Miyax stared hard at the regal black wolf, hoping to catch his eye. She must somehow tell him that she was starving and ask him for food …
She had been watching the wolves for two days, trying to discern which of their sounds and movements expressed goodwill and friendship ... If she could discover such a gesture … she would be able to make friends with them and share their food … “Amaroq, ilaja, wolf, my friend,” she finally called. “Look at me. Look at me.”
She spoke half in Eskimo and half in English, as if the instincts of her father and the science of the gus-saks, the white-faced, might evoke some magical combination that would help her get her message through to the wolf.
The science of the gussaks and the instincts of her Eskimo father do conspire within Julie; she succeeds in communicating her hunger to the wolves, and they bring her caribou meat.
From Little Red Riding Hood to Julie covers a great interior distance: from being eaten by a wolf to being fed by one.
From inside a wolf mask to inside a wolf’s head. The distance is not only great but also deep. Under the wolf mask you might feel close to the wolf, but from these stories, you can feel intimate with him.
Children who have the great good fortune to read, or be read, the books in which these wolf stories are told can know more and fear less than those who sit in the assembly of the tribal elder who has donned the totem mask of the wolf. Books allow us to know the wolf’s fierceness and tenacity, yes, but we can also know his loyalty. We can know his pride as leader of the pack, but we can also know his nobility in defeat. We can know more and can imagine more.
When the masks are books, we can pass down to future generations not only the fearsome magic of a single shaman in a totem mask but the richer magic of many. We can pass down a whole trunkful of wolf masks, and we can have them ready in sizes to fit all ages. We can let our children and our grandchildren know the wolf of the many writers who have donned his mask.
New Orleans is not the only city famous for its carnival. Rio and Venice are famous, too. All three of these cities share an exotic geography—one that is intimate with water—and each has its particular traditions, but whether the festival celebrates Fat Tuesday as it does in New Orleans and Rio or whether it celebrates the Ascension as it does in Venice, all of them celebrate with masks. The festival in Venice is the oldest of the three, and at the time of the Renaissance, when a nobleman pinned a mask to his lapel, it was a reminder to others that he was traveling incognito.
Does making an announcement that you are traveling incognito seem a contradiction of terms? Batman and the Lone Ranger always did; Romeo wore a mask to the house of the Capulets. Movie stars used to wear dark glasses to indicate that they were traveling incognito. Nowadays, even though sunglasses have become a fashion statement, they still function as a mask of incognito for those of us who are less than celebrity but have run out to the grocery store without makeup—another one of our everyday masks.
Sometimes the choice to travel incognito is not ours to make.
Saturday, 20 June, 1942
I haven’t written for a few days, because I wanted first of all to think about my diary. It’s an odd idea for someone like me to keep a diary; not only because I have never done so before, but because it seems to me that neither I—nor for that matter anyone else-will be interested in the unbosomings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl …
... I [was born] on June 12, 1929, and, as we are Jewish, we emigrated to Holland in 1933 …
After May 1940 good times rapidly fled: first the war, then the capitulation, followed by the arrival of the Germans, which was when the sufferings of us Jews really began. Anti-Jewish decrees followed each other in quick succession. Jews must wear a yellow star …
Wednesday, 8 July, 1942
Dear Kitty,
Years seem to have passed between Sunday and now. So much has happened, it is just as if the whole world had turned upside down … Margot told me that the call-up was … for her. I was more frightened than ever and began to cry. Margot is sixteen; would they really take girls of that age away alone? But thank goodness she won’t go, Mummy said so herself; that must be what Daddy meant when he talked about us going into hiding …
Thursday, 9 July, 1942
Dear Kitty,
So we walked in the pouring rain, Daddy, Mummy, and I, each with a school satchel and shopping bag filled to the brim with all kinds of things thrown together anyhow.
We got sympathetic looks from people on their way to work. You could see by their faces how sorry they were they couldn’t offer us a lift; the gaudy yellow star spoke for itself.
The gaudy yellow star was a badge that rendered Anne Frank, her mother, and her father incognito to the point of being nonpeople. They became invisible. And when they lost their mask of invisibility, Anne Frank, her mother, and her sister Margot lost their lives.
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl was not published as a children’s book, but children have adopted it. As they read it, they learn not only what it feels like to be incognito but also what it is like to have a long, penetrating look at your inner self because your outer self has been rendered invisible. It is one of those books that youngsters in the fifth and sixth grades reread and re-reread and do so each time with anticipation and discovery.
Saturday, 15 July, 1944
… It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart …
The diary of Anne Frank is an introspective book, and those fifth-and sixth-graders who read it over and over are introspective readers. It has been my experience that children reread books they love up until they enter the seventh grade. I think there are several reasons why this is so. One reason, of course, is that the assigned reading load becomes heavier in the seventh grade, but there is another, more poetic reason why this is so, and in order to explore it, I must tell you about the Bapendes tribe of the Congo.
Before a Bapendes youth can be proclaimed a man, he undergoes a long ordeal—the details of which I do not know—after which he appears to the elders of the tribe wearing a mask representing the ghost of his childhood. I know of only one other elaboration of the ritual of the Bapendes, but I would like to talk about that a little later.
Right now, I want to think about a mask that represents the ghost of one’s childhood.
Would you please take a minute to think about making such a mask?
Don’t try for a photographic representation of yourself as a child, but try to design a mask of the ghost of your childhood. There is a lot to be decided. What materials will you use? Will your mask be clay or wood or papier mâché? Will the mask of your childhood be pastel or bright? Is it smiling? Is it fat and full or thin and skimpy? Is it knit of yarn of many colors? Is it cast in stone?
This is not an easy assignment. Think about it, please.
Close your eyes if it helps and promise not to cry.
Do you have an image?
Is the mask of the ghost of your childhood still unfinished? We have probably all built the mask of the ghost of our childhood on an armature made from a branch of some family tree, and we have stretched the material of family life over that frame. There are probably holes and patches—quarrels and reconciliations—in everyone’s fabric, but I’m willing to bet that every mask is covered with a lacy web of dreams. Dreams of what we will see. Dreams of what we will be. Dreams that must remain on the mask of the ghost of your childhood to help define it. The web of dreams may not be the skeleton of your mask, but doesn’t that web hold it together? And make it your very own?
Is there a silvery thread in that web of dreams where you were a knight in shining armor? Is there a sturdy woolen skein where you had a nanny and lived in a proper English household? Did you talk to animals? Were you kidnapped? Were you an orphan growing up in India? Or England? Colonial America? Did you ride an elephant?
A river boat? A covered wagon? Did you fly? Did you travel through time? What are the threads of dreams that cover the mask of the ghost of your childhood?
Those readers who are rereading Anne Frank’s diary and whose letters tell me that they have reread books of mine are, I believe, gathering materials for their masks. These readers are not sure what materials they need or how much they need, and as they add to and take away, they reread those books that they can mine for raw materials. The responsibility is awesome.
I am convinced that the rereading stops when the material gathering stops and that is the time when the young man or the young woman is asked at last to construct the mask of the ghost of his childhood, and nowadays, that is often at the end of the sixth grade, when the child is twelve.
Being twelve is special. It is the end of childhood, it is the April of our years. April is the cruelest month, and twelve is the cruelest age. It is a watershed in one’s emotional development. A wise librarian once told me that if Booth Tarkington were to write Seventeen today, he would have to call it Twelve. I think that when I was growing up, he would have called it Fourteen, and four hundred years ago it would have been Nineteen. I didn’t pick the number nineteen out of the air.
Recently, I was listening to a radio interview with a director of Renaissance choral music. When asked why he had included female voices even though no women’s parts were included at the time the music had been written, the choral director replied that it was necessary to use female voices to achieve the full range of the music. He elaborated by saying that he cannot start training until the age of nine or ten and then, by the age of thirteen, male voices begin to change. Whereas, years ago, when Renaissance music was being written, male voices changed much, much later—sometimes as late as nineteen.
Nowadays, like it or not, twelve seems to be the age at which children carve their masks. It is the age at which the peer group begins to pull—and pull strongly. If that mask is not deeply carved, if it is not made of good material, if it does not have its own contouring veil of dreams, if it is set out and allowed to be painted on or rubbed smooth by peers, it can never, never be really and truly one’s own.
Those of us who write for children must give them a variety of masks to try on, and we must write rich and deep so that they can choose what materials they want for the body of that mask. And we must provide threads of many colors to let them weave the web of fantasies to lay over its surface.
We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and writers have a great responsibility to provide the raw stuff of those dreams. Writers—unlike producers of television shows or movies-can provide the one ingredient that I offered before when inviting readers to try on wolf masks. And that is intimacy. Intimacy—that degree of privacy that is plural but not public—is the place where we can try on an eccentric mask and, wearing it, pose this way and that. It is the place where we can unselfconsciously shape a dream to make it fit and where we can reject those masks we don’t like, for the weaver need never know that we have even tried it on.
Tuesday, 4 April, 1944
Dear Kitty,
... I want to go on living even after my death! And therefore I am grateful to God for giving me this gift, this possibility of developing myself and of writing, of expressing all that is in me …
I wish I could tell Anne Frank that she has gone on living. She has helped many children shape the masks of the ghosts of their childhoods.
Masks can reveal; they can conceal; but they all exaggerate. And therein lies some of the truths they tell.
Several years ago I wrote a book called Up From Jericho Tel. Jeanmarie begins telling her story as follows:
There was a time when I was eleven years old— between the start of a new school year and Midwinter’s Night—when I was invisible. I was never invisible for long, and I always returned to plain sight, but all my life has been affected by the people I met and the time I spent in a world where I could see and not be seen.
Being invisible is, of course, the most exaggerated mask of incognito. Jeanmarie’s invisible life begins when she falls into Jericho Tel and meets Tallulah, the ghost of a famous actress, who sits on an enormous sofa piled high with pastel-colored pillows, and who, as Jeanmarie says, “told wonderful stories about the theater, and [who] always had something funny to say.”
Jeanmarie wrote down many of the things Tallulah said. At the beginning of chapter 16, this appears:
Tallulah says, “If you want to learn the difference between accuracy and truth, look at a photograph of Gertrude Stein and then look at Pablo Picasso’s portrait of her.”
According to The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, here is a description of how Picasso came to paint that famous portrait.
[Gertrude] took her pose, Picasso sat very tight in his chair and very close to his canvas … and the painting began … All of a sudden Picasso painted out the whole head. I can’t see you any more when I look, he said irritably, and so the picture was left like that.
Some months later he … returned to the faceless portrait and imposed the intense, discordant mask without looking at the sitter. The face clashes against the body to create the picture’s grip. This ritual mask has now taken the place of all camera likenesses as our idea of Gertrude Stein.
Picasso said, “We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.”
Tallulah and Alice B. Toklas would say that the mask delivers a truth that the camera cannot.
There is a point beyond which accuracy does not matter.
My college education and my first work experience were in the world of science, and it was there that I learned the language of millimeters. It is in the world of science that accuracy is most prized, but even in science there are limits. There is, for example, the case of pi. Pi is the constant made famous in sixth grade when we learned that the formula for finding the area of a circle is πr2. Pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. We first knew pi informally as three and one-seventh, and later we got to know it as 3.14159, which we were allowed to round off to 3.1416. At the end of the nineteenth century, an obscure British mathematician named William Shanks—when both calculators and anabolic steroids were unknown—spent twenty years working out pi to 707 decimal places—only to fumble after 527. The 528th decimal place of pi is 4, but Shanks called it 5, and from there on all his digits were wrong. But here’s the thing of it: for more than seventy years no one knew that the 528th decimal place of pi is 4 and not 5, and for all those years no one cared.
In 1973, as computers became faster and more sophisticated, a French mathematician calculated a million decimal places. The French, being very proud of this accomplishment, published the million decimal places of pi as a four-hundred-page book. It has never made the New York Times best-seller list. By 1988, the Japanese extended that million decimal places to 201 million, and in 1989, David and Gregory Chudnovsky of MIT calculated pi to 480 million decimal places, and a few years later, they made it a billion.
Even the brothers Chudnovsky would probably admit that a billion decimal places of pi don’t say too much more than good old 3.1416 did. There is a point beyond which accuracy may have rhythm but no meaning.
The business of accuracy and truth is a tricky one. If you want to see something that is accurate but not true, I would once again recommend Williamsburg, Virginia. There everything is accurately reconstructed down to the last quarter inch. Everything is tied down, wrapped up, a neatly packaged, pretty good imitation of the truth. But that which is exaggerated often tells a greater truth.
The masks, the painted faces, the costumes, the exaggerations of Mardi Gras showed a truth just as the masks, the painted faces, and the costumes do in the theater. In ancient Greek theater, when a player wanted to take on several roles, he would put on a different mask for each role. So that the audience sitting in the back rows would not mistake who was talking, the features of the masks were exaggerated. Even today, in live theater, actors apply makeu
p that is so heavy it is called greasepaint. And when a civilian appears in makeup that is heavily applied, we call such exaggerated makeup theatrical.
It is the role of masks to exaggerate. Who’s to say which is the real Tammy Faye Bakker: the face? or the mask?
As any good humorist will tell you, there is truth in exaggeration.
It has been said that the difference between English and American humor is that the English make the ordinary seem extraordinary, and the Americans make the extraordinary seem ordinary. Both imply exaggeration.
Take this example by a quintessential American humorist, Mark Twain. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is about to set out in search of adventure:
I was to have an early breakfast, and start at dawn, for that was the usual way; … my armor … delayed me a little. It is troublesome to get into, and there is so much detail. First you wrap a layer or two of blanket around your body, for a sort of cushion … then you put on your sleeves and shirt of chain mail … very heavy … then … your shoes—flat-boats roofed over with interleaving bands of steel—and screw your … spurs into the heels. Next you buckle your greaves on your legs, and your cuisses on your thighs; then come your back-plate and your breast-plate … then you hitch onto the breast-plate the half-petticoat of broad overlapping bands of steel which hangs down in front but is scolloped out behind so you can sit down … next you belt on your sword; then you put your stove-pipe joints onto your arms, your iron gauntlets onto your hands, your iron rat-trap onto your head … and there you are …
Just as we finished ... I saw that as like as not I hadn’t chosen the most convenient outfit for a long trip …