Innocence, Stories and Digressions

I have enjoyed watching young children on the beach here in Costa Rica. I am thinking about the nature of the children’s innocence. Some might call it ignorance, but there is a difference between children’s ignorance and adult ignorance: the latter is willed and the former is natural! Unlike me, the children run to the water unaware of or unconcerned with any high waves or water temperature. They do not worry as do I about sharks and other things. Mostly they race to the ocean carelessly and enthusiastically, often enjoying a delicious scream of delight as they do so. Even children who are just learning to walk hurry as best they can down to the water and do not look back at their parents. At the water the children splash about and excitedly jump up to escape a crashing wave but then sit right back down in the water which is usually a bit too chilly for me and almost always somewhat rough. I move into the water always tentatively, body part by body part testing the waters as it were but mostly, I think, testing myself. Interestingly (to me, anyway) parents do not seem to hover about their playing children and do tend to leave them to their play. Perhaps they know: even at high tide a toddler child can walk a good distance into the waves without losing footing, though as an adult I do hear John Prine’s warning, “It’s a half an inch of water and you think you’re gonna drown.” The children had already stood impatiently if tolerantly as their parents pasted them up with sunscreen and protective head gear. They, the adults, that is, know, though the children remained ignorant to any danger!
            There is I think an innocence to this children’s play. Innocence intrigues me today perhaps because I cannot remember it and because the children’s behavior at the beach seems to epitomize it. The children have no story to tell: they play. Innocence precedes a life’s story. Fife, in Russell Banks’s novel, Foregone, says, “Innocence is that brief time in one’s earliest life when one’s knowledge of the world has no ethical strut, let alone an ethical base. If you are looking for the moral meaning of your life . . . it’s useless to go there for it.” This would be as good a definition of innocence as I can find. I think the children at the beach here in Costa Rica exhibit that innocence: there is nothing to the children’s play but play, and there is no in it no underlying basis of ethics and morality. They play without meaning. These moments of play are what I, an adult, for lack of a better word might call joy, but that is not a word the child might ever use for their sense of presence. 
            But I think life doesn’t move forward from innocence to experience in a simple plot line; innocence isn’t a starting point that leads anywhere. Innocence is and that is all that I can say about it. Innocence cannot tell a story nor narrate a plot. Fife recognized that if one wants to understand a life then “You have to examine your life’s continuum back to the point in time when your ethical base first appeared like a firmament between the firmaments, when what you know about the world and the way you acquired that knowledge became for the first time in your life a consciously willed thing . . . you have to return to when the shape of your morality became for the first time your own creation and not something designed and enforced by your parents or teacher or a priest or a god . . . you have to return to where you first started navigating with a map of your own making, losing your way from time to time, and correcting your course as you go along.” Or perhaps not correcting anything. One might return to the moment innocence ended but innocence itself cannot be remembered: innocence can only be lived. I think a life’s narrative begins when one becomes capable of distinguishing right from wrong and good from bad. To tell the life an individual must be able to distinguish good and bad and right and wrong, must distinguish between as it were, the naked from the nude. The idea of innocence in the mind of the adult is simply an instance of nostalgia; But when I want to understand my life I have to have the capacity to contextualize it, to historicize it, and understand how what I know (or think I might know) has come to be known. But this is not an easy, straight or direct path, nor might it be a certain one. In his memoir Germs, Richard Wollheim says, “For many years, and all of them long before I set out with Dr. S. as my kit to sail back up the stream of my life—an image I clung to for those strained pipe-filled sessions, in which the unity that I longed to find in my life seemed to slip further and further away into incoherent anxieties.” I know those anxieties all too well—my memoir is titled Anxious Am I: A Pseudo Memoir with some fiction and a bit of truth.

            That is, a life cannot be understood by its plot line, it is the story that tells a life and the story demands some conscious awareness. But innocence does not contain the capacity for that cognizance. I think that if a life is organized simply by a plot then perhaps it lacks meaning; innocence does not demand meaning. But if a life is structured by digressions then that life has context and character. D.W. Winnicott in his essay “The Moral Defence,” says that in a session when only the plot of life is narrated then the analysand is purposely ignoring the internal life. The same is true when one is off of the psychoanalyst’s couch. There is no path to truth: there is only knowledge. Tristram Shandy says, “My way is ever to point out to the curious different tracts of investigation, to come at the first springs of the events I tell . . . with the officious humility of a heart devoted to the assistance merely of the inquisitive;—to them I write—and by them I shall be read.” My story is the entirety of the situation of which I write, and it includes what happens to the characters who inhabit that world. The plot is merely the series of events and from which the story may unfold. As Tristram says as he interrupts his narrative with yet another digression and wonders why this one has suddenly appeared: “Here—but why here,—rather than in any other part of my story I am not able to tell.” However, Tristram acknowledges that digression is inevitable, “I defy the best cabbage planter that ever existed, whether he plants backwards or forwards . . . I defy him to go on cooly, critically and canonically, planting his cabbages one by one in straight lines, and stoical distances, especially with slits in petticoats and unsew’d up—without ever and anon straddling out, or sidling into bastardly digression.” But without the digressions there is no book!
            Daniel Mendelsohn refers to this narrative practice as ring composition. I am narrating a story, of my life, let me say, and suddenly it appears another story becomes necessary to better understand the original story. And then as I narrate the second story a third story becomes necessary to better understand that second story that is helping develop the first story. And so on and so on until finally I circle back to the first story. Mendelsohn explains, “But of course, by this point you’ve had all this texture, all this additional information that’s been provided by what look like “digressions”—Tale B, Tale C, etc.—but, in the end, turn out to be loaded with information crucial to the audience’s understanding of the primary narrative. Ring composition reveals itself as an efficient means for a story to embrace the past and the present and sometimes even the future—since some “rings” can loop forward, anticipating events that take place after the conclusion of the main story. In this way a single narrative, even a single moment, can contain a character’s entire biography.” Tristram’s digressions argue from a similar position: without them, he avers, there is no book: “That tho’ my digressions are all fair, —as you observe,—and that I fly off from what I am about, as far and often too as any writer in Great Britain; yet I constantly take care to order affairs so, that my main business does not stand still in my absence.” The plot must go on, but without the digressions there is no story and the plot will lack substance and meaning. The innocence of the child does not know past and future and can narrate no story: the child lives only a complete and immersive present!
            I neither envy nor admire the innocence of children. Innocence is a state I cannot remember nor calculate its duration and so I can tell no story about it. Probably at some time I lived in it but that visionary gleam is gone. I don’t even think I can say that I enjoyed innocence for that ascription already includes an ethical judgment. Innocence has no “ethical strut.” Nor does Innocence have a narrative ability and therefore, it has no plot. In the Intimations Ode Wordsworth had said that in thought I could return there, but now I think I believe him mistaken and Fife correct: when I understood that my actions derived from somewhere, when I knew why and how I have chosen to make decisions, then I can narrate my life and ask and even offer forgiveness. I cannot again know or remember innocence. But as I want to narrate my life,  digressions become the complete and economical means of telling the story. The substance of a life appears in the digressions, in the stories I can tell. The plot is simple: I was born, I went to school, I taught school, I retired and then I will die. How boring it seems. But wait until I tell you a story!