there wagging his tail, being completely oblivious to what was happening. When I was cutting myself he licked the blood up and went back to his chew toy, when I lyed in bed paralysed with fear that my life was over he snuggled into my arm, when I was thirteen and took all those pills he looked at me as if to say “please come back into bed so you don't keep waking me up.” In all three of those instances, I cuddled him close to me and cried, and felt a little less like I wanted to die.

He wasn't really my child, and I know that, I know that I didn't love him as much as a mother loves her baby or a father loves his son. But I did love him, and he brought me so much joy everyday, he was my best friend.

When they took him away it felt like things would never be okay again. Sometimes it still feels like that. But I know that it will be, eventually. Whatever happens, I'll never forgive those who stole him from me, and that isn't a decision, that's a biological fact. As far as my brain is concerned he was my baby, and for a parent to forgive an atrocity like that is simply impossible.

How Jean Fouquet Pioneered Visual Storytelling

Jean Fouquet, known primarily for his masterpiece 'Virgin and Child', is a French artist from the 15^th century with interesting and unusual origins. He was a pioneer in many ways, being the first painter of his country to travel to Italy to experience the Italian Renaissance first-hand, he is also the supposed inventer of the portrait miniature. This kind of avant-garde way of thinking was born when Jean fused his influences, namely the Flemish and Tuscan styles of painting, and created his own unique brand.

Though Jean's works are to this day very unique, when one studies his background you can literally point out all the different elements of his work and understand where and when he learned them. For example the precise lines and colouring of the above image 'The Nativity' were certainly acquired from the skills he learned as a master limner and miniaturist.

As a storyteller I find that his panel painting works, such as the one I've put in this article, are the most enchanting. Going completely against the grain of the 15^th century's accepted standards of artistic merit, Fouquet does not pay much to any attention to the fine-detailing of the individual characters, their emotions, their tragedy, their symbolism, but instead treats all those who fall inside his canvass as one big character, one big story to be expressed as a whole.

'The Nativity' is all about story, it isn't about Mary's thoughts as she keeps her baby safe in a barn, even the border seems to suggest a disconnection from the actual events of these human beings, we're not meant to be seeing them for who they really are, we're not meant to feel like we're right there with them, we're seeing the story of it all and the grandeur beauty of a famous, immortalized tale.

Fouquet found a sense of art in visual storytelling rather than in romantic symbolism, this was one of the many oddities that made him great. It was simply not done in those days, stories were stories and paintings were paintings, they were both ways of expressing ideas and exploring human society, but Fouquet showed that there was a sense of humanity in the actual idea of a story itself, that one moment captured in time and passed through the ages is something that reflects our nature.

As a writer, I am inspired by the way he combined his influences to make something great. It's a very tricky thing to discuss when it comes to artistry, where it comes from, and if somebody can ever be truly original? Every bit of Fouquets works can be pinpointed to a time in his life where he would have learned a particular skill from some other movement, but in the end, using all of these ideas, he created something truly original. Art isn't created in a vacuum, and this legendary painter is a great example of that.

The Artistic Intention Behind 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'

Being the most prolific example of what some would call the 'nonsense' genre, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is a rich haven of romantic symbollism. I can't tell you how much fun I had analyzing all the different events in the book, trying to make sense out of nonsense. The truth is that anyone who has managed to graduated from primary school can sit there and discover hidden message after hidden message, the lake of tears, the grinning cat, the hedgehog croquet balls, I could have gone absolutely wild when studying the intentions behind this book.

But I didn't, because in reality we already know Lewis Carrol's intention, he wrote the story in order to entertain specific little girls whom he knew individually, so what would be going inside this man's head as he is writing this story? Everyone knows what it's like to try to entertain children, it's a little daunting, because if you're boring them they'll soon let you know it, so entertainment had to have been one of the major factors that he wanted to bring to the tale, and indeed he certainly managed it, the bright and crazy world of Wonderland would have any child around that age on the edge of their seats, but does this mean that the symbolism of the book is arbitrary? Hmm, that I'm not so sure of.

Whilst writing this book, Lewis must have spent the majority of the time following his instincts, for only your instincts can lead you down a rabbit hole, through a shrunk door, and down the lane to play croquet with a sentient pack of cards. If all of that came from serious thought, Carroll would have been a lunatic. But there is wisdom and meaning in that kind of visceral artistic mess, a child might run his red paint brush across a sheet of paper angrily, not rather knowing what he's doing, and the image on the paper would be deemed valueless, but if you ask some people, the single, jittery brush of red symbolizes the child's strike of anger, of course, the kid was probably just bored. The point is, nothing is nothing, and everything is something, I believe that Carroll wrote this story with no great intention other than to entertain the children he adored, but hidden within that intention are the originators of his seemingly random ideas.

Let's put a pin in that, because for a very short while I want to address a point that many who read this article may find lacking, this is the idea that Lewis Carroll was a pedophille. It's not very difficult to see why the idea has become so popular, it's dramatic, it puts a disturbing twist on the story we all (vaguely) know. The idea of Carroll writing this story for children whom he was sexually attracted to, perhaps as a substitute for the impulses which he could never act on. But, let's cast that aside, because to put it bluntly, it's bullshit. The reason why people believe this is because Carroll used to take naked photographs of the children he knew, but what people fail to realize is, in the nineteenth century, naked children were not a problem. In modern society we teach children that their bodies are shameful and should be hidden, but in Carroll's time naked children were on postcards, it was completely normal. The photographs he took were always in an outdoor environment, he loved to have them be near trees or plants, undoubtedly because the theme of his photography was nature and purity.

Anyway, I'll waste no more time on that deluded theory, let's find that pin shall we? If Carroll was writing for these children, his motive certainly would have been to entertain them, but it soon becomes clear reading the book that he couldn't help but use the story as a way to teach the children things he thought they ought to know. “If you drink from a bottle marked poison, it is almost certain to disagree with you sooner or later,” he writes early on, one can imagine he worried about the little girls drinking something dangerous and used this as an opportunity to teach them that. So with this established, are there any other lessons for children in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland?

Well, like I've said before, you could go crazy with the imagery, but I do think that the personality of the characters Alice meets are something of a warning from Carroll about what people in the real world can be like. “We're all mad here,” the Cheshire Cat grins, indeed growing up it often feels that everywhere we turn, people are mad, and that we are the only sane person left. This isn't a story where the girl runs around and has fun with every creature she meets, Alice has trouble understanding the motives of the others, she goes from creature to creature never really managing to fit in and always finding conflict, whether it's involving herself or not. When she meets the mouse, she finds a conflict that she has never noticed was there, that is the one between a mouse and a cat, Alice loves her cat Dynah, but feels great sympathy for the mouse, she learns that, like anything in Wonderland, conflict is not simple, and there is no good or bad side, sometimes it is simply there as part of the natural havoc of the world.

After she drowns in her own tears, converses with the mouse, watches as the critters engage in a pointless contest of which nobody wins, Alice makes a curious statement, she says that the room around her has changed of it's own accord, whilst she wasn't paying attention, her surroundings have transformed. You may call me overzealous but I do think this was written by Carroll to teach the children that their world will change, as you grow up, the aura of everything around you transforms completely, you can be in the same room you were in when you were four and feel like it was a whole other universe. The room had changed because Alice had changed due to her experience.

The most interesting message I picked up from the book is “Don't trust them.” As a child, you almost have no choice but trust the people around you, you are still discovering the world yourself, and this is exactly the situation Alice finds herself in. After the lake of tears, when the animals are trying to figure out what to do to dry themselves, they are all absolutely useless, each one of them radiates a sense of authority, that they know what to do, but they never do manage to dry themselves or anyone else, and Alice is wasting her time by listening to them. They organize a race which nobody wins, they do no thinking, but continue to act mindlessly. Let's face it, that's the majority of adults isn't it? Children do more thinking than adults, and often, they are much smarter.

As a writer, the most valuable thing I've learned from reading Carroll is the efficiency of very basic descriptive imagery and the importance having trust in the mind of the reader. Like any writer I have a tendency to be superfluous, when I edit my stories I spend most of the time trimming the fat, but I do still like the narrative to be thick and juicy. I think that's why I was so uncomfortable when I first began reading Alice, the prose was just so... basic, “The rabbit was white, it ran, it jumped down a whole, Alice jumped after it,” (please know that is not a direct quotation.) If it was me, describing that sequence would have been a few paragraphs, I would have wanted to make sure the reader was really paying attention and knew every detail, every sense that the characters was feeling, because the moment was so important. But Carroll? Pfft, he knows you can read, the rabbit jumped down the whole, there you go. It's the most magical image of the nineteenth century, but the magic wasn't written from Carroll's quill, it came from our minds.

He knew it was captivating, and fussing over the moment would have been a distraction. I think it is a very modern practice for literature not to trust in the reader's imagination, but instead to describe every single little detail, perhaps a trend originating from the television and film industry surrounding us in imagery all the time, books are often written as though they have to replicate these in language format, but they don't, they're stories.

At the same time, I feel that as a writer I am very descriptive at heart, and it comes from an honest place, so who knows how this revelation will effect my work. Though I don't think I will directly make an active decision against it, understanding a new perspective of artistry is an enriching experience that I always enjoy.