Chapter VII

by Hugh M. Lewis

  Action is released by emotion, and emotion is stirred by words. What, then, is the role of thought in the release of action? For all we know its role is as an instrument in the production of potent words. (Eric Hoffer 1973: 39)

We are left with the problem of understanding, in terms which are not to destructive of the original meaning, of how a child makes sense of her/his world. Given that a child’s world is in fundamental ways qualitatively different from the adult world, it follows that the way that a child views booth her/his own life world, and the wider surrounding world, must be in some essential way fundamentally different from the way an adult would normally construe her/his world. We must, so to speak, get ‘behind the veil’ of the child’s world as it is presented to us, to understand the subjective patternings which construct that world. We must say that these subjectively rooted patterns are neither rational nor merely habitual or customary in the way that the subjective constructs of adult reality have been held to be. It is similar to the adult subjectivity in that it is fundamentally an emotional process, a pattern of feeling that comes to be attached to habit and customary practice, and which is fundamentally ‘integrational’ and creative in its developmental expression and in its incorporation and environmental embodiment of experience. In this sense rational consciousness is more of an epiphenomenal by-produce of this largely unconscious subjective experience of the world.

But a critical difference between the subjective world of the adult, and the subjective world of the child, is that the range and expression and influence of feeling is fundamentally different. Adult feeling is marked by its tendency towards rationalization and sublimation and displacement through symbolic ritualization. This is largely accomplished through the mediation of the internalized mechanism of linguistic translation of experience and its subsequent reinterpretation. It furthermore becomes symbolically ‘acted out’ in meta-linguistic and paralinguistic behaviors. Children, especially when they are most young, do not have this fully formed linguisticality by which to rationalize and ritualize their subjective experience of the world-for them this experience is expressed ‘proto linguistically’ and becomes enacted ‘proto symbolically.’

Their feelings are not yet fine tuned by the words they command to express them, and their behavioral responses and expressions in their life world are not yet firmly fixed or well defined. For children, the world comes to have, subjectively, a concrete presentational immediacy about its experience which is largely alienated and intermediated by the adults internalized representational linguistic and behavioral strategies. To put it another way, children do not make a sharp dichotomy normally maintained in the ego identity of the adult, but which on occasions of stress sometimes breaks down as well. From an adult standpoint, children are normally and naturally hysterical and hyper-suggestive to the stimuli of their environment. From a child’s standpoint it makes little difference whether their behavior is judged hysterical or hypnotic or not-what matters to them is that it seems most real when it happens.

 If children come to and identify with and internalize their parent’s character, then they must do so in a way that is fundamentally different from how the parents come to acquire their own adult personalities. The adult’s personalities have been shaped many ways by experience and have been ordered and integrated on the basic of functional and formal homology. What works and what is pleasurable becomes incorporated into the adult character as something intrinsic to it. If the children receive any of this by transmission, then they must be receiving largely as analogy and as somewhat arbitrary and empty conventionality-it is superimposed and internalized as if it were an external facticity about their world and not as something as profoundly derivative of experience with the world. What for adults are deeply ingrained insights, lessons and eternal verities about life, become for their children but superficial constraints and superfluous values that they must live by. If the parent’s strongly and strictly reinforce their values and teachings upon the children, then it will be the strictness and the strength of the reinforcement that they incorporate into their character, and the understanding attached to their acquired values and attitudes will be mostly understanding derived from this strictness and strength rather from any intrinsic properties of the experiences themselves from which the values were originally derived.

In this way each new generation must begin to learn for themselves the lessons long since learned by their parents and ancestors. They will come to apply and amend in their own world in their own way the lessons that have been bequeathed upon them by their parents. Each new birth witness the beginning of a whole new subjective world-a world which will have to make itself for better or worse in the larger world, in conformity and in contrast with the wider world into which it has been born.

 It is to be wondered whether a child is subject to the control of natural instincts before cultural habits and constraints come to be inserted in the child’s character. If so, we are left with understanding in the child the substrate of human nature underlying all subsequent changes. If not, we are left with a sense that the young child is a half formed creature-neither subject to the controls of nature nor yet subject to the constraints of nature. The case of feral children argues strongly for the conclusion that though the capacity for language and culture may be inborn, its acquisition is subject to the vicissitudes of the social environment. The evidence of the wolf child teaches us that even as basically human a trait as bipedality is not necessarily an inevitably acquired natural capacity-human children must learn how to walk, and they must have the appropriate social environment-the role models-which instruct them in this marvelous feat.

The case of Homo ferus also informs us that if left on their own in nature, children do not revert into a regressed, proto human state in their natural adaptation and survival in the wild. Indeed they adapt and survive, but without the social character which marks humankind off as social creature. If left on their own, children acquire whichever kind of minimal social ethos that becomes available to them, whether it is to jump like gazelles, or howl like wolves, or to growl and lumber like a bear. They do not become little Tarzan’s or even young Homo Erectus. They become bestial things who remain entrapped in a never ending state of infantile regression. They become as if young infants locked inside of a growing body, without having acquired, and having mostly lost the ability to acquire those vital traits permitting the development of the adult personality.

If this hypothesis is correct, then we must first look to the subjectivity of the wolf child as evidence for the normal child’s world view before it becomes rescued and ruined by the intervention and interference of society. Children, if left to their own, will not develop naturally into healthy, robust and virtuous human beings-this Romantic notion of the untrained natural child has been laid to rest by the encounter with the real wild child.

The lack of depth perception; the inability to notice one’s own reflection in the mirror and to understand it; the difficulty of dressing and the desire for nakedness; the inability to easily manipulate fine objects with one’s fingers; the lack of language and the gesticulations; the typical over-extensions and under-generalization of reference and the concreteness of perception; the crawling locomotion; are all prototypical characteristics of both feral children and very young infants, and taken together suggest that in general, without the proper stimulation and modeling, children will fail to acquire even the most basic skills that define human beingness.

We may speculate further that such a child is just not preliterate in the sense that the so called ‘primitive mentality’ has been held to be, nor does it yet share in the fundamental ‘orality’ which is so important to our sense of humanness. Rather, the young child can be characterized as ‘pre-oral’ in orientation. Such a pre-oral sense of being lacks even the basic structure which linguistic orality provides. It may be speculated that even its emotionality and form of emotional expression is undeveloped and quite rudimentary-gross feelings of pleasure and pain, of satisfaction and lack of gratification dominate the child’s experiences. In such a state, experience must be about as perceptually presentational and immediate as is humanly possible. Basic sense impressions remain an unrefined, untransmuted and untransformed stream of stimuli that must be for the most part seemingly haphazard noise of the opaque background of one’s own sensations.

Such a child remains a multi-sensorial entity whose basic modalities remain uncoordinated and undifferentiated. No single modality such as vision, hearing, touch will have exclusive predominance or a central orientation over the other modalities. Rather it is possible that it is the relative salient strength of the stimuli itself which will tend to attract the greatest focus of attention, and which leads to predominance of development of one modality over the other. Thus, if a child is raised in an environment without much visual contrast, but a great deal of aural stimulation, then it can be expected that the child will develop a preference for, and a possible talent with, distinguishing sound and tonality, while a child brought up in a relatively muted, but visually enriched environment, may come to select and develop a predominantly visual modus operandi. Not to be ignored are the modalities of smell, taste, and touch which may be differentially developed in different kinds of environments.

It is possible that the young child does not yet have a lateralized brain function--lateralization and possibly relateralization of brain hemispheric function are acquired later in development. A primarily unlateralized brain has certain implications about the way a child might experience the world. Either hemisphere may be struggling for control at any given time, the control can pass intermittently from one to the other side of the brain, affecting the child’s mode of experience, and the conflict between the two modalities might result in the effective functioning of both being frustrated and seemingly unorganized in the early experience of the child. The child is as if rudimentarily dyslexic in its balance and coordination. This state may have something to do with the adaptability of the child to alternative environmental stimuli-the acquisition of lateral dominance may be in part dependent upon the predominant modality of experience that the child has come to rely upon it her/his adaptation and development. The occurrence of dyslexia may have something to do with the child’s lack of acquisition of cerebral hemispheric lateralization.

In spite of the basic performance of the child’s character and sense of being in the world, it must be hypothesized that the child has inherited a basic ‘mechanism’ of consciousness which allows all subsequent acquisition to be possible. Such a device of human nature would be the basic building block of all human consciousness-of cognition, language, feeling, memory, dream, motor and manipulative activity and of perception itself. This device has already been suggested as something that is basically organic, and fundamentally occurring in an undifferentiated, multi-modal state of form and function. It is the presence and innate functioning of this basic mechanism which allows the subsequent integration and coordination of the different skills, capacities, and characteristics typical of human beings. It is successful because it is generalized, polymorphous, multi-modal, even ‘polythematic’ in form and function, and because it is inherently unspecialized and undifferentiated in the way that a specialized ‘instinct’ or ‘biogram’ for language, cognition or manual dexterity might hypothesized to be.

It is the central thesis of this work, underlying the theory of organic human development, that this central mechanism is the rudimentary, undeveloped organization of the brain, and primitive organic being itself. It is fundamentally a symbolic and emblematic pattern-recognition process which allows the multi-modal transmutation of experience, a kind of organic synaesthesia, and results in increasingly complex and fine tuned stimulus generalization and response specialization. It is the form and function of the emblematic symbol to allow one mode or form to be associated with, and translated into, another mode, and which allow the accumulation of symbolic forms independently of its experience, which nevertheless function as internalized, secondary stimulus for generating and direction inner experience. The emblematic symbol allows a duality of patterning that becomes increasingly independent to experience but is subject to and dependent for its effective communication and development upon conventional environmentally rooted social constraints.

This same symbolic emblematic recognition device is the building block of language, cognition, culture and behavior. In short it is the atom of primary acquisition and the basic subjective molecule of human worldview.

This innate device is, in other words, the innate, undeveloped human consciousness itself-naked of its cultural acquisition, bereft of its environmental experiences. In a fundamental sense, human consciousness is basically organic and symbolic-it is neither primarily cognitive, linguistic, motor sensorial, manipulative or behavioral. But it does have a basically primary emotive form and function that can be thought of as precognitive, proto-linguistic. The experience of emotion can be thought of as primarily symbolic, allowing the intermediation and coordination between body and brain, and brain and mind, such that feelings become fine-tuned in its expressively, sensitivity and sensibility. Because this device is fundamentally emotive, its development is primarily socially dependent-it is the interaction and emotional, inter-subjective communication between people which cultivates and makes possible its refinement, differentiation, specialization and overall organic development in adaptation to the environment.

The elusiveness of emotion, as bodily impulse, as up surging, hydrodynamic forces of the id, and as the salience of meaning underlying thought and metaphysicalness of human consciousness, and the elusiveness of confirmatory evidence for any single, specialized primary acquisition device, suggests that circumstantial evidence for this fundamental, organic emblematic recognition device must be found in many different aspects of human awareness, but is defined by not particular or distinguishing set of features.

Evidence may be found in the basic prototypicality that seems to underlie much of human cognition and language. Children, like cultures, acquire colors, language, cognition skills, artistic patterns, in much the same general order, and in much the same basic prototypical forms. The near universal prototypicality of the acquisition of human consciousness suggests that the emblematic, symbolic forms which are the precursors of later, differentiated functions of language, cognition, perception, are somehow basic and organically rooted in the physiology of brain function. This basicness and prototypicalness of human consciousness is suggested by the holophrases of a child’s first words, by the first circles and Mandalas of a child’s drawing, by the general shape and color and form of the first ‘hand sized, face shaped’ objects which fascinate all children. Later, books, pictures, utensils, tools, jewelry, toys, are all made to a convenient hand-size.

It is not to be wondered whether or not these basic elements of consciousness do not form the basis of the allegedly universal ‘collective archetypes’ underlying human consciousness. Basic elements of percussive sound, tonality, unilateral figures, transitivity, unidirectionality, have all been suggested as possible candidates of a universal consciousness. It also suggests the basic power which basic, fairly abstract emblematic devices and symbols have in holding and moving the human consciousness in a way that defies conscious understanding.

In considering the possibility prototypical paradigms that such basic universals entail for the general, pan human organization of experience, may have a basis in both cultural and biological constraints. Being more than merely limits to long-term memory or the way the cells of the retina are able to process information about different frequencies of the color spectrum, there is a communicative function that demands a modicum of common simplicity for the maximization of the carrying capacity of any information system, whether this is culture, language or a symbolic system of representation. It is not necessarily by accident that human beings, given the same basic biological equipment to play with, would have only a limited number of ways that it could use this equipment in a way that would promote both biological and cultural survival. It is hardly surprising that different cultures and different individuals, given similar kind of circumstances and a similar range of challenges, would ‘invent’ similar kinds of patterns and culture, cognition and behavior. Another way of putting this is to say that the ‘design features’ of the human world view impose certain universal and basic sets of constraints on human development which cannot be violated and which channel such development along certain, broadly predictable directions. The arc of human possibility is a grand arc, but not unlimited by nature and by structure.

 The organic and symbolic, basically emotive, emblematic recognition device of human consciousness underlying primary acquisition and human development leads to a view of the child’s subject sense of reality as being in a kind of somnambulant dream state, and the drawing of memory, attention, language, cognition and of willful self consciousness is a kind of gradual awakening from a primeval dream state-a state of magic and suspension of credulity. It is the dream state of a young child that renders our fragmentary earliest memories but momentary flashes as if our memory of dreams when we awaken. Perhaps it is the organic, developmental function of dreams and sleep to periodically and nocturnally return us to such a primary, temporarily ‘regressed’ state of primitive beingness. Though we may grow free of the womb, we never leave the need for the womb-state that we carry within us. It is perhaps also this basic dream state of dawning human consciousness that we recognize a correspondence to our mythology, and to what some believe to be our basically mythological consciousness. The analogical, dichotomic, transformational structure of the myth recapitulates the basic structure of our dream stare. It is especially in origin myths the world over that we find the rudimentary parallels to early organic consciousness-many such myths begin with the enactment of autochthonous creation of the world by thought, speech or deeds.

One characteristic feature of the dream-state and of alternative states of consciousness is that the self becomes magically empowered in supra normal ways, or else it becomes rendered helpless and imprisoned in passive control by the symbolic enrichment that surrounds it. The sense of reality upon which waking consciousness depends becomes temporarily suspended during the dream-state in order that the symbolisms of the mind can have some free reign and free play.

It must be emphasized that this basic, organic form and function of the human mind in primary acquisition is in its inherently symbolic structure an inherently creative process-a child creates its reality in much the same way that human beings regular create and recreate their cultural worlds.

The infinite creativity of a child’s world-view accounts for the symbolic generative capacity of language, cognition and behavior. A child learns to create new patterns from old elements-as it grows its essentially emblematic, symbolic creative capacity increases in its sophisticated and power. It is the distinguishing characteristic of regression that the individual is non-creative and often destructive.

 How then does Alyce make sense of her world? First, her world follows no sense of order, which is precisely predictable from day to day. Hers is an amateur life world with only a rudimentary and incipient sense of order. An expert’s world is one which is characterized by precisely delimited domains of knowledge and skill in utilizing that knowledge-unlike an expert, Alyce’s world is one which is characterized by its lack of precisely boundable domains of knowledge. The different categories and the experiences that they are indexical of her in her life world are not clearly separated from one another, but the elements of each are all mixed up with the other. Drawing, reading, television viewing, dancing, talking, eating, are all domains of daily activity which are not clearly separated from one another in the same sense that they become for an adult. Within this multiple, overlapping domains she flits in a quite unpredictable, if not wholly random fashion, mixing up different sub-components as they seem to fit at the moment.

It is fitting to characterize the amateurish world of Alyce as moderately chaotic-certain patterns are expectable, but never quite predictable. It is a world that is characterized by its increasing sense of anti-chaotic order that emerges somewhat creatively upon the edge of total chaos. It is a world that is thin and minimum of structure-a structure perhaps derived from the operation of very basic organizational functional transform operators-perhaps certain patterns of association and contagion. As much, the structure is a very fluid and flexible state. It has not crystallized into the kind of solidity which is characteristic of the adult’s sense of order. And yet her world somehow ‘hangs together’ in a way that is overall consistent and productive for Alyce.

Expert systems can be characterized as being composed of several orders or levels of increasing breadth and depth-each higher order is exponentially more complicated than the previous order of magnitude. The expert is characterized by his or her specialization and focus. A certain point of breadth in world knowledge is achieved, before subsequent levels must be increasingly delimited and focused in order to allow for such specialization and expertise-otherwise the individual would be overwhelmed by the shear enormity and complexity of the total breadth and depth of world knowledge. Part of the constraints in determining the sub-disciplinary focus and hyper-specialization of knowledge must be related to the intrinsic constraints of attention span and of the human capacity in processing so much information at one time, the number of elements that can be held in short term memory, and the overall capacity of long-term memory. There are also certain linguistic constraints that work in delimiting the scope and scale of human specialization.

One set of constraints is in the individual’s and cultural world’s monolinguistic/monothetic value orientation versus a polyglot, polythetic world view and value orientation. The latter orientation produces jacks of all trades, but master of none, while the former orientation produces narrowly focused experts who trade off great breadth of focus for great depth and precision. Related to this set of differences is the acquired capacity for linguistic code switching and code mixing which enables individuals to facilely pass from one orientation or world-view into another. Individuals who acquire such a capacity for multilingualism can more readily adopt alternative world views and associated value orientations than those individuals who are brought up with a strongly and single dominant language.

Furthermore, it seems that any specialized domain of knowledge becomes defined by its specialized jargon that seems to set rather narrow limits of focus for those who participate in such jargon. It tends to be exclusive and specifically defining of the world which precludes a great deal of cross disciplinary assimilation and amalgamation of divergent worldviews and specializations. Such demands typically surpass the human limits to deal proficiently with so many different knowledge bases.

It can be readily seen that a child’s worldview is precisely contradictory to the expert’s specialized orientation. Alyce’s world is grossly generalized and quite unspecialized. Such common semantic and linguistic errors such as over extension of reference and over restriction of generalization reflect the basically unspecialized and generalist nature of the child’s worldview.

Unlike the expert who has mastered the skill of function at a fifth or even sixth and seventh order of magnitude, the child is still typically attempting to gain control of and master the first and second, and possibly third order of magnitude which are those orders characterized more by their general breadth and openness, and their basicness, of worldview, than they are by their specialized narrowness, specificity and boundness. In this case, the child is working at a basic, ordinate level from which there is both an ascending superordinate level of greater generality and a descending subordinate level of increasing specificity and detail. It is true of knowledge acquisition in general that greater degrees of discriminatory power and detail are inversely paralleled by corresponding increasingly levels of generality and abstract relation. The child is working primarily upon the ordinate level, sometimes dropping down to a subordinate level or moving up to a more superordinate level, but not managing the movement with the ease and acquired facility of an adult. The child’s level is exclusively oriented towards chaining together different basic things in increasing breadth and comprehensiveness of compass-the basic foundation upon which later knowledge acquisition will be built is being demarcated and laid out.

The process of basic emblematic pattern recognition can be seen operating on an everyday basis in interrelating many different facets and modalities of experience. Alyce makes basic relationships of association based upon the similarity of form and function. A microwave beeping is the phone ringing. A happy face on a picture of a cool aid package is a round face of a jack-o-lantern. A dinosaur skeleton on the television screen becomes associated with the ‘saurs’ in her books. A woman with her arms on her hips in a storybook becomes ‘Mommy’ and a strange man becomes ‘Daddy.’

A similar kind of associative pattern recognition is occurring when she tries to put diapers on her doll, or sees a big hot air balloon in the sky and calls it a ball. It occurs whenever sees a small bird high up in the sky and calls it a bee, or sees a crab in the picture book of animals and calls it a spider. Similarly, when her mother draws a rough outline of a horse, a sheep, a pig, a fish, Alyce makes an immediate and correct association. Daddy with a beard in a picture is not recognized, while any strange distant but similar looking clean-shaven male might be Daddy. Grandma becomes the little gray-haired lady on television or in the magazine ads.

This pattern recognition is fundamental to Alyce’s acquisition of knowledge and skills in making sense of and ordering her world. It is a recognition process which involve tactile sensation and manual manipulation as well-the hot water in the bathtub is the same hot of the taste of food, and the cold of an ice cube is the same cold as snow and icy weather outside. Playing with the zipper on her jacket, and learning how to use it, brings a curiosity in the zipper on daddy’s pants or on the dolls’ clothes or the zippers on plastic pouches. Learning to hold a pen in the right direction quickly becomes adapted to drawing crude circles and scribbles (‘fish’) that become transferred to a wider variety of drawing and writing instruments and the markings of which soon become transferred onto the floor, the pages of books and magazines, and onto the walls and table-tops.

This association and pattern recognition is the basic element in the ordering of a child’s make believe play. Dressing dolls, reading the newspaper or books or letters out loud, cooking food, serving coffee, putting on make up and dressing in jewelry all involve the essential association and transfer of meaningful patterns from the adult’s world to the child’s level and order of understanding. I watched her climb up onto the toilet seat cover and stand and reach the various bottles there. She tipped the capped bottle of mouthwash to her lips several times, like she’s seen her mother do, dust the bath powder onto her body, and squeeze the hand lotion to her hands and rub them together, brushing her hair, bathing her doll trying on Mom’s lipstick.

In such play activities, many of which involves a great deal of language play, the child is ordering her experience and relations with her world in a way which is syntagmatically structured as well as paradigmatically referenced. She is learning not only in what groups things belong, but emerging sense of class inclusion in which her dolls occur in one pile, her books in another. Nevertheless she is learning how to string the elements of her world into different serial orders-she stacks the blocks and stack her books, choosing which one she wants to read. She is learning how to put things back into the places in which they come.

The following sequence is anecdotal and typical of Alyce’s growing style is relating and ordering her world:

Such a sequence of activities and responses are not exceptional, but are quite a typical, everyday performance. It never happens in quite the same order or fashion from one day to the next, and she adds new things which she learns as she goes along in her extemporaneous enactments of her play world-getting better and more sophisticated with each passing day. A much similar kind of action sequence was recorded when Mahala was just about thirteen months old:

There is a sense that, even at twenty months, Alyce’s language is still not necessarily the center of her world. It is just one alternative modality of experience that is nevertheless becoming increasingly salient as it facilitates her social interaction, communication, her expressiveness and intentionality, and in her organization and sense making of her world. Language until now has been for Alyce primarily just one alternative way of going about making things happen in her world. This was made quite clear to me the other morning when she woke up first, quietly climbed down from the bed, and stood at the threshold of the doorway while waiting and watching me with her wide eyes, as if her salient beckoning was enough by itself to tell me to get up and come with her. Her intention finally dawning on me, it struck me how pensively silent she was being as I got up and fetched another bottle for her and sat down to read to her in the other room. Children can be quite taciturn and tactile when they want to be-seeming not to need language exclusively to express themselves.

But this state of affairs seems to be rapidly changing for Alyce. We recorded her vocabulary at sixteen months of age at about forty-one words. Now at twenty one months plus her effective, expressive vocabulary has increased to approximately 270 words which can be divided into a number of interrelated but separable categories relating to the emerging domains of her life world. This compares favorably to what is listed as the average rate of acquisition, which at two years old is held to be just over one hundred words. We estimate that she is adding one to two new words a day to her vocabulary, in which if the rate remains the same her vocabulary will almost be doubled by the time she is just over two years old-or approximately 450-500 words. If this rate continues, by the time she is three it will have trebled-adding perhaps seven or eight hundred words to her vocabulary. We also estimate that her recognition vocabulary is much larger than her effective vocabulary that are the words she can generate spontaneously on association with things in her world. She seems to understand a great deal more of what we say to her than she responds with.

As her linguistic competence and performance grows, she is coming to recognize and effectively understand the functional value of her language in helping her to order and organize her experiences. Her repertory in how she uses her language is increasing about as rapidly as is her basic vocabulary. She can well understand dimple instructions we give to her-like helping us fetch paper, or throw away thrash, or to take something to Mommy or Daddy, whether she pays any heed or not. She began with basic interrogatives like ‘what’s that’ or ‘who’s that,’ and then added simple commands like ‘get up,’ ‘lie down,’ ‘come out,’ ‘stop it,’ ‘lets go,’ ‘go dance,’ ‘sit on,’ ‘read book,’ ‘go out.' These expressions she often emphasized with a brusque motion of her arm or a push or pull against our bodies. She uses repetition of a word, a question, or an exclamation to emphasize something that she does not understand or wants to attract our attention to.

In such a manner she may repeat a word several times over to the exasperation of her parent’s patience. Her two-word sentences function similarly to her ‘holophrastic’ one-world expressions. In a sense, even her sometimes more complex three or even four and five word utterances, which are usually only muttered and semi-intelligible (lets go in the other room) are strung together like a single long ‘holophrastic’ clause. It is to be wondered whether all basic oral phrases and utterances are not essentially complex holophrastic explanations-even adult statements.

In this manner, these phrases come as unbroken units that do not get reversed or mixed up. It is the generative, creative capacity of an endless array of such new utterances in ways that remain syntactically correct and semantically faithful which is the interesting aspect. Adults come to handle typically five to seven, or even longer strings of syllables as if schematic units of discourse. Many such units are cultural or personal clichés that become repeated over and over again-and yet new oral schemata are being invented and old ones revised or discarded in systematic ways which do not violate the structural patterning and communicative function of language.

A remarkable aspect of a child’s worldview is that it is largely with only a minimal sense of order, a bare skeletal outline of systematic structure which is surrounded by large pockets and open spaces of experience which remain essentially unordered in any but a random, chaotic way. In talking about how Alyce orders her world, it is as my wife remarked, she doesn’t have any overall sense of order meaningful, predictable pattern, at least nothing that is directly intelligible to the sensibilities of the adult. She goes about mixing up things in her daily activities in a more or less haphazard fashion, leaving behind many messes that her parents must then pick up after.

This is clearly evident when we gave to Alyce a shelf in my own bookcase to prevent her from further pulling my own books off all the shelves. Her ravaging of my books more or less abated, but by the end of everyday all her books wound up on a big pile on the floor at the foot of the bookcase. She prefers the floor arrangement best, as it is easier for her to pick and choose and see many more of the covers of the books for us to read to her. Every evening we would put the books back onto the shelf in neat arrangement, only to have them pulled down the next morning in our exasperation. Finally we reached a compromise solution in which we just randomly piled the books onto the shelf into a kind of supercritical stack-she would pick and choose books from this pile at random while for the most part the stack retain its overall structure. But once in a while she would bring much of the rest of the pile down to the floor with the book she managed to pull out.

The apparent delight in disorder and its apparent adult lack of any sensible arrangement is evident in her pre-oral, proto-linguistic babble and expressive activity. From her first few months she would regular babble quite loudly in extended soliloquy’s about seemingly nothing in particular. A sociolinguist friend of mine who heard her while on the phone at three months old was quite amazed by her performance. More lately we’ve recorded her reading her books and stories to herself or to her dolls, quite out loud, in the fashion of a long extended narrative discourse, turning the pages and pointing to the figures. At the most one or two names relating to the prominent characters in the stories will be noticeable amidst such extended babble.

It is to be wondered whether she also does not experience our adult world. Our many written words in the books she always finds us preoccupied with, in our extended discussions in which she has at best a peripheral part, in our dialogues over the mysterious telephone with her strange Grandma who lives in California, or in our engrossment in the long movies on TV that to her are but a long train of people and words. It happens in much the same way that we experience her nonsensical babble and disordered clutter. Much of our world must remain effectively incomprehensible to her as so much background noise from which she only occasionally recognizes a few meaningful words and expressions.

This relative delight and sense of the fundamental disorder is apparent in all her domains of her life. He scribbling patterning of her drawings, which she calls fish, and puts in eyes and mouths, remains completely illegible to the adult eye. The kinds of stack of blocks she makes are basically without any systematic design. They occur as a randomly developing stack of interlocked blocks. Similarly, her overall ordering of her world remains without any apparent overall sense of order. It only consistency is in her own assured bouncing from one set of activities to another, for as long as her attention span will entertain her, starting, stopping, restarting, and sometimes getting several activities going concurrently and intermittently.

It is important that from a child’s point of view, the adult’s sense and need for order makes little sense-that a child’s must bring down and tear apart a great deal of the world that adults try to keep so fastidiously in tact. A child’s ‘deconstruction’ of the adult’s world to its own basic terms is a prelude to its exploration of the world, and precursory too its acquisition and reconstruction of its own sense of order in the world. It is equally important that the adult retains some measure of sanity against the entropic incursions and chaotic influences of the child. The adult provides the child the framework and model for order that it itself lacks, and which it will soon need when it begins its reconstruction of that world in its own inner subjectivity. "But, Daddy, isn’t that a funny thing-that everybody means the same when they say ‘muddled’ but everybody means something different by ‘tidy’." (Gregory Bateson 1972: 4)