Berthe Morisot, Le berceau (detail), 1872, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
I have read Goodnight Moon to my daughter over and over since she was an infant. Its long, drawn-out goodnight to everything in that surreal green room for a little rabbit in blue striped pajamas. Margaret Wise Brown is a special children’s book writer, psychoanalytically inspired, educated at the revolutionary Bank Street School in New York City where apparently she went too far for even their sensibilities. A New Yorker profile notes her tendency toward extremes going all the way back. “She was a tomboy with a terrible temper … [W]hen Brown became angry she some-times held her breath until she turned blue, prompting a nanny to plunge her head into a tub of ice-cold water.” Brown’s fantastical, wild, and brief life befits the modernist poetics of her writing, hidden in the simplest of stories. She changed children’s literature, and, like a good psychoanalyst, she claims she was mere “eye and ear” for the children who were the real writers of her stories.
“Goodnight room, goodnight moon. Goodnight cow jumping over the moon. Goodnight light and the red balloon. Goodnight cow jumping over the moon.” At face value, a simple set of rhymes and repetitions: room, moon, moon, balloon, and night, night, night, light, night. However, Brown manages to evoke the transition from object to sound and image, because who would fail to hear the moo of the cow jumping over the moon, or the transition of night as goodnight light. And who would not think of the balloon in the room, rising in the air, like the moon in the sky outside. The moon outside is shown in the window in the room, while the cow jumping over the moon is a picture in the pictured room.
This is a subtle didactic lesson, to be sure. It speaks the way a child navigates reality as space, air, breath, object, sound, words, jumping from images that are real to imaginary ones in picture books. Also, how these qualities permeate one another, forming a world of associations. All that is seen and named and heard, we must say goodnight to—a version of goodbye—when going to sleep. How does the child know what will be there when it wakes up? The book reassures continuation. Reading the book, night after night, is an enactment of that continuation. Continue reading, continue saying goodnight, continue finding the world still there after your brief absence from it.
The book first lists what there is in the bunny’s room, and then takes a second moment to say goodnight to all of it. The clocks only appear in the second round, along with its rhyming partner “socks,” which failed to be mentioned in the first half, though they were visually included in the picture. The missing object comes forward to be said goodnight to along with the mention of time. Everything’s time will come. In time, everything can be counted.
Brown, whose books only came to be appreciated after her early death at the age of forty-two, was following a new tradition of children’s writing that attended to “the here and now” of life rather than fantastical fairy tales. Children find the everyday world magical. They don’t need more magic than that. Brown brought her love of language and avant-garde sensibilities to the task of writing children’s stories. She says she loves the Oedipal child right before repression sets in. The New Yorker profile quotes words from her notebook: “At five we reach a point not to be achieved again” while noting that she else-where claimed that children of this age enjoy a “keenness and awareness” that will likely become dampened by life.
Above all I love her love of children’s language to the extent of dare—try if you can. She seems to have lived her life this way. The most fantastical addition to the goodnights takes place towards the end of the book. “Goodnight comb, goodnight brush. Goodnight nobody, goodnight mush.” It’s still a revelation to read this page where nobody and mush appear and stand firm—worth a goodnight. While mush is certainly food, it is also the dematerialized object, the food eaten, or the food left uneaten. The remnant, there next to nobody and nothing. We are close to the ending: “Goodnight to the old lady whispering hush. Goodnight stars, goodnight air. Goodnight noises everywhere.”
We have the final appearance of the only other person next to the little rabbit going to sleep—the old lady and her strange whispers of hush, maybe gentle, maybe harsh. It’s hard to tell. And then we zoom out beyond her to the stars, the air, the noise. Every night we say goodnight to all the others. Goodnight to the noises that fill our days with one another, that keep us bound together as humans. Goodnight to the air that carries these sounds, and the stars that mark the outer limits of this world, just like the moon and edges of my room.
It is as if she understands the magical and slightly uncanny journey that a child takes nightly in allowing themselves to go to sleep and wake up again, this rhythmicity like breathing that begins to mark time and time away from other humans. Thinking about this book, about Margaret Wise Brown, I started to see how many children’s books reference air, speech, noise, sound. Of course, these books—themselves always read aloud—are the material medium for beginning to learn speech. An induction into another type of breathing, teeming with significance. A space for closeness with words, pictures, sounds, repetitions, at points of transition in the difficult life of a child.
When my daughter is finally left in her crib alone, either at naptime or at night, she speaks and sings. “Crib speech,” as it is called: she repeats fragments of songs and books, sometimes interspersed with bits of conversation from the day, close to what Freud, speaking of dream matter, called the day residue, like a fantastical mash-up mix tape. All the phonemic distortions and creative analogizing and agglutinizing of words that attack the stability of language is on full display. It really is an early form of free association.
I listen to her follow her mind from the pop of the caterpillar from its egg in the beginning of The Hungry Caterpillar, to the pop of bubbles in her favorite fish song, to pop pop papa. She rewrites song lyrics when she reaches a part she doesn’t know, and these distortions find their way back when we sing it the next day. “Now I know my ABCs, Mama mama mama me.” Language is the place we find ourselves together and then separate.
I try to preserve these inventions rather than remind her of the correct lyrics. We can sing those again later. Years earlier I tried too hard to preserve some of my son’s phonetic neologisms, like his substitution of benge for beige; he said it with such gusto, like Stone Benge. I asked everyone around him to leave it be. He later figured out it wasn’t the right word and was furious with me. A mother shouldn’t willfully tamper with the symbolic … I suppose.
A slightly hysterical distress about these lawful codes could turn into full-blown disgust at the books that were explicitly teaching language to my daughter. They acted like an index of correct transfer from speech to reality. “Besides, they fail to even differentiate what they think they are indicating!” I yelled. Like the word red and a picture of a red apple. How am I supposed to know you don’t mean apple? Don’t we learn about language so much better with Margaret Wise Brown, with her gentle free play of associations, than with these didactic monstrosities?
I know better now the chorus of language that can be kept alive both within the constraints of language and by making room for what is so painfully and wonderfully open in it. No poetry is written without a deep sense for the rules, grammar, and structure of language. Willy-nilly invention is cheap. Margaret Wise Brown took a year to write one of her children’s books. Apparently, the year was spent refining what was, at first, a furiously scribbled draft on an envelope or napkin.
In All the World, which reads like a secular prayer, the author Liz Garton Scanlon also does the work of explaining the turning of day into night, giving its small reader—or listener—a glimpse of a vast world that vanishes in sleep. Of course the “all” of the book is amusing, given the tiny fragment of the world that children know. But it is the word, idea, rhyme, that carry the prayer: the “all,” then, is in fact the “all” of language which we can’t see in its totality, but that we take in all at once, and without consent—which is why Lacan said that language was akin to a trauma, and why, throughout the lives that follow this enormous intake of breath, we forever dream of this “all.”
In All the World, as the day becomes noon, a storm comes in. “Nest, bird, feather, fly. All the world has got its sky.” We see the air and clouds rushing in, birds taking flight on a torrent of wind. It starts the rain: “Slip, trip, stumble, fall. Tip the bucket, spill it all. Better luck another day. All the world goes round this way.” This is the page that most will remember, where the skies, filled with rain, gather into a puddle. Time and space collide in the image of weather and the day that goes awry, that stumbles in the same way as children with their little bodies and new instrument of speech.
A little fear and hesitation visit these images which seem to push us inside, away from the weather. Dinner is being prepared. Day turns to night. “Spreading shadows, setting sun. Crickets, curtains, day is done. A fire takes away the chill. All the world can hold quite still.” The clearing sky as dusk falls is the image of stillness from which a light turns on inside a home. The idea of waiting, holding, stillness, foreshadows sleep. Sleep is coming after the turns and tumbles of time and weather and bodies throughout a day.
But not yet! The home erupts with people and sounds. “Nanas, papas, cousins, kin. Piano, harp and violin. Babies passed from neck to knee. All the world is you and me. Everything you hear, smell, see.” It’s an almost manic moment following the sullen stillness that was atmospheric. The feeling of the baby being passed, the feeling of being close to the neck, or bounced on the knee, the difference in these positions of what you can smell or see.
The rhythm of the book is foretold by the “all” that must be evoked and navigated, from the world and weather to the feelings and smells and sounds at home. This “all” emerges as a kind of joyous human uproar before the ending of the book, which sounds its only false note: “Hope and peace and love and trust. All the world is all of us.” If we must, we must.
I thought of these books, the way they interpolate their readers and listeners into the atmosphere of language, while reading Louise Glück’s Marigold and Rose, the last book she published during her lifetime—her last word. This short fictional work is about her baby twin granddaughters, reading more like a children’s story than adult fiction. The twins think about stories and memories and memories of stories they’ve heard. “She had loved long, long ago (being a twin, she liked things that happened twice) but she had become aware of another way to begin, a way Mother and Father both used when they read stories at bedtime. Once upon a time: that is what the stories said.” But there was a sticking point—upon. They didn’t know what it meant, and it only seemed to be used when reading stories.
“Up, he said, and on. He picked up each twin in turn and held her up (saying the word) and then put her on (usually Mother and Father’s bed),” writes Glück. But the twins still can’t get a grip on this word. Once felt better because Marigold heard the one in it, which always began the counting lessons. “And time was the difference between waking up and going to sleep … Once must mean that time doesn’t happen again.” Like when you fall, you only fall and hurt yourself once in that one way.
Marigold decides she wants to write a book and settles for once time as the way to start, leaving out the confusing upon. “She was trying to hear what the book wanted. Then she listened and waited. But the book was completely silent in that way of nonexistent things … When the book is ready to talk it will talk. Like us, Marigold thought.” Once time is like long, long ago. And the twins were beginning to remember things even though there wasn’t much behind them.
In not long at all, they had gone from not breathing and living in the water like tadpoles, to being able to breathe and even hold a cup of water and drink by themselves. That’s a lot! Marigold wants to learn to remember before she must remember—this is what gives her the idea of writing a book. “But actually it was Rose who remembered farther back, being the older twin. I will have to breathe first, Rose thought (it was her first memory). I will have to teach her.”
At the end of Glück’s book, they must go to sleep after a party. This is no way to end a book, thinks Marigold. This ending is too soon! Marigold, watching Rose sleep, tries to conjure her long, long ago, trying to make it real. And then once time, as if this could change the ending. But everyone was sleeping. Later, “deep, deep in the night,” Rose awakens to see Marigold sleeping. She thinks to herself how she must be having a wonderful dream about her book: “In the dream, Marigold was writing her book, a real book that people who could read would read … The end was the morning. I think I must have read that somewhere, Marigold thought, later the next day. But of course she couldn’t have since she couldn’t read.”
I love that Glück turns some of her last moments of writerly attention to a children’s story, that her last words return us to first words. Or better, the meta-story of children listening to stories—ones that destine us to become speakers, and maybe writers. Reading aloud is a magical exposure to words that speak to the enduring mystery of life, breath, language, sleep, and time.
In Goodnight Moon and in All the World, we end with air and the sounds that travel through them as the thread connecting us to our loved ones. The child, I think, must be consoled at sleep. Helped to believe the parent, and everything else in their room and beyond, will still be there in the morning to welcome them to a new day. The incantation of the children’s story is the rhythm of bodies and language connected to the rhythm of the day dramatized as the changes in the sky, from light to temperature to weather to seasons. To the stilling of the body after a day’s work and play.
Air is so palpably visible in the life of a child: at once written into the most indelible children’s stories, and the medium through which they’re received. How have we forgotten the air? The air is there, all around us, everywhere, and it is gathered into speaking to help the child feel the extension and continuation of all the world. It is a first intimation of time where night is the moment when the sounds stop. Air is part of the sensation of a body in space, and speaking gives meaning as the space children take on in the mind of adults who repeatedly babble with them, read, sing. This means that at one point we were so close to the air. From this vantage point, doesn’t it seem like we would have done anything to protect it? Where did this feeling go?
From On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe, to be published by Catapult in March.
Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst and the author, most recently, of Disorganization and Sex and Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis. She is also the cowriter, with Simon Critchley, Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine. She teaches at the New School for Social Research.
