ON FIRST READING (essay)

[Zlatko Waterman]

( I apologize for the typography and layout here. I grew weary wrestling with the machine, which insisted on slamming things together and making a mayonnaise of my paragraphing, etc.)


ON FIRST READING




That wonders are worked within us apart from our knowledge or consent is a commonplace theme in Western philosophy, religion and literature. Learning to read must fall, though our first teachers do not caution us about it, into this category of interior wonders. Strange connections are formed as we read, connections that have little or nothing to do with decoding the snake of the "S" and the stride of the "R" across the page, but everything to do with beginnings, what we read first.
Reading is narcissistic at its birth: only later do we grudgingly let strangers into our lettered world.
I learned to read from the only printed matter in our home: the Stag, Male and Argosy magazines my father left lying on the coffee table where I could borrow them and take them under the wheels of the house trailer, into a crude burrow whose walls I had piled up from sawdusty Oregon mill-ends.
Comic books came next, but only after I had puzzled out the routine fare of "male" publications. These woody, pulp paper books pictured grimacing Nazis freezing nubile women dressed in brassieres into blocks of solid ice. From the back pages, I learned what the word " rupture" meant long before I mastered Dick, Jane and Spot's adventures in school. Charles Atlas promised to make me invulnerable to bullies kicking sand in my face by sending me a (seven pound shipping weight) German Iron Shoe for wrist exercise.
Psychologists used to be fond of pointing out that pathology along sexual lines is fed by just this sort of thing. A young boy sees women being abused, scenes of torture connect in his pre-pubescent imagination with sexual pleasure or desire, and sooner or later sexual pathology, or what used to be referred to as "inversion" occurs; he commits heinous crimes of his own, even if he lacks a giant refrigerator like the Nazis used on my pulp magazine frauleins.
The opposite effect seemed to be worked on me, but perhaps it was because my curiosity for print was omnivorous in those first eight or nine years. I didn't rebel at what I was told I couldn't read by my parents. Maybe my evolving conscience lacked the proper effort at correction the dutiful parent takes to steer his child in the direction of sexual wholesomeness.
My father, who smelled like Luckies, worked in a meat market and sat in a sweaty undershirt watching the Friday night fights with a can of Schlitz,, took no notice of my borrowings.
When I try to remember what I "read" before I could read, I remember page texture: the coarse magazine paper, how it smelled, and how the covers, particularly the black parts of the lurid illustrations, a woman in a slip handcuffed and thrown into a bathtub, an ingenue hanged in a closet, smeared black on my fingers.
One might think I would have grown into an adult abuser of some sort, but, as I said, the effect has been the opposite, though perhaps I have partially assumed the psychologist's archetype, since I have become withdrawn.
To this day I cannot stand public sexual spectacle, particularly the group variety, and I have never been able to sit through a pornographic film, which seems like watching kidney surgery. I simply seem to lack the ability to lose myself in this filmed dream of eroticism, probably because it is not my dream; I notice the poor lighting, the unintentional shadows cast by the film crew into the counterfeited erotic den; I remain stubbornly unconvinced.
The blandness and lack of imagination in such films, Nabokov reminds us, is the same blandness and lack of imagination in the criminal mind. A crook can think only of holding up a bank, snatching a purse, or bludgeoning someone for cash. He is precluded from more clever feats, from seeking incongruity, like planting a tree in the center of a bank, or dumping a potted geranium in someone's purse.
The world is simply taken as he finds it already assembled, unlike the artist, saint, poet or those truly innovative pornographers advertising writers are; he does not dream mankind and reassemble it to his satisfaction.
It might be argued that the sort of reading I have described is nothing healthy for a growing boy, and I would be the first to agree. But the pictures along with the text, unlike the chaste illustrations of Dick, Jane and Spot at school, kept my interest, and I was mightily challenged in my efforts to decode them, whereas I thought it was perfectly obvious and even insulting to figure out the boy, girl and dog's monosyllabic adventures. "Fell" as an adjective, "merciless", "daunting" " clandestine", along with a generous list of playful, decorative and baroque archaisms, first did their dance in front of my eyes on the pages of those coarse police and military adventures.
Real men, as I hoped to become, did things in a man's world. Women were to be glimpsed in undergarments and kept away from the "controls" of the D-C-3. How the women often managed to "jam" controls was another mystery; I have never talked to anyone who flies who can explain to me to this day how controls are"jammed", yet it happened routinely in these stag adventures.
Jane, dressed in a filmy slip, would never have jammed the controls while Dick tried to pull out of a nose dive and Spot growled his animal disapproval.
Later I even saw the roles reversed: women in brassieres and garter belts freezing the Nazis, their Luftwaffe wings frosted over, into those same blocks of ice.
Why were the women dressed in those costumes? As probable victims of torture I understood. But these were the same garments, only black and lacy, that I saw hanging around the corner on my mother's closet door. But why dress in those costumes to inflict torture on their torturers?
Finally, the day came when I had to graduate, I must have been about twelve, from my magazines into real literature. Dad had switched jobs, as he was wont to do, and worked in the meat department of a large supermarket. From the store he brought home comic books, and I delighted in the extraordinarily imaginative and adult, though grisly, EC comics of the fifties. I read them in those golden days before the Congress forced creation of the Comics Code, guaranteeing blandness and pages of cute animals and unambivalent good guys.
There, next to the comic books one day, was a new revolving wire rack of paperback books, and on the cover of one, whose title was strange, because it wasn't a title, but a date, a year, 1984, was a picture of a nubile young woman wearing a red button and a sash around her waist. The button said, "Anti-Sex League", and Julia, Winston's forbidden paramour, was pictured as the shimmering double of my Nazi girls.
I bought the book with a fifty-cent piece from my allowance, tickled by the little red Kangaroo and her baby in the pouch, logo of "pocketbooks, Inc." on the back.
This book had no pictures, but made pictures with words, some quite provocative for a boy of twelve in those days, though nothing compared to the scenes of kitchen-sink intercourse that smear our biggest box-office movies today; their messages are "kill the attraction. Make it truly fatal and then you are vindicated, then you are the proud smiling homeowner and daddy restored."
From then on, though of course without realizing it, "literature" was what I read, puzzling through the words, using the dictionary at the school library.
I almost lost Julia when my teacher saw the illustration on the cover. But I quickly told my teacher what the book was about, and an allegory of totalitarianism was considered character-building. I never told her how many times I reread the scenes between Julia and Winston in bed in their attic of erotic sanity above the antique store. To literature I was led, and away from kitchen sink couplings, which disgust me to this day.
As a teacher of literature I would never today recommend that my students, vastly more sophisticated about sex at twelve than I was, read stag magazines, even if their equivalent could be found in our postlapsarian print age. But in trying to interest them in anything having to do with human passion, and finding their thresholds so high from butcher-knife movies, I wonder whether there might not be some good in the mild nastiness of that provocative literature that was my first reading?
If the attention of the human heart cannot be won, through shock or any other means, does the "decoding" process, a favorite term of "reading professionals" become only a cold cerebral exercise? Do the kids who read the porno mags that "show everything today" or gaze at the pictures of women tortured and abused in far more graphic fashion turn inevitably into torturers themselves? Today their imaginations have no paper Nazis like mine to delegate the task to.
I wasn't noticed or particularly supervised, and living in a less predatory world, perhaps I innocently corrected myself from those other films and stories about good people triumphing over adversity through persistence, patience and other painfully acquired virtues. Those lessons are still available today, those good stories.
But the innocent nastiness that prompted me to go from stag fantasies to 1984 led me on to Shakespeare and every other lord of language .
What is learned from first reading is more than decoding, more than content, more than grammar, unless it be a grammar of rich confusion. It is or ought to be a chipping of steps into the child's wall between ourselves and the punishing world. We ascend, grasping our crude literary hand and foot-holds ; finally, peering over the top of the wall, we begin discreetly to compare our insular world, our self-referential reality, with the official world on the other side of the wall--the moral, Dick-and-Jane world.
But our version, our first world of letters, is never lost, always remains as a referent, always keeps the sting of original curiosity; it is the world Whitman describes: " without check, with original energy . ." This world-forming process must happen with appropriate distortion, with suitable flaws and misunderstandings, and must never be copied exactly from sordid or shocking originals, something so easy to do with color film. James pronounced that novels ought to "cohere like planets", and our first reading is the molten core to which our subsequent experiences must cohere.
First reading ought to include training the imagination to respond with rigor and even anger, not just butterfly summer reveries. A young boy's imagination craves blood and thunder, not polite children and parental parables of worth.
Images of Nazis freezing brassiered women in blocks of ice, leering at the frauleins on their coarse-grained pages, gave me the imaginative power to puzzle about why people hurt each other and how; without the attendant lesson, the moral brake routinely applied by school, my pubescent mind was left free to roam, to err, to stumble and recover, standing straighter for those stumbles.
But the big-screen mutilations, the sink fornications, the slashings in bright color, the whole sanguinary slop of it all, doesn't invite us in the same way today to build our fragile private world. We may learn slasher "technique", but too much technique applied to the imagination causes overload, and the desperate groping for release, for revenge. We cease to become puzzled, cease to inquire; we have had the certainty of violence and cruelty grafted to us. We have been cheated of our informative confusion.
Somehow, even though I didn't need a rupture truss , and didn't plan to wear Charles Atlas's leopard skin swim trunks and seek revenge, those old magazines made me see that the world of words smeared in seamy newsprint , while unlike the world I recognized, could be a world of its own. The world those magazines presaged eventually included The Book of Revelation, Sir Thomas Browne, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Johnson's Rasselas and other pages which described things far stranger than freezing frauleins.



---ZW
(Originally published in BAKUNIN, Volume 4, Number 2, Winter 1994. Reprinted in NEWTEXT, an International Journal of the Essay, London, 1995)


( after reading this essay, try this link!)

http://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalog ... /03815.htm



--Z

[judih]

Great essay, Z.

Just now having to re-think reading via yet another online course, and here you are adding unhoped for wit and intelligence into the mix.

Reading was always a joy, a chance to split the scene of public space and enter into a new dimension where time was irrelevant and imagination unlimited.

How is it that such a marvelous vehicle could be dismissed? Has the world been reduced to 3 minute song clips and 30 second adventure stories?

.....judih

[Lightning Rod]

as usual Z
a penetrating analysis (don't you remember Victorian times, when the glimpse of a woman's ankle was considered highly erotic?) It's all a matter of context. Since today's generation is bombarded with salacious and ubiquitous violence and graphic sex, what they find intriguing and erotic is the innocent and romantic storyline.

my teenage thumbs became stained from the ink of those pulp mags too

my dad sold a couple of stories to Argosy

[abcrystcats]

A very moving and beautiful essay, Zlatko. Thank you for reprinting it here.

Coincidentally, it is very apropos to an online course I happen to be taking at moment, as well, though in a very different way than the one Judih mentioned.

And I began my young reading life with rhymes and Dr. Seuss, later graduating to Grimm's and Andersen's Fairy Tales, then on to Shakespeare (weirdly, I was into Shakespeare at age eight) and H. Rider Haggard read with a flashlight in my bedroom when I should have been asleep. I never thought deeply about how my early reading might have influenced me, but I will now.

Thank you again. I will re-read this several more times.

[Zlatko Waterman]

Thank you all for your kind comments.

Zlatko