Tar Baby, or How I fell out of the Garden

In a previous post, I called myself as a small child a "natural philosopher." That is, I believed implicitly that the world possessed an inherent, unseen order, which I could eventually discern -- or perhaps others would make it known to me. This latter possibility suggests that I was not only philosophically disposed but also predisposed to religious belief – if we take religious belief to be that which is revealed by God and handed on by those who already believe, while philosophy is an activity of the intellect, seeking out the truths of the universe, rather than expecting them to be revealed. At any rate, although still having little understanding of anything, I had an inchoate desire to be wise and to be good.

I certainly was not naturally wise or good. I was easily led by any child older or more authoritative than myself, and got into all sorts of mischief as a result. (I was so deferential to anyone older than myself that once, when I was seven, I startled a nine year old boy by calling him “sir”.) My older brother was my first leader, but he apparently did not share my inborn desire to be good; in fact, he delighted in telling me things that he knew to be false, because he knew I was so credulous as to believe him unquestioningly. He knew I would mindlessly follow any command he gave me.

Tar Baby and Brer Rabbit

Once, when I was four or five years old, a little friend and I were watching some workers patch an asphalt street with hot tar, which had a tantalizingly beautiful shiny gloss that I found almost irresistible. After the road crew moved down the street to work on the next crack in the pavement, my brother happened along with one of his little pals and saw me gazing with fascination at the glossy surface of the cooling tar. He assured me that chewing tar would give me bright, white teeth and urged me to take some before the tar hardened. My conscience pricked me, reminding me that tar is very sticky and messy – more than once I had tracked tar on the bottom of my shoe after stepping in it on a hot day – but my brother kept insisting that I should trust him on this. He could see my natural urge to touch that beautiful tar and impishly egged me on; I liked the idea of white teeth, since mine were naturally yellowish, and I knew that soon the tar would cool, harden, and lose its beautiful, glossy sheen, the surface puckering and wrinkling as it shrank in cooling. My desire to touch the tar before it dulled and wrinkled, reinforced by my brother’s commanding reassurance, overcame my conscience and experience, and I reached out to scoop up some of the beautiful tar on my fingertip.

Of course, the tar was just as experience had taught me: devilishly sticky and difficult to manipulate (also, unexpectedly hot -- I burned my fingers). I managed to get some into my mouth, but wasn’t able to chew it as if it were gum. I also manage to get tar in my hair and, when I tried to wipe it off, smeared it all over my clothes. A little friend who was with me followed my lead and got even messier, and we knew – too late – that we should not have let ourselves be persuaded to touch the tar. We also knew that we would be in trouble if our parents saw us in such a state, so we sneaked into my friend’s house to wash off before I went home. The other child’s mother found us in the bathroom, wet and soapy from head to foot, still covered in tar, as were all the towels within reach. The woman called my father to take me home and said she would never let me play with her child again, as I was obviously a bad influence. But, of course, I was not malicious, merely foolish, taken in by a beautiful appearance and a willingness to be persuaded against my better judgment when it suited me.

I imagine that Eve in Paradise experienced a similar kind of temptation. I’ve always suspected that the Serpent’s lies persuaded her because they spoke to some inchoate desire in her to taste the forbidden fruit even though she had it on good authority (indeed, the best!) that eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil would proved deadly. Perhaps that fruit was as beautifully enticing to her as the smooth, glossy surface of the tar was to me; certainly, she was more easily persuaded than I, because a talking Serpent’s testimony is certainly less credible than the assurances of one’s older brother. At any rate, like Eve, I had drawn another into my own crime and we both hid ourselves when we realized what we had done.

I may not have been thrown out of Paradise as a result of my misdemeanor, but there certainly were inevitable painful consequences for my actions. My father took me home and spent the better part of an hour trying to get the tar off me with turpentine. While the turpentine was effective in removing the tar, it also burned my skin, and the tar in my hair had to be cut out. Burning red skin and a ragged haircut were the natural punishment for my foolishness, but it remained to be seen whether my parents would impose a punishment of their own. When the ordeal was over, my parents asked me why on earth I had gotten into the tar, and I told them that I wanted to chew it because Brother had told me it would give me nice, white teeth. Realizing that my brother had deliberately duped me, they punished him instead of me.

I’ve often wondered if my brother ever regretted misleading me, but I know that my adulation of him began to wane that day. I think, though, that I felt more betrayed by the intractability of the tar than I did by the mischievous urging of my brother. I felt, somehow, that the tar should not have been so beautifully smooth and glossy if it would not allow me to take it and enjoy it. Beauty is good, and authority, rightly exercised, is good, but that day I felt betrayed by both. That day, I got my first inkling that the world is not as well-ordered as I had implicitly assumed, and for perhaps the first time I began to feel the existential dis-ease of living in a world out of kilter.

I was a natural philosopher

If a child can be born naturally religious, I was born that way. Perhaps all children are naturally religious – innately believing in a mysterious, wider and invisible, world of which we are all a part, a realm that has its own inscrutable but indubitable logic and order. This makes sense, considering that for nine months we inhabit a tiny universe of our own, which is familiar and yet not self-contained; does the child in the womb not hear (even feel, perhaps smell?) the larger world of its mother’s body, the pounding of her heart, the bellows of her lungs, the gurgle and grumble of her other organs, the rocking, rolling, and ratcheting of her sitting, standing, and lying down? And beyond that, a larger unseen universe full of noises and dimly felt sensations. Thus it seems entirely reasonable to me that the unborn child should be sensible of an unseen world of unsuspected complexity, and content that it should be so, as the child has never known anything else.

Whether the unborn infant has any sensation of God is another question, perhaps, but the very fact that there are worlds outside of worlds would seem to imply a tacit intuition that there is Someone outside of all worlds. Aristotle, when he arrived at his theory of the Prime Mover, or the Uncaused Cause, was perhaps not making any great intellectual leap forward, but simply articulating something that each person intuits from the months of his gestation. At any rate, I know that as a young child, I implicitly believed that there was a mysterious order to the universe, and that it could be observed. I didn't yet question the way things were, because I had not yet noticed any disorder. So when my brother told me that when pet turtles get out of their bowls, they always head east, I believed him without question.

Sams One, Two, and Three?

We had a series of pet turtles, always named Sam, of the sort which, in those days, before we all became aware of (and therefore afraid of) the diseases that could be transmitted by these otherwise harmless reptiles, one often saw at the back of dime stores, dozens climbing over each other in a large glass tank at the end of the aisle, priced about fifteen cents. Dime store turtles were, for my generation, what hamsters would become to children later on – an early easy-to-care-for, easy to replace “starter” pet. Usually these little turtles were about the size of a silver dollar when you brought them home, and often by the time they had grown to the size of a baseball they would crawl out of their bowls and wander through the house, under the furniture or down into the floor registers, or out the screen door when no one was looking, or they would simply die of mysterious causes. When any of these things happened, it was easy and economical to replace them, either with one of similar size (so that parent & child could pretend it was the same animal, and thus avoid the question of mortality) or with another tiny one which would, most likely, itself wander off as soon as it was big enough to scramble out of its bowl. In this way, my brother and I acquired and lost a series of turtles, all named Sam. (Much later it occurred to me to wonder if my brother, who was older and enjoyed the perquisites of seniority, had named them Sam because he had overheard adult discussions in which the terms “turtles” and “salmonella” were associated.)

Sams One, Two, and Three each managed to scramble out of the bowl in which they lived, with a little tap water to swim in and perhaps a stick or some marbles to sit on when they felt like it, and get lost amongst the furniture legs and floor rugs. My brother confidently told me that turtles, when they get out of their bowls always headed east, and I never questioned this truth. We would ask some adult in the household which way was east and then work our way in that direction through the various rooms, calling for Sam. If that did not discover a turtle, we would head down the back steps and into the yard, and continue our search eastward, until we were forced to conclude that the turtle had had too much of a head start and its instinctual pull eastward had overcome the comfortable but limiting appointments of the turtle bowl. My brother would head indoors to begin campaigning for the purchase of the next Sam, and I would retire to the cool recesses of the nandina bush in the back yard to meditate on the mysteries of turtle instinct.

My private thinkatorium

Plato had his grove and I, at age three or four, had my nandina bush, which stood in the center of our back yard and had a secret, hollow center, the canes of the bush towering three or four feet high around an interior space of smooth, cool dirt, as silky as talcum powder, which served as my palace of meditation, my own private “thinkatorium.” There I would sit for hours on end, idly moving the silky soil about with an old spoon and meditating on the mysteries of turtles, lady bugs, and other creatures that preferred to leave houses whenever they could and venture on their own. That my brother was right in asserting that turtles head east I never doubted. His authority went unquestioned; he was older and, therefore, wiser and he spoke with great conviction. Only many years later did I wonder whether he truly believed what he said (perhaps my father had jokingly assured him of this “truth”) or if he had improvised this announcement, knowing that I was his adoring disciple and would believe whatever he told me. Yet, once the truth had been taught me, my brother lost interest in it, whereas my interest was just beginning. Into the nandina bush I would crawl, and there in the cool shade, sitting cross-legged in the dust like some Hindu sage, I would reflect on the aptness of his insight.

Why would turtles go east? I asked myself. Perhaps it was just where they felt drawn, toward the rising of the sun. Perhaps they smelled water – just a block or two down the street there was a drainage ditch or a domesticated creek and, a mile or two further east, the Red River. I imagined the Sams, and other escapees, toiling relentlessly on their tiny legs for days, at night finding a cool nook under some rock or behind a garbage can where they could safely tuck their legs and heads into their shells for the night and, then, when the first golden rays of dawn broke the darkness, resume their trek eastward until they could quietly and wearily slide, or perhaps with glee and renewed vigor leap, into the gently flowing waters of the river, where so many other turtles already enjoyed a life free of confinement. Turtles, I understood, knew where they belonged and they naturally sought out that place.

Turtles have their rivers, birds have their nests, and I had my home with my parents, grandmother,  brothers. Only once did I try to light out on my own – perhaps in a fit of pique after a parental “no” – but got no farther than the curb on the opposite side of the street from our house before I sat down and wailed in misery at being cut off from my home, a haven of security. Later, this sense of security would begin to slip, and I would envy the turtles their sense of direction, their instinct for where they belonged. At age three or four, however, I sensed that all was right with the world, and I had no doubts about the order of the universe.