Talk, Talk : A Children's Book Author Speaks to Grown-Ups

by E. L. Konigsburg

  If, on the other hand, Meg were a Chinese baby, hearing three generations of Chinese-speaking relatives, she would pull the plug on the letter r. By the time a Chinese baby becomes an adolescent, he has tuned his radio telescope to such a degree that he no longer focuses on the letter r at all. He no longer hears its reverberations. If from birth to adolescence, the frequency that leads to the sound of r ceases to be tuned in, ceases to be used, that frequency is no longer received.

  If after the onset of adolescence, a Chinese child wants to say T, and the channel wire has been left dangling, it takes a lot of trial and error to find that wire and pull it out of the tangle of loose ends. It can be found, and it can be reconnected. It’s called practice, practice, practice. If the connection is not found until after adolescence, it will never be fiber-optically smooth—there will always be a relay where the wires were taped.

  So we have our first example of a critical time. And that critical time is preadolescence.

  We are all aware of the disadvantages of hearing only one language in the cradle. We have all heard the very bad accents that result. Many of us have spoken in those bad accents. There is for some—not for everyone but for some—an advantage to pulling the plug on those foreign language frequencies. It was an advantage for Winston Churchill.

  By being so long in the lowest form (at Harrow) I gained an immense advantage over the cleverer boys ... I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence—which is a noble thing. Naturally, I am biased in favor of boys learning English. I would make them all learn English; and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honor, and Greek as a treat.

  That was what Winston Churchill had to say about tuning out the sounds our language does not make.

  But even if we are not sacrificing our skills in order to —as Edward R. Murrow said of Churchill—”[mobilize] the English language and send it into battle,” we all have to clean up our wiring some.

  To some degree or other, each of us aims our radio telescope in such a way that we sacrifice hearing Hints from Heloise in order to better hear the Sermon on the Mount. Leaving some wires unconnected is necessary not only to avoid cross-wiring but also to make our connections more efficient. We leave some wires unconnected in order to reinforce others.

  Long ago, when I wrote From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, I was concerned even then about keeping circuits uncluttered. Claudia, the young protagonist of my story, has just told Mrs. Frankweiler, a rich old recluse, that she should want to learn one new thing every day. Mrs. Frankweiler replies:

  I don’t agree with that. I think you should learn, of course, and some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up inside of you until it touches everything. And you can feel it inside you. If you never take time out to let that happen, then you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you. You can make noise with them, but never really feel anything …

  We disconnect in order to better connect.

  We are hardwired to communicate, and we eliminate some connections to reinforce others because we need some trunk lines. Trunk lines are more efficient. They take less energy. An adult can get from Aardvark to Zarathustra faster than a kid can because his wiring is streamlined. And those cleaned-up, litter-free trunk lines are the route to being able to concentrate, being able to think conceptually. Yes, it’s the old use-it-or-lose-it message, but it is also something more.

  Something much, much more.

  More than use-it-or-lose-it, in humans the link between use and strength has a quickening pulse. The more a nerve pattern is used, the better it gets. Well-used nerve paths release nerve growth factors that help ensure their survival. The nerve paths we carve out of the morass of gray cells actually trigger their own growth. I cannot draw a computer analogy for this. I cannot draw a highway analogy. I cannot because this process of growth producing its own stimuli is unique to living organisms. Other things wear out with use. But the human brain gets better with use. There is no toaster oven or Cuisinart or Rolls-Royce in the whole wide world that does not wear out with use. There is no computer that gets faster and better with use; it is the human using it who does.

  We connect in order to connect.

  Even before we start strengthening those trunk lines, even before those brain cells send out nerve growth chemicals, we must turn on the ignition. And—guess what?—before we do, we must jump-start the battery. Consider our capacity to charge and recharge the brain as a storage battery. We come with it already installed but keep it dry until ready to send out its first spark. We add distilled water to loosen those chemicals that will make the current. Consider those first pure sights and sounds as the distilled water we pour into our human storage battery. Even though new and unused, the human battery still must be jump-started. Then those nerve growth chemicals kick in and keep the current flowing. But just as a battery is jump-started with its own product, the brain must be jump-started with experience. Even our most basic patterns of consciousness—seeing and speaking—must be jump-started. There is evidence.

  Dr. Patricia Cowdery is a friend of mine who is a retired medical doctor. Before she completed her medical studies, she worked at the Yerkes Primate Lab, which used to be housed in North Florida, where we both live. She told me of an experiment she observed there in the early forties, in those years when animal-rights groups were hardly a cry in the wilderness. Experimenters kept a group of normal chimps in the dark. The technicians who fed, diapered, and mothered the chimps were allowed only a dim red light, one that did not stimulate the retina. For eighteen months, the chimps did not see light.

  Then they did.

  After eighteen months, the chimps were allowed to see, but they couldn’t. They were functionally blind.

  Dr. Cowdery tells of dangling a watch on a chain in front of Dixie, one of the female chimps; Dixie did not reach for it as a normally playful chimp would. Dixie was taking pictures, and the film was being developed, but Dixie did not know if she was looking at a watch or the surface of the moon. She could not interpret. Dixie had never learned to organize the world from images. To identify my friend, Dixie had to touch her, sniff her, and listen to her. Pat Cowdery’s face, the face of the watch, or the face of the man in the moon were the same to Dixie because the circuitry between sight and sense was never laid out, and the process of stimulation/ use/growth-through-use never got under way.

  There is a human analogy to this.

  A child who has a lazy eye must wear an eye patch over his good eye to force him to use his lazy eye, force him to connect his organ of sight with the site in his brain that lets him interpret what he sees. He must do it by the time he is seven—or he will not see out of that eye any more than Dixie could “see” the watch that Pat dangled in front of her.

  The seer must see in order to see, and the speaker must speak in order to speak.

  There is an example in the tragic case of Genie, the California child who was kept in silence in a bedroom, harnessed to a potty chair during the day and strapped into bed at night. She was never spoken to; she received no auditory stimulation at all. She was punished if she cried; she was not allowed to make any noise at all; she never spoke. Her rescue did not come until she was thirteen. She couldn’t speak. All tests indicated that the mechanism was intact: her hearing, her vocal cords, the left hemisphere of her brain. All were there. But after her rescue, when she was given every opportunity to talk, she learned words—she was anxious to learn the names of things—but she never learned to string words into sentences. Genie was not rescued until she was past the critical time when her brain needed to lay down the path between sound, speech, syntax, and sense. Rescue came too late for Genie. She never learned to organize the world through language.

  We need to experience seeing in order to see. We need to experience speaking in order to speak.

  A child who does not speak before adolescence will
learn words but will not learn language. He can always learn words. So can a chimp. So can a parakeet. But what he cannot learn is language—the patterns of words that convey meaning. The human connective tissue we call language. It is language, not words, that makes us human.

  Unlike the battery that can be jump-started at any time as long as it is intact, the human brain cannot be. Unlike the radio telescope, which will always transmit the reverberations from the Big Bang as long as it is correctly wired, the human brain will not. The human brain will not transmit if during a critical period it has not been jump-started. The human needs feedback. He needs to send in order to receive in order to send.

  Dixie and the lazy-eyed child and poor, poor Genie are all telling us that this is something more than use-it-or-lose-it. This is something that precedes use-it-or-lose-it. This is something that happens before the Chinese baby loses his r’s or Meg loses her French vowel sounds. They are saying that if you don’t stimulate the proper nerves within a critical time, those nerve paths don’t get laid down at all.

  And you can never, never, never connect.

  And every piece of evidence points to the critical age being those years—some sooner, some later—but every one of those critical periods happens before adolescence, during the age when the nonsense of Edward Lear is taken seriously.

  And that brings me to books. Children’s books.

  I am convinced there is a critical time for books, too.

  Picture books.

  Let me tell you when I realized that I was grateful that I had been exposed to picture books at a critical time. I am not even embarrassed to tell you that a lot of them were comic books. As a matter of fact, those comic books helped.

  I was in France, sitting inside Chartres Cathedral, the building that Kenneth Clark has described as “one of the two most beautiful covered spaces in the world … one that has a peculiar effect on the mind.”

  Well, it does. For a while I allowed myself to enjoy the emotional impact and the play of light on the patterns of colored glass, feeling as if I were inside a kaleidoscope. That feeling was soon superseded by the feeling that I was like Borges sitting under the stairs looking into the dizzying world of the limitless Aleph. Everything was there, but I couldn’t see. I needed to impose some order on this myriad of pieces and pieces of pieces.

  I called on some old patterns of organization.

  I saw words. I saw a set of windows that had names written beneath them. I could read: David, Solomon, Aaron. I knew David, Solomon, and Aaron. David, Solomon, and Aaron were friends of mine. They were Old Testament names, familiar to a woman raised in a small Orthodox synagogue in Farrell, Pennsylvania, where we were allowed names but no graven images. So I studied those windows. David had a harp. They got that right. Aaron had a plumed rod, the one given to him by Moses. Correct. But who were those people under my friends, David, Solomon, and Aaron? I studied them. I could make out those names, too: Saul under David. Okay. It figures. Jeroboam under Solomon. Jeroboam? A Jeroboam is a big bottle of wine.

  I needed a guide.

  I got one.

  Help came in the form of Malcolm Miller, the eccentric Englishman who has devoted his life to Chartres and whose tours have become, by his own admission—certain^ by his own admission—legendary. Malcolm Miller sorted out the images; he explained the iconography and connected it to the images and the images to one another. Using his pointer from window to window, he told me stories. He made successive the images that had like the Aleph been simultaneous. He did it with language.

  And that is when I knew that these windows were pages of a gigantic picture book. These were Bible tales for the illiterate. And then it further occurred to me that if I had been living in the Middle Ages when Chartres was built, if I had been illiterate, I would have sat in that cathedral and told myself the stories of these windows. If I were illiterate, I wouldn’t need the written words at all. I could read the windows as well as Malcolm Miller could. Probably better. But being a twentieth-century woman, I needed subtitles—either spoken or written.

  By becoming literate, I had forgotten the language of the windows, but hey, those trunk lines were open, and words provided the first dangling cord I had reached for. Written language had allowed me to reconnect those patterns in my brain. With practice, I could recapture the stories of the windows of Chartres Cathedral. And the stories in the frescoes of Adam and Eve, God and Noah on the great ceiling of the Sistine, and I could read Theodora and Justinian in the beautiful mosaics of Ravenna.

  I was not deprived like Dixie or Genie. I had merely let my r’s get covered over with kudzu.

  Think about it.

  If I were illiterate, and if I had a kind of time that existed for the people who lived when these works were laid down—a kind of time that does not exist in a world where Federal Express is slow and fax is normal—and the shot heard round the world arrives by satellite—I wouldn’t need a guide to read the windows of Chartres Cathedral.

  But.

  But, I was once preliterate.

  I once had that kind of time.

  I was once preliterate and had that kind of time, and I once had adults who gave me the tools with which to see the story of the pictures. And those tools were picture books, and because I had them, I laid down a network inside my head. I laid down the nerve patterns that let me see pictures as symbols and connect them one to another. With help, with training, I was able to clear the entangling debris of words and read those windows.

  Sure, I was reading with an accent. Sure, I had to beam my responses through a relay station, but with practice, I got better and better at it.

  Think about children, those preliterates, who are the great audience of picture books. Think about what they are learning from reading pictures. Think about how willing they are to learn from pictures. Think about the kind of pony express time they have to do it in.

  Think about Meg’s sister Anna. She is five. She has already been read to a lot. This year we read Tuesday by David Wiesner. Anna laughed out loud. “What’s so funny?” I asked. Anna pointed to the frog pushing the remote control with his tongue. When there are no words—or very few—Anna is a better reader than her grandmother.

  Anna sees the tongues, and Anna sees the toes.

  I am talking about sculptured toes.

  The sculptured toes of the bronze charioteer.

  Let me tell you about the toes of the bronze charioteer.

  When I went to Delphi and saw that wonderful statue in the museum there—the charioteer who stands with the bronze reins in his outstretched right hand—the guide asked us to examine his toes. Each was beautifully sculpted. Even though when the statue was intact, a chariot would have hidden the sight of his toes from the viewer, each toe was carved because, the guide explained, “They were made for the gods’ eyes.” Small g. Plural gods.

  When I read to my grandchildren or when I write and illustrate books for them, I often think that they are like so many small gods. Small g. Plural gods. They know if toes are missing or are not carved with care.

  I may have lost some of my preliterate patience. I think I have lost a lot of it. I may have lost some of my preliterate awareness of pictures, and sometimes it is hard to find that dangling cord, and my headset does not come with a remote control—you see, I needed the words—but I do find it, and I can always find my way back because I have the circuitry laid out inside my head.

  What if I did not?

  What if—as a preliterate—I had never been exposed to picture books? Would I ever be able to make sense of the windows of Chartres? What if I had never seen a picture, never seen a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional object, would I have ever been able to sort out the windows? No.

  No, I wouldn’t. I would be like Dixie or Genie, who could not interpret, and not like the Chinese adult, who has merely lost his r’s.

  Today’s kids, today’s American kids, may not have an Aleph, and they may not have a radio telescope, but they ha
ve something that is close to being a combination of both. And they need help. They need help teasing out those brain patterns that will let them connect to Churchill and the windows of Chartres, to Shakespeare and the Sistine, to Moses and the Sermon on the Mount.

  Let us think about a child who is verbal but not yet literate. He is a preschooler in day care. The TV is on. He interacts well with other kids. The TV is on. He has learned his alphabet from “Sesame Street.” The TV is on. He has learned his numbers from “Sesame Street.” The TV is on. The child sometimes sits and watches it, the TV that is. Sometimes he is not tuned in, but the TV is on, and the background noise, the buzz, persists. There is no void when the TV stays on.

  One day he sees Mount St. Helens, Mount Vesuvius, and Madonna erupting simultaneously because now MTV is on. He hears Talking Heads sing. MTV is on.

  He sees “the teeming sea”; he sees … “daybreak and nightfall”; ... he sees “convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand”; he sees “the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor”; he sees “tigers, pistons, bison, tides and armies”; he sees “the coupling of love and the modification of death.” He has looked upon “the unimaginable universe.”

  He does not feel dizzv.

  I do.

  The Aleph had the virtue of being quiet. This is loud. Man, is it ever loud when MTV is on.

  I try to connect.

  There are the words. The singer is singing words. Words might help. They helped at Chartres. I listen. Maybe the words will help me connect the pictures with the words. I hear words. This singer sings “Shock the Monkey.” Those are his words. They are his only words. He says “shock the monkey” regardless of what image is on the MTV screen. The beat doesn’t change either. It is loud. Man, is it ever loud when MTV is on.