{"id":169743,"date":"2025-02-06T12:23:46","date_gmt":"2025-02-06T17:23:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=169743"},"modified":"2025-03-11T18:04:38","modified_gmt":"2025-03-11T22:04:38","slug":"room-moon-moon-balloon-reading-and-breathing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2025\/02\/06\/room-moon-moon-balloon-reading-and-breathing\/","title":{"rendered":"Room, Moon, Moon, Balloon: Reading and Breathing"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Berthe Morisot, Le berceau<\/em> (detail), 1872, via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>. Public domain.<\/p><\/div>\n

I have read Goodnight Moon<\/em> 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\u2019s 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<\/em> profile notes her tendency toward extremes going all the way back. \u201cShe was a tomboy with a terrible temper \u2026 When Brown became angry she sometimes held her breath until she turned blue, prompting a nanny to plunge her head into a tub of ice-cold water.\u201d Brown\u2019s fantastical, wild, and brief life befits the Modernist poetics of her writing, hidden in the simplest of stories. She changed children\u2019s literature, and, like a good psychoanalyst, she claims she was mere \u201ceye and ear\u201d for the children who were the real writers of her stories.<\/p>\n

\u201cGoodnight room, goodnight moon. Goodnight cow jumping over the moon. Goodnight light and the red balloon. Goodnight cow jumping over the moon.\u201d At face value, a simple set of rhymes and repetitions: room, moon, moon, balloon<\/em>, and night, night, night, light, night<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2014a version of goodbye\u2014when 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. <\/p>\n

The book first lists what there is in the bunny\u2019s 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 \u201csocks,\u201d 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\u2019s time will come. In time, everything can be counted.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s writing that attended to \u201cthe here and now\u201d of life rather than fantastical fairy tales. Children find the everyday world magical. They don\u2019t need more magic than that. Brown brought her love of language and avant-garde sensibilities to the task of writing children\u2019s stories. She says she loves the Oedipal child right before repression sets in. The\u00a0New Yorker<\/em> profile quotes words from her notebook: \u201cAt five we reach a point not to be achieved again\u201d while noting that she else-where claimed that children of this age enjoy a \u201ckeenness and awareness\u201d that will likely become dampened by life.<\/p>\n

Above all I love her love of children\u2019s language to the extent of dare\u2014try 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. \u201cGoodnight comb, goodnight brush. Goodnight nobody, goodnight mush.\u201d It\u2019s still a revelation to read this page where nobody and mush appear and stand firm\u2014worth 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: \u201cGoodnight to the old lady whispering hush. Goodnight stars, goodnight air. Goodnight noises everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

We have the final appearance of the only other person next to the little rabbit going to sleep\u2014the old lady and her strange whispers of hush, maybe gentle, maybe harsh. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s books reference air, speech, noise, sound. Of course, these books\u2014themselves always read aloud\u2014are 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.<\/p>\n

When my daughter is finally left in her crib alone, either at naptime or at night, she speaks and sings. \u201cCrib speech,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

I listen to her follow her mind from the pop of the caterpillar from its egg in the beginning of The Hungry Caterpillar<\/em>, 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\u2019t know, and these distortions find their way back when we sing it the next day. \u201cNow I know my ABCs, Mama mama mama me.\u201d Language is the place we find ourselves together and then separate.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s phonetic neologisms, like his substitution of benge<\/em> for beige<\/em>; he said it with such gusto, like Stone Benge. I asked everyone around him to leave it be. He later figured out it wasn\u2019t the right word and was furious with me. A mother shouldn\u2019t willfully tamper with the symbolic \u2026 I suppose.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cBesides, they fail to even differentiate what they think they are indicating!\u201d I yelled. Like the word red and a picture of a red apple. How am I supposed to know you don\u2019t mean apple? Don\u2019t we learn about language so much better with Margaret Wise Brown, with her gentle free play of associations, than with these didactic monstrosities?<\/p>\n

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\u2019s books. Apparently, the year was spent refining what was, at first, a furiously scribbled draft on an envelope or napkin.<\/p>\n

In All the World<\/em>, 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\u2014or listener\u2014a glimpse of a vast world that vanishes in sleep. Of course the \u201call\u201d 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 \u201call,\u201d then, is in fact the \u201call\u201d of language which we can\u2019t see in its totality, but that we take in all at once, and without consent\u2014which 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 \u201call.\u201d<\/p>\n

In All the World<\/em>, as the day becomes noon, a storm comes in. \u201cNest, bird, feather, fly. All the world has got its sky.\u201d We see the air and clouds rushing in, birds taking flight on a torrent of wind. It starts the rain: \u201cSlip, trip, stumble, fall. Tip the bucket, spill it all. Better luck another day. All the world goes round this way.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cSpreading shadows, setting sun. Crickets, curtains, day is done. A fire takes away the chill. All the world can hold quite still.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

But not yet! The home erupts with people and sounds. \u201cNanas, 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.\u201d It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The rhythm of the book is foretold by the \u201call\u201d that must be evoked and navigated, from the world and weather to the feelings and smells and sounds at home. This \u201call\u201d emerges as a kind of joyous human uproar before the ending of the book, which sounds its only false note: \u201cHope and peace and love and trust. All the world is all of us.\u201d If we must, we must.<\/p>\n

I thought of these books, the way they interpolate their readers and listeners into the atmosphere of language, while reading Louise Gl\u00fcck\u2019s Marigold and Rose<\/em>, the last book she published during her lifetime\u2014her last word. This short fictional work is about her baby twin granddaughters, reading more like a children\u2019s story than adult fiction. The twins think about stories and memories and memories of stories they\u2019ve heard. \u201cShe 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.\u201d But there was a sticking point\u2014upon. They didn\u2019t know what it meant, and it only seemed to be used when reading stories.<\/p>\n

\u201cUp, 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\u2019s bed),\u201d writes Gl\u00fcck. But the twins still can\u2019t get a grip on this word. Once<\/em> felt better because Marigold heard the one<\/em> in it, which always began the counting lessons. \u201cAnd time was the difference between waking up and going to sleep \u2026 Once must mean that time doesn\u2019t happen again.\u201d Like when you fall, you only fall and hurt yourself once in that one way.<\/p>\n

Marigold decides she wants to write a book and settles for once time<\/em> as the way to start, leaving out the confusing upon<\/em>. \u201cShe 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 \u2026 When the book is ready to talk it will talk. Like us, Marigold thought.\u201d Once time<\/em> is like long, long ago<\/em>. And the twins were beginning to remember things even though there wasn\u2019t much behind them.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s a lot! Marigold wants to learn to remember before she must<\/em> remember\u2014this is what gives her the idea of writing a book. \u201cBut 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the end of Gl\u00fcck\u2019s 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<\/em>, trying to make it real. And then once time<\/em>, as if this could change the ending. But everyone was sleeping. Later, \u201cdeep, deep in the night,\u201d Rose awakens to see Marigold sleeping. She thinks to herself how she must be having a wonderful dream about her book: \u201cIn the dream, Marigold was writing her book, a real book that people who could read would read \u2026 The end was the morning. I think I must have read that somewhere, Marigold thought, later the next day. But of course she couldn\u2019t have since she couldn\u2019t read.\u201d<\/p>\n

I love that Gl\u00fcck turns some of her last moments of writerly attention to a children\u2019s story, that her last words return us to first words. Or better, the meta-story of children listening to stories\u2014ones 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.<\/p>\n

In Goodnight Moon<\/em> and in All the World<\/em>, 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\u2019s 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\u2019s work and play.<\/p>\n

Air is so palpably visible in the life of a child: at once written into the most indelible children\u2019s stories, and the medium through which they\u2019re 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\u2019t it seem like we would have done anything to protect it? Where did this feeling go?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

From<\/em> On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe<\/a>, to be published by Catapult in March.<\/em><\/p>\n

Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst and the author, most recently, of <\/em>Disorganization and Sex\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis. She is also the cowriter, with Simon Critchley, <\/em>Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine. She teaches at the New School for Social Research.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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