The Confounding World: Feral Children

 Forget Tarzan. Forget Mowgli. 

Those stories of lore are malarky. 

Romulus & Remus

Echoes of feral children or, in times long past, feral peoples, have succeeded in permeating cultural traditions in perhaps every generation of storytellers. The idea balloons in our minds as something oddly romantic. How kind of those apes to raise that needy little boy. 'Gee-golly, what an opportunity that boy has had! He gets to see the world like no one else, and now we will dutifully acclimate him to the ways of modern man so he can share his learned wisdom with the myriads.'

We have only a handful of documented cases where a child either learned to live in the wild, or was enslaved by an upbringer who deprived the child of sensory interaction with the world. The results from such cases are much less happy-go-lucky than our imaginations would lay siege for.

The most famous case was perhaps one which sprung up from 19th century France in the form of a young boy named Victor. Victor was eleven or twelve when he was spotted on the outskirts of town by a woman who promptly reported the likes of the crazy child to local authorities. Using dogs, the boy was caught, and then plopped into the age of man. The story from this point forward is immortalized by Francois Truffaut's film, The Wild Child. His take on the situation peels out more with the same The Elephant Man-esque ode to the human spirit fervor that Lynch's later film mastered. The cause of Victor is taken up by Dr. Jean Itard (played by Truffaut) himself, the unsinkable doctor who successfully rehabilitates the boy to french society. The film is noted for its ending, in which the good doctor has finished his work with the child, and we watch Victor ascending a spiral staircase with his new foster mother. The idea from this, of course, is that now that the hard work of assimilation into culture was completed for Victor, 'the sky's the limit!' Huzzah!

Reality tells a bleaker tale. Dr. Itard was able to make a good deal of progress with Victor, but language never came. For some reason, when it came to speaking and reading, language simply didn't stick.

In modern times in America, we have the story of Genie. Genie was a little girl who was found to be locked in a room her whole life. When she was found, the adolescent girl was wearing a diaper. Upon being found out, Genie's father shot himself. Her mother claimed her and her daughter were both enslaved by the now dead man. An insightful doctor admitted that when Genie was discovered by doctors and scientists, "She had a personal quality that seemed to illicit rescue fantasies." Here was a girl who was going to be put through the ringer of every test imaginable.

The scientific trick of feral children is that you can't easily test for such environments. No person will isolate a child from society for years just to see what happens to their brain. So, when little Genie showed up in 1970 -- studying her was an opportunity that couldn't be overlooked.

With her, also -- the same results as Victor.

She could learn many things, but language was an insurmountable hurdle. A brain-scan of Genie showed that significant parts of her brain revealed 'sleeping-packed neurons'; packets of neurons that are bundled together and unused.

Watch a Nova special about Genie HERE.

Why is this perplexing? Why do feral children get quick access into my wonderful list of enigmas? It's the 'what-ifs'!

Why can't these children learn to talk? As of now, the evidence shows that if a child is not around a language speaking society by ages five or six, well then, it's too late. The brain hard-wires itself down, and then it's to be no more. The limits have been established. The caps are in place. The sky isn't the limit after all.

Remember that time during The Matrix when Morpheus apologizes to Neo -- he tells him he broke his own rule -- that people can't handle the switch out of the matrix after a certain age? Is there authentic truth to that? If we can't handle language acquisition after a certain age, what else do we hard-wire ourselves against?

Is there anything we are missing out on? Is there something that we would understand better, if only we encountered it during our formulative years? And what of telling a child about God? What happens to the brain of a child that is taught to believe in God from toddler age on upwards, and what of the child that is deprived of such ideas? If a child is brought to believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, is he more apt then to beliefism over skepticism?

A bit further down that rabbit-hole before I finish -- what of speaking in tongues? If tongues can be some sort of angelic language that is bestowed from above, are we hardwired to never be able to comprehend it on our own because we missed out during the growing years? Okay, that one's a stretch. But logically, it seems theoretically possible that the parent can greatly affect what hardwiring goes on due to what one's child is exposed to. If you raise a child only on logic and mathematics, trying your best to leave out the arts, do you create a creature that is more akin to a computer than to an emo-rockstar? Conversely, if the world of the senses is denied, and in its stead only the fantastic is pushed in -- what happens then?

Perhaps it is due to classic Disney movie indoctrination and the American spirit, but my instinct is to want to believe that anything we put our minds to we can accomplish. Sadly, the failures of language acquisition in the lives of these feral kids shows otherwise. As it turns out, when you wish upon a star, you better be younger five for it to work.

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As long as I'm touching on this topic I would be chagrin not to mention the great Werner Herzog's contribution to the conversation. His 1974 film, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser covered this very subject matter.

All that anyone really need know of the film is this: the title of this Herzogian film in German directly translates to, "Every man for himself and God against them all." Yep. That's the title.

Desperate Search: The Rest of the Story

Part VII.

He slept with his fist pressed against his heart.

 Tetro, directed by Francis Ford Coppola

What is the worst?
Think hard. What is deeply your all-time, top prize, greatest fear?

Terry Gilliam tried to release his retro-futuristic satire on modern bureacracy, Brazil, in 1985.  The distributor of this particular picture, Universal, was displeased with Gilliam's product.  They saw an ending that was simply unacceptable.  It was too damn morbid.  What was the point of going through all that journey just for a loser of an ending?  What's the point in watching trapped prey unless it eventually escapes?  The studio saw this sad sack of a creation, and thought, 'We can rebuild it.  Stronger.  Faster.  Happier.'  And so they did.  What came of it was a version of the film that morphs what was supposed to be a dream sequence, into the final reality of our protagonist.  In that world, everyone we care about lives happily ad infinitum.

As is also the case with Blade Runner, we, the consumers, have been blessed to see Gilliam's dream realized in subsequent, non-studio inverventioned versions of the film.  The film can now be seen as it was intended to be seen (Extra credit: send me a write-up on the parallels between 'Director's Cuts' and the redemption of the true inner being of the sinner!).

From time to time, I take some flack for my tendency to embrace Debbie-downer films.  I think I am well versed to explain my reasoning for this, and I often give a more drawn-out version of this response:
                      Because we live in a world of sin, it is a far easier task for the auteur to create that which is a deeply affecting truth that finds its mold in the fabric of this broken world.  Happy endings are often corny because they somehow ring untrue to our lives.  They follow some sort of line of destiny that spews out these sometimes insolently simple creations that play a small note in an orchestra playing the notes of some other universe.  

                     To write a story of deep, resonant joy is the hardest task of any artist.  It is far safer to write a tragedy, and have it incidentally be a masterpiece, than it will ever be for a 'comedy' to fall within the confines of that category of art. 

I could pontificate further on this point, and could do so with near unending strength, but this is all an old hat concept.  Aaahh, I speak too quickly.  One more example for the traditional argument of Tragedy vs. Comedy:

Which of these myths is closer to our reality: Michael Myers or the Blue Fairy?

Perhaps you could say that Jesus is our Blue Fairy, but that's a stretch.  Jesus died to save us because he is awesome and we are not.  And he's chosen to save us from the repercussions of living in a world of Halloween.  Michael Myers is a pretty crushing reflection of the reality of death and sin.  It's coming.  It's unavoidable.  But the Blue Fairy is not coming, at least, you don't believe in her the way you know that death is imminent for both you and I.

Over a cup of 'kava s smetano' (coffee with cream), a friend asked me if I was afraid of death.  My answer; "No, I have no need to be."  Jesus has told us that we are granted eternal life to those of us who follow him.  In this way my fate is sealed; my endgame is written.  But this wasn't really the point my friend was trying to make.  After some back-and-forth, we arrived at our destination.  We were in complete agreement...

The worst of it all, the worst fear, the worst 'thing', the worst of the worst: it is nothingness.  Turn the radio to static.  Nothing.  What cruelty it holds.  What lack of compassion!  What obscene inarticulateness.

From "The Call of Cthulhu": The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

When H.P. Lovecraft's "Call of Cthulhu" captured our collective fears, what was it that was so abhorrent and terrifying?  It's not the evilness, per se.  It's the grandity of it.  Grandiosity.  When that insurmountable monster arises from the deep, that leviathan of leviathans, there is no retreat, there is no combat, there is no chance.  It is over.  It was over before it began.  This is the endgame.  The end moment.  The end.

I am afraid of nothingness because I love story so much.  All stories end, yes?  But do they really?  Last month in Switzerland we discussed how to have better, clearer conversations.  One of the topics broached was that of 'the conversation after the conversation'.  When we hang up that phone, yes, we've physically ended the relationship for that moment, but twenty minutes later your brain comes up with what would have been the perfect response.  The perfect comeback.  The perfect proof.  Even though the physical conversation has ended, it keeps going onward, pushing further in the reaches of our minds and imaginations.  So, though it's physicality has ended, the spirit of the conversation continues onward.  So it is with story.

This talk of great fears and nothingness does indeed come into play with stories of happiness.  It does.  Trust me.

Fall back for a moment to the doctrinal belief of existential nihilism.  It, as a theory, exerts that there is no absolute, internal meaning to life.  This philosophy is practically and ultimately unlivable.  All men seek meaning.  All men seek purpose.  And so the nihilist is forced, by the necessity of living, to abandon his bleak outlook for something that has the hope of meaning.  All sad tales have this aspect to them: they suppose movement.  They are not static.

Take Brazil.  Ending in catatonia, though the character may be enlisted into a realm of quiet nothingness, this is not the response that we, the viewer have.  We are brought to the point of dissection.  We are uneased by the state of which the film ended.  We want to rid ourselves of such a feeling.  So we do something about it.  We vent.  We quickly try to whitewash the feelings by giving ourselves happy stimuli.  Or we review the film to get a handle as to how we got to this disturbing junction.  Perhaps we will go back and revisit the film, only this time, our lens is skewed toward stitching together the seams of the wretched destiny our protagonist unknowingly barrels towards.

Take happy Universal edit of Brazil.  Ending in freedom, our minds drift away from all of it.  Our protagonist is happy.  We are happy.  Everything is fine.  And because everything is fine, there is no movement.  No movement = static.  And static, dear brothers and sisters, is a bedfellow with nothingness.

Joy and happiness are tremendously difficult themes to build in authenticity because they so easily fall victim to the great 'staticness' of this world.  And staticness is not storytelling.  It is the absence of story.

Some quick theological terms are of use here.  I believe we are living under the banner of an 'inaugurated kingdom of Jesus Christ'.  Christ has come to save us sinners.  His active work of paying for our sins is completed.  I have been made anew already.  I am saved from the destruction I deserve to bear.  Now, this is a whole truth, but still, the world is decomposing.  It is brimming with sin.  Everything is in the process of being renewed.  The consequence of that statement is that all things are not yet made new.  The redemption of all things has not yet come to pass.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser Gate. All those ... moments will be lost in time, like tears...in rain.
Time to die.

Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott

Joy and happiness have not been made complete.  We have not yet known the furthest extent of their reality.  We have not yet known completely redeemed joy, redeemed happiness.  We only yet know of its shadow.  And because of this, we struggle to see these subjects as moving, vibrant pulses.  They remain obscure, distant ideas.  They appear not to move.

Suffering and tribulation are our closest friends when it comes to story.  We know them.  We sit in a world soaked in them.  And so we observe how they breathe, how they move.  That is why they are so much easier to capture (with excellence) in story.

Let us now recollect St. Augustine's famous syllogism:

God created all things.

God did not create evil,

Therefore, evil is not a thing.

If evil isn't a thing, then it must be nothing.  Static.