That product called childhood
"I always opposed the absurd mythology of happy childhood.I don't think any boy is 'happy' as adults understand it.The boy is a lonely being that has a huge awareness of the deficiencies and helpless.That happiness is a myth of childhood that is always retrospective.Never in my life I heard a boy say 'I am happy' and, if you ever heard it is an invention of an adult.All that mythology of the Golden Age, of purity, the innocence of the lyncruptibility of the children has seemed an invention stained by the bad faith of the adult who does not dare to seriously rebuild his propagation childhood ”. María Elena Walsh agrega que la única felicidad del niño radica en el juego, desmitifica así el supuesto estado ideal de esa etapa de la vida.
Podemos preguntarnos: la infancia, ¿es la edad de la felicidad? ¿Se puede decir que es feliz quien no tiene consciencia de serlo? Felicidad implica satisfacción plena y disfrute de lo que se considera valioso.But assessing involves discerning achievements.The joy without conscience is exhausted in itself, instead conscious satisfaction transcends, it is almost what we imagine as happiness.
When childhood-paradise is exalted, it is stated from the outside of childhood.Childhood does not think of itself and no reconstruction can repeat the original.Always what is repeated is different.The memory of the first age is a simulation of that spacetime cut called childhood. Quienes asocian felicidad con niñez, ¿no sufrieron miedos nocturnos?, ¿no temían perder a sus padres?, ¿no les paralizaba la oscuridad?, ¿no les inquietaba lo desconocido?, ¿no padecieron agresión entre pares (cuando no de mayores), o violencia, o burla, o abuso, o menosprecio, o hambre, o celos o envidia?
Being an adult I read Adén Arabia, I identified myself with Paul Nizan's initial phrase and I extended it to childhood."I was twenty years old.I will not allow anyone to say that it is the most beautiful age of life ”.
Childhood did not exist until the end of the 18th century.Of course there were always girls, boys, children, but the conceptual, cultural, medicinal and legal category "childhood" is a recent invention.Before modernity, it was considered adulthood in small and asexual.The formulation that there is child sexuality, issued by Sigmund Freud, was revolutionary.Shortly before the architecture had mobilized to the rhythm of a changing imaginary: he created the "child's room".Childhood began to have a social entity, to inhabit a differentiated space in life.
Little by little science and the market will greedily reinforce the positivity-niñez.It is no longer a small adulthood.Pediatrics, kindergarten and cities dedicated to the pleasure of lesserity were established, from Disneyland in Los Angeles, to the Republic of Children in La Plata, passing through Disney Word in Orlando and its world subsidiaries. Se crearon marcas de ropa y farmacopea para los primeros años de la vida, se medicalizó el embarazo, se instituyeron derechos de las niñeces, así como espectáculos y bibliografía.The biopolytic and consumerist machinery extended its own limits.
Así como la politización de la niñez se esboza desde una genealogía histórica, su mercantilización se observa en la fagocitación marquetinera de la Navidad, por ejemplo, celebración que, si bien es planetaria, ensancha la ilusión en los primeros años de la vida.In addition, births are celebrated and colonized with Baby Showers, the party of the uteros about to be unoccupied.
Five hundred years before Christ there was Christmas history.It was a phagocyted pagan celebration, disrupted and replaced by Christianity.Coincides with the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere. Los romanos celebraban las saturnales exaltando la fecundidad.The first Christians did not associate those parties of others with the birth of Christ, since that date is unknown. Pero en el siglo IV -a pesar de que se creía que Cristo había nacido en primavera- se estableció el dogma de que Jesús había nacido justo en la festividad del solsticio de invierno (en el hemisferio norte).The celebration became popular among the last imperial Romans, associated him with his own traditions of fertility.
A long time later, Francisco de Asís, in the thirteenth century, made the first representation of the Bethlehem manger.The syncretism was reinforced and later a dad Noel or Santa Claus Morrudo, Regalón, in Sled and with an illuminated tree was integrated.Exported traditions of frost regions;Nothing to do with the torrid land that gave birth to Jesus. Pero, como quien le roba a un ladrón tiene cien años de perdón, la tradicional fiesta de Navidad hoy se celebra más allá de creencias y religiones (con excepciones), si bien persiste una constante globalizada: es una fiesta involucrada con la niñez y el mercado.Days of obscene abundance between privileges or sad deficiencies between abandoned nañes.
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"Why is being and not nothing?" Leibniz exclaims from the summits of philosophical abstraction.Ask for being and being: the philosopher is.On the other hand, when we ask ourselves about childhood or the incidence of Christmas in it, we demand from not being: we are not children, we cannot experience the childhood of others and child.Persists in the memory of those who have crossed it. Lo que para cada persona representa su niñez es como una obra pictórica plagada de pentimentos, de alteraciones o “arrepentimientos” ocultos en la elaboración de una obra.They are captured by electromagnetic waves in pictorial art, and by implacable of the non -transferable personal recallings in these "parties" in which memories, balances and some secret restlessness that throbbing. Resulta un buen momento para preguntarnos, ¿por qué -cada vez más- las personas necesitan huir de estas celebraciones y viajar o desconectarse para eludirlas? Quizás por miedo a los pentimentos -tristes o alegres, sufridos, gozados o infringidos- de la propia infancia.Or perhaps because of the unlikely but not impossible hope of finding us - as Alejandra Pizarnik yearns - with the treasure of the pirates buried in my first person of the singular.