The Child In The Tree

"The modern individual (for Marx) coincided with the rise of markets in which the owners of commodities were able to exchange their commodities (the qualities of) for quantities of the general equivalent. Modern subjectivity is deeply wedded to this emergence. But the idea of human psychic evolution is complex. Children like to, often, go off by themselves and climb trees or explore terrain unfamiliar to them. City kids do their own version of this only in abandoned buildings etc. And younger children will often find a place, sometimes in a tree, or in a grotto, where they themselves feel they can’t be seen. And in their silence they day dream. This is a familiar experience from everyone’s childhood (I think everyone). Now, these younger children have less developed vocabularies. They cannot articulate what they feel. And again, childhood amnesia looms as a profound riddle. But older children may have enough of a vocabulary to explain or describe what they felt alone in that tree. But it is always but a very partial description. For that sense of freedom, of aloneness, and usually quiet, is the other part of religious experience. I have said before that religion comes out of theatre, not the other way round. But that is partial, too, for this aspect of taking oneself away from the world has deep roots that probably go back to the early hunter gatherer communities. For the child brings that experience back to the home or community. Silently. As men return from war, often silently, with a different and traumatic experience. Victims of violence bring that experience back to the home or society. And there are no words for this. And it is EXACTLY BECAUSE there are no words that it has such deep resonance. Is it possible that this unworded resonance is a deeper form of memory? Or rather another register of memory? The pre history of the child in a sense. Childhood amnesia is actually another kind of remembering?

It is possible that this silent emotion of freedom is a basic building block of the human. And to watch children with smart phones is disturbing, even if just intuitively, because we know, we sense, something is being stolen from them."

https://john-steppling.com/202....2/06/the-child-in-th