The development of a territory by a child can be seen as a process of establishing contact with it. In fact, this is a kind of dialogue in which two sides participate — the child and the landscape. Each side reveals itself in this communion; the landscape is revealed to the child through the diversity of its elements and properties (landscape, natural and man-made objects located there, vegetation, living creatures, etc.), and the child manifests itself in the diversity of his mental activity (observation, inventive thinking, fantasizing, emotional experience) . It is the mental development and activity of the child that determines the nature of his spiritual response to the landscape and the forms of interaction with it that the child invents.
The word «landscape» is used in this book for the first time. It is of German origin: «land» — land, and «schaf» comes from the verb «schaffen» — to create, to create. We will use the term «landscape» to refer to the soil in unity with everything that is created on it by the forces of nature and man. In accordance with our definition, “landscape” is a concept that is more capacious, more loaded with content than a fresh flat “territory”, the main characteristic of which is the size of its area. The “landscape” is saturated with the events of the natural and social world materialized in it, it is created and objective. It has a variety that stimulates cognitive activity, it is possible to establish business and intimate personal relationships with it. How the child does this is the subject of this chapter.
When children of five or six years old are walking alone, they usually tend to stay within a small familiar space and interact more with individual objects that are of interest to them: with a slide, swing, fence, puddle, etc. Another thing is when there are two children or more. As we discussed in Chapter 5, association with peers makes the child much more courageous, gives him a sense of additional strength of the collective «I» and greater social justification for his actions.
Therefore, having gathered in a group, children in communication with the landscape move to a level of interaction of a higher order than alone — they begin a purposeful and fully conscious development of the landscape. They immediately begin to be drawn to places and spaces that are completely alien — «terrible» and forbidden, where they usually do not go without friends.
“As a child, I lived in a southern city. Our street was wide, with two-way traffic and a lawn separating the sidewalk from the roadway. We were five or six years old, and our parents allowed us to ride children’s bicycles and walk along the sidewalk along our house and next door, from the corner to the store and back. It was strictly forbidden to turn around the corner of the house and around the corner of the store.
Parallel to our street behind our houses was another — narrow, quiet, very shady. For some reason, parents never took their children there. There is a Baptist prayer house, but then we did not understand what it was. Because of the dense tall trees, there has never been sun there — like in a dense forest. From the tram stop, the silent figures of old women dressed in black were moving towards the mysterious house. They always had some kind of wallets in their hands. Later we went there to listen to them sing, and at the age of five or six it just seemed to us that this shady street was a strange, disturbingly dangerous, forbidden place. Therefore, it is attractive.
We sometimes put one of the children on patrol on the corner so that they would create the illusion of our presence for the parents. And they themselves quickly ran around our block along that dangerous street and returned from the side of the store. Why did they do it? It was interesting, we overcame fear, we felt like pioneers of a new world. They always did it only together, I never went there alone.
So, the development of the landscape by children begins with group trips, in which two trends can be seen. First, the active desire of children to contact with the unknown and terrible when they feel the support of a peer group. Secondly, the manifestation of spatial expansion — the desire to expand your world by adding new «developed lands».
At first, such trips give, first of all, the sharpness of emotions, contact with the unknown, then the children move on to examining dangerous places, and then, and rather quickly, to their use. If we translate the psychological content of these actions into scientific language, then they can be defined as three successive phases of the child’s communication with the landscape: first — contact (feeling, tuning), then — indicative (gathering information), then — the phase of active interaction.
What at first caused reverent awe gradually becomes habitual and thereby decreases, sometimes moving from the category of sacred (mysteriously sacred) to the category of profane (mundane everyday). In many cases, this is right and good — when it comes to those places and spatial zones where the child will often have to visit now or later and be active: visit the restroom, take out the trash, go to the store, go down to the cellar, get water from the well, go swimming on their own, etc. Yes, a person should not be afraid of these places, be able to behave there correctly and in a businesslike way, doing what he came for. But there is also a flip side to this. The feeling of familiarity, familiarity of the place dulls vigilance, reduces attention and caution. At the heart of such carelessness is insufficient respect for the place, a decrease in its symbolic value, which, in turn, leads to a decrease in the level of mental regulation of the child and a lack of self-control. On the physical plane, this is manifested in the fact that in a well-mastered place the child manages to get hurt, fall somewhere, hurt himself. And on the social — leads to getting into conflict situations, to the loss of money or valuable items. One of the most common examples: a sour cream jar with which the child was sent to the store falls out of his hands and breaks, and he had already stood in line, but chatted with a friend, they started messing around and … as adults would say, they forgot where they were.
The problem of respect for the place also has a spiritual and value plan. Disrespect leads to a decrease in the value of the place, a reduction of the high to the low, a flattening of meaning — that is, to the debunking, desacralization of the place.
Usually, people tend to consider a place more developed, the more they can afford to act there from themselves — to manage the resources of the place in a businesslike way and leave traces of their actions, imprinting themselves there. Thus, in communicating with the place, a person strengthens his own influence, thereby symbolically entering into a struggle with the “forces of the place”, which in ancient times were personified in a deity called “genius loci” — the genius of the place.
In order to be in harmony with the «forces of the place», a person must be able to understand and take them into account — then they will help him. A person comes to such harmony gradually, in the process of spiritual and personal growth, as well as as a result of purposeful education of a culture of communication with the landscape.
The dramatic nature of a person’s relationship with the genius loci is often rooted in a primitive desire for self-affirmation in spite of the circumstances of the place and due to the person’s internal inferiority complex. In a destructive form, these problems often manifest themselves in the behavior of adolescents, for whom it is extremely important to assert their «I». Therefore, they try to show off in front of their peers, demonstrating their strength and independence through disregard for the place where they are. For example, having deliberately come to a “terrible place” known for its notoriety — an abandoned house, the ruins of a church, a cemetery, etc. — they begin to shout loudly, throw stones, tear something off, spoil, make a fire, i.e. behave in every way, showing their power over what, as it seems to them, cannot resist. However, it is not. Since adolescents, possessed by pride of self-affirmation, lose elementary control over the situation, it sometimes takes revenge immediately on the physical plane. A real example: after receiving certificates of graduation from school, a gang of excited boys passed by a cemetery. We decided to go there and, boasting to each other, began to climb on the grave monuments — who is higher. A large old marble cross fell on the boy and crushed him to death.
It is not for nothing that the situation of disrespect for the “scary place” is the beginning of the plot of many horror films, when, for example, a cheerful company of boys and girls specially comes to a picnic in an abandoned house in the forest, known as a “haunted place”. Young people laugh disparagingly at the «tales», settle in this house for their own pleasures, but soon find that they laughed in vain, and most of them no longer return home alive.
Interestingly, younger children take into account the meaning of «place forces» to a greater extent than presumptuous teenagers. On the one hand, they are kept from many potential conflicts with these forces by fears that inspire respect for the place. But on the other hand, as our interviews with children and their stories show, it seems that younger children objectively have more psychological connections with the place, since they settle in it not only in actions, but also in various fantasies. In these fantasies, children are inclined not to humiliate, but, on the contrary, to elevate the place, endowing it with wonderful qualities, seeing in it something that is completely impossible to discern with the critical eye of an adult realist. This is one of the reasons why children can enjoy playing and loving rubbish, from the point of view of an adult, places where there is nothing interesting at all.
In addition, of course, the point of view from which a child looks at everything is objectively different from an adult. The child is small in stature, so he sees everything from a different angle. He has a different logic of thinking than that of an adult, which is called transduction in scientific psychology: this is the movement of thought from the particular to the particular, and not according to the generic hierarchy of concepts. The child has his own scale of values. Completely different than for an adult, the properties of things arouse practical interest in him.
Let us consider the features of the child’s position in relation to individual elements of the landscape using living examples.
The girl says:
“In the pioneer camp, we went to one abandoned building. It was rather not scary, but a very interesting place. The house was wooden, with an attic. The floor and stairs creaked a lot, and we felt like pirates on a ship. We played there — examined this house.
The girl describes a typical activity for children after six or seven years of age: «exploring» a place, combined with a simultaneously unfolding game from the category of those called «adventure games.» In such games, two main partners interact — a group of children and a landscape that reveals its secret possibilities to them. The place, which somehow attracted children, prompts them with story games, thanks to the fact that it is rich in details that awaken the imagination. Therefore, «adventure games» are very localized. A real game of pirates is impossible without this empty house, which they boarded, where the creaking of steps, the feeling of an uninhabited, but saturated with silent life, multi-storey space with many strange rooms, etc. causes so much emotion.
Unlike the games of younger preschoolers, who play out their fantasies more in “pretend” situations with substitute objects symbolically denoting imaginary content, in “adventure games” the child is completely immersed in the atmosphere of real space. He literally lives it with his body and soul, creatively responds to it, populating this place with images of his fantasies and giving it his own meaning,
This happens sometimes with adults. For example, a man with a flashlight went to the basement for repair work, examines it, but suddenly catches himself thinking that while he is wandering among that, i.e., along a long basement, he is more and more involuntarily immersed in an imaginary boyish game, as if he he, but a scout sent on a mission … or a terrorist about to …, or a persecuted fugitive looking for a secret hiding place, or …
The number of generated images will depend on the mobility of a person’s creative imagination, and his choice of specific roles will tell the psychologist a lot about the personal characteristics and problems of this subject. One thing can be said — nothing childish is alien to an adult.
Usually, around every place that is more or less attractive to children, they have created many collective and individual fantasies. If children lack the diversity of the environment, then with the help of such creative fantasizing they “finish” the place, bringing their attitude towards it to the required level of interest, respect, and fear.
“In the summer we lived in the village of Vyritsa near St. Petersburg. Not far from our dacha was the house of a woman. Among the children of our alley there was a story about how this woman invited the children to her place for tea and the children disappeared. They also talked about a little girl who saw their bones in her house. Once I was passing by the house of this woman, and she called me to her place and wanted to treat me. I was terribly frightened, ran away to our house and hid behind the gate, calling my mother. I was then five years old. But in general, the house of this woman was literally a place of pilgrimage for local children. I also joined them. Everyone was terribly interested in what was there and whether what the children were saying was true. Some openly declared that all this was a lie, but no one approached the house alone. It was a kind of game: everyone was attracted to the house like a magnet, but they were afraid to approach it. Basically they ran up to the gate, threw something into the garden and immediately ran away.
There are places that children know like the back of their hand, settle down and use them as masters. But some places, according to the ideas of children, should be inviolable and retain their own charm and mystery. Children protect them from profanity and visit relatively rarely. Coming to such a place should be an event. People go there to feel the special states that differ from everyday experiences, to get in touch with the mystery and to feel the presence of the spirit of the place. There, children try not to touch anything unnecessarily, not to change, not to do anything.
“Where we lived in the country, there was a cave at the end of the old park. She was under a cliff of dense reddish sand. You had to know how to get there, and it was difficult to get through. Inside the cave, a small stream with the purest water flowed from a small dark hole in the depths of the sandy rock. The murmur of the water was barely audible, bright reflections fell on the reddish vault, it was cool.
The children said that the Decembrists were hiding in the cave (it was not far from the Ryleev estate), and later partisans made their way through the narrow passage during the Patriotic War to go many kilometers away in another village. We didn’t usually talk there. Either they were silent, or they exchanged separate remarks. Everyone imagined their own, stood in silence. The maximum that we allowed ourselves was to jump back and forth once across a wide flat stream to a small island near the cave wall. This was proof of our adulthood (7-8 years). The little ones couldn’t. It would never have occurred to anyone to squirm a lot in this stream, or dig sand at the bottom, or do something else, as we did on the river, for example. We only touched the water with our hands, drank it, moistened our face and left.
It seemed to us a terrible sacrilege that the teenagers from the summer camp, which was located next door, scraped their names on the walls of the cave.
By the turn of their mind, children have a natural predisposition to naive paganism in their relationship with nature and the surrounding objective world. They perceive the world around as an independent partner who can rejoice, be offended, help or take revenge on a person. Accordingly, children are prone to magical actions in order to arrange the place or object with which they interact in their favor. Let’s say, run at a special speed along a certain path so that everything goes well, talk to a tree, stand on your favorite stone in order to express your affection to him and get his help, etc.
By the way, almost all modern urban children know the folkloric nicknames addressed to the ladybug, so that she flew to the sky, where the children are waiting for her, to the snail, so that she sticks out her horns, to the rain, so that it stops. Often children invent their own spells and rituals to help in difficult situations. We will meet some of them later. It is interesting that this childish paganism lives in the souls of many adults, contrary to the usual rationalism, suddenly waking up at difficult moments (unless, of course, they pray to God). Conscious observation of how this happens is much less common in adults than in children, which makes the following testimony of a forty-year-old woman especially valuable:
“That summer at the dacha I managed to go to the lake to swim only in the evening, when twilight was already setting in. And it was necessary to walk for half an hour through the forest in the lowland, where the darkness thickened faster. And when I began to walk like this in the evenings through the forest, for the first time I began to very realistically feel the independent life of these trees, their characters, their strength — a whole community, like people, and everyone is different. And I realized that with my bathing accessories, on my private business, I invade their world at the wrong time, because at this hour people no longer go there, disrupt their lives, and they may not like it. The wind often blew before dark, and all the trees moved and sighed, each in its own way. And I felt that I wanted either to ask their permission, or to express my respect to them — such was a vague feeling.
And I remembered a girl from Russian fairy tales, how she asks the apple tree to cover her, or the forest — to part so that she runs through. Well, in general, I mentally asked them to help me get through so that evil people would not attack, and when I came out of the forest, I thanked them. Then, entering the lake, she also began to address him: “Hello, Lake, accept me, and then give me back safe and sound!” And this magic formula helped me a lot. I was calm, attentive and not afraid to swim quite far, because I felt contact with the lake.
Before, of course, I heard about all sorts of pagan folk appeals to nature, but I didn’t fully understand it, it was alien to me. And now it dawned on me that if someone communicates with nature on important and dangerous matters, then he must respect it and negotiate, as peasants do.
The independent establishment of personal contacts with the outside world, which every child of seven to ten years is actively engaged in, requires tremendous mental work. This work has been going on for many years, but it gives the first fruits in the form of increasing independence and «fitting» the child into the environment by the age of ten or eleven.
The child spends a lot of energy on experiencing impressions and internal elaboration of his experience of contacts with the world. Such mental work is very energy-consuming, because in children it is accompanied by the generation of a huge amount of their own mental production. This is a long and varied experience and processing of what is perceived from the outside in one’s fantasies.
Each external object that is interesting to the child becomes an impetus for the instantaneous activation of the internal mental mechanism, a stream that gives birth to new images that are associatively associated with this object. Such images of children’s fantasies easily «merge» with external reality, and the child himself can no longer separate one from the other. By virtue of this fact, the objects that the child perceives become more weighty, more impressive, more significant for him — they are enriched with psychic energy and spiritual material that he himself brought there.
We can say that the child simultaneously perceives the world around him and creates it himself. Therefore, the world, as seen by a particular person in childhood, is fundamentally unique and irreproducible. This is the sad reason why, having become an adult and returned to the places of his childhood, a person feels that everything is not the same, even if outwardly everything remains as it was.
It’s not that then «the trees were big,» and he himself was small. Disappeared, dispelled by the winds of time, a special spiritual aura that gave the surrounding charm and meaning. Without it, everything looks much more prosaic and smaller.
The longer an adult retains childhood impressions in his memory and the ability to at least partially enter into childhood states of mind, clinging to the tip of an association that has surfaced, the more opportunities he will have to come into contact with pieces of his own childhood again.
Starting to delve into your own memories or sorting out the stories of other people, you are amazed — where only children do not invest themselves! How many fantasies can be invested in a crack in the ceiling, a stain on the wall, a stone by the road, a sprawling tree at the gate of the house, in a cave, in a ditch with tadpoles, a village toilet, a dog house, a neighbor’s barn, a creaky staircase, an attic window, a cellar door, a barrel with rainwater, etc. How deeply lived all the bumps and pits, roads and paths, trees, bushes, buildings, the ground under their feet, in which they dug so much, the sky above their heads, where they looked so much. All this constitutes the child’s «phenomenal landscape» (this term is used to designate a landscape subjectively felt and lived by a person).
Individual features of children’s experiences of different places and areas as a whole are very noticeable in their stories.
For some children, the most important thing is to have a quiet place where you can retire and indulge in fantasy:
“At my grandmother in Belomorsk, I loved to sit in the front garden behind the house on a swing. The house was private, fenced in. Nobody bothered me, and I could fantasize for hours. I didn’t need anything else.
… At the age of ten, we went to the forest next to the railway line. Arriving there, we diverged at some distance from each other. It was a great opportunity to get carried away into some kind of fantasy. For me, the most important thing in these walks was precisely the opportunity to invent something.
For another child, it is important to find a place where you can express yourself openly and freely:
“There was a small forest near the house where I lived. There was a hillock where birches grew. For some reason, I fell in love with one of them. I clearly remember that I often came to this birch, talked to it and sang there. Then I was six or seven years old. And now you can go there.”
In general, it is a great gift for a child to find such a place where it is possible to express quite normal children’s impulses, squeezed inside by the rigid restrictions of educators. As the reader remembers, this place often becomes a garbage dump:
“The theme of the garbage dump is special for me. Before our conversation, I was very ashamed of her. But now I understand that it was simply necessary for me. The fact is that my mother is a big neat man, at home they were not even allowed to walk without slippers, not to mention jumping on the bed.
Therefore, I jumped with great pleasure on old mattresses in the garbage. For us, a discarded «new» mattress was equated to visiting attractions. We went to the garbage heap and for very necessary things that we got by climbing into the tank and rummaging through all its contents.
We had a janitor-drunkard living in our yard. She made a living by collecting things in the garbage heaps. For this we did not like her very much, because she competed with us. Among children, going to the garbage was not considered shameful. But it came from the parents.”
The natural make-up of some children — more or less autistic, closed nature of their nature — prevents the establishment of relationships with people. They have much less craving for people than for natural objects and animals.
A smart, observant, but closed child, who is inside himself, does not look for crowded places, he is not even interested in people’s dwellings, but he is very attentive to nature:
“I walked mostly on the bay. It was back when there was a grove and trees on the shore. There were many interesting places in the grove. I came up with a name for each. And there were many paths, tangled like a labyrinth. All my trips were limited to nature. I’ve never been interested in houses. Perhaps the only exception was the front door of my house (in the city) with two doors. Since there were two entrances to the house, this one was closed. The front door was bright, lined with blue tiles and gave the impression of a glazed hall that gave freedom to fantasies.
And here, for comparison, is another, contrasting, example: a fighting youngster who immediately takes the bull by the horns and combines independent exploration of the territory with the knowledge of interesting places for her in the social world, which children rarely do:
“In Leningrad, we lived in the Trinity Field area, and from the age of seven I began to explore that area. As a child, I loved to explore new territories. I liked to go to the store alone, to matinees, to the clinic.
From the age of nine, I traveled by public transport all over the city on my own — to the Christmas tree, to relatives, etc.
The collective tests of courage that I remember were raids on the gardens of neighbors. It was about ten to sixteen years old.»
Yes, shops, a clinic, matinees, a Christmas tree — this is not a cave with a stream, not a hill with birches, not a grove on the shore. This is the most turbulent life, these are places of maximum concentration of people’s social relations. And the child is not only not afraid to go there alone (as many would be afraid), but, on the contrary, seeks to explore them, finding himself in the center of human events.
The reader may ask the question: what is better for the child? After all, we met in the previous examples with three polar types of children’s behavior in relation to the outside world.
One girl is sitting on a swing, and she wants nothing but to fly away into her dreams. An adult would say that she is in contact not with reality, but with her own fantasies. He would have thought about how to introduce her to the world, so that the girl would awaken a greater interest in the possibility of spiritual connection with living reality. He would formulate the spiritual problem threatening her as insufficient love and trust in the world and, accordingly, in its Creator.
The psychological problem of the second girl, who walks in a grove on the shore of the bay, is that she does not feel a great need for contact with the world of people. Here an adult may ask himself a question: how to reveal to her the value of truly human communication, show her the way to people and help her realize her communication problems? Spiritually, this girl may have a problem of love for people and the theme of pride associated with it.
The third girl seems to be doing well: she is not afraid of life, climbs into the thick of human events. But her educator should ask the question: is she developing a spiritual problem, which in Orthodox psychology is called the sin of pleasing people? This is the problem of increased need for people, excessive involvement in the tenacious network of human relationships, which leads to dependence on them up to the inability to remain alone, alone with your soul. And the ability for inner solitude, renunciation of everything worldly, human, is a necessary condition for the beginning of any spiritual work. It seems that this will be easier to understand for the first and second girls, who, each in their own way, in the simplest form not yet worked out by consciousness, live the inner life of their souls more than the externally socialized third girl.
As we can see, virtually every child has its own strengths and weaknesses in the form of a predisposition to well-defined psychological, spiritual and moral difficulties. They are rooted both in the individual nature of a person and in the system of education that forms him, in the environment where he grows up.
An adult educator should be able to observe children: noticing their preferences for certain activities, the choice of significant places, their behavior, he can at least partially unravel the deep tasks of a given stage of development that the child faces. The child tries to solve them with more or less success. An adult can seriously help him in this work, raising the degree of its awareness, raising it to a greater spiritual height, sometimes giving technical advice. We will return to this topic in later chapters of the book.
A variety of children of about the same age often develop similar addictions to certain types of pastime, which parents usually do not attach much importance to or, on the contrary, consider them a strange whim. However, for a careful observer, they can be very interesting. It often turns out that these children’s amusements express attempts to intuitively comprehend and experience new life discoveries in play actions that a child unconsciously makes at a certain period of his childhood.
One of the frequently mentioned hobbies at the age of seven or nine is the passion for spending time near ponds and ditches with water, where children observe and catch tadpoles, fish, newts, swimming beetles.
“I spent hours wandering along the seashore in the summer and catching small living creatures in a jar — bugs, crabs, fish. The concentration of attention is very high, the immersion is almost complete, I completely forgot about the time.
“My favorite stream flowed into the Mgu River, and fish swam into the stream from it. I caught them with my hands when they hid under the stones.
“At the dacha, I liked to mess with tadpoles in the ditch. I did it both alone and in a company. I was looking for some old iron can and planted tadpoles in it. But the jar was needed only to keep them there, but I caught them with my hands. I could do this all day and night.”
“Our river near the shore was muddy, with brownish water. I often lay on the walkways and looked down into the water. There was a real strange realm there: tall furry algae, and various amazing creatures swim between them, not only fish, but some kind of multi-legged bugs, cuttlefish, red fleas. I was amazed by their abundance and that everyone is so purposefully floating somewhere about their business. The most terrible seemed to be swimming beetles, ruthless hunters. They were in this water world just like tigers. I got used to catching them with a jar, and then three of them lived in a jar at my house. They even had names. We fed them worms. It was interesting to observe how predatory, fast they are, and even in this bank they reign over everyone who was planted there. Then we released them,
“We went for a walk in September in the Tauride Garden, I already went to first grade then. There, on a large pond, there was a concrete ship for children near the shore, and it was shallow near it. Several children were catching small fish there. It seemed surprising to me that it occurred to the children to catch them, that this is possible. I found a jar in the grass and also tried it. For the first time in my life, I was really hunting for someone. What shocked me the most was that I caught two fish. They are in their water, they are so nimble, and I am completely inexperienced, and I caught them. It was not clear to me how this happened. And then I thought it was because I was already in first grade.”
In these testimonies, two main themes attract attention: the theme of small active creatures living in their own world, which is observed by the child, and the theme of hunting for them.
Let’s try to feel what this water kingdom with the small inhabitants inhabiting it means for a child.
Firstly, it is clearly seen that this is a different world, separated from the world where the child is, by the smooth surface of the water, which is the visible boundary of two environments. This is a world with a different consistency of matter, in which its inhabitants are immersed: there is water, and here we have air. This is a world with a different scale of magnitudes — compared to ours, everything in water is much smaller; we have trees, they have algae, and the inhabitants there are also small. Their world is easily visible, and the child looks down on it. While in the human world everything is much larger, and the child looks at most other people from the bottom up. And for the inhabitants of the water world, he is a huge giant, powerful enough to catch even the fastest of them.
At some point, a child near a ditch with tadpoles discovers that this is an independent microcosm, intruding into which he will find himself in a completely new role for himself — an imperious one.
Let us remember the girl who caught swimming beetles: after all, she set her sights on the fastest and most predatory rulers of the water kingdom and, having caught them in a jar, became their mistress. This theme of one’s own power and authority, which is very important for the child, is usually worked out by him in his relationships with small creatures. Hence the great interest of young children in insects, snails, small frogs, which they also love to watch and catch.
Secondly, the water world turns out to be something like a land for the child, where he can satisfy his hunting instincts — the passion for tracking, chasing, prey, competing with a fairly fast rival who is in his element. It turns out that both boys and girls are equally eager to do this. Moreover, the motif of catching fish with their hands, persistently repeated by many informants, is interesting. Here is the desire to enter into direct bodily contact with the object of hunting (as if one on one), and an intuitive feeling of increased psychomotor capabilities: concentration of attention, reaction speed, dexterity. The latter indicates the achievement by younger students of a new, higher level of regulation of movements, inaccessible to young children.
But in general, this water hunting gives the child visual evidence (in the form of prey) of his growing strength and ability for successful actions.
The «water kingdom» is only one of the many micro-worlds that a child discovers or creates for himself.
We have already said in Chapter 3 that even a plate of porridge can become such a “world” for a child, where a spoon, like a bulldozer, paves roads and canals.
As well as the narrow space under the bed may seem like an abyss inhabited by terrible creatures.
In a small wallpaper pattern, a child is able to see the whole landscape.
A few stones protruding from the ground will turn out to be islands for him in a raging sea.
The child is constantly engaged in mental transformations of the spatial scales of the world around him. Objects that are objectively small in size, he can enlarge many times by directing his attention to them and comprehending what he sees in completely different spatial categories — as if he were looking into a telescope.
In general, a phenomenon known in experimental psychology has been known for a hundred years, which is called «reassessment of the standard.» It turns out that any object to which a person directs his close attention for a certain time begins to seem to him larger than it really is. The observer seems to feed him with his own psychic energy.
In addition, there are differences between adults and children in the very way of looking. An adult better holds the space of the visual field with his eyes and is able to correlate the sizes of individual objects with each other within its limits. If he needs to consider something far or near, he will do this by bringing or expanding the visual axes — that is, he will act with his eyes, and not move with his whole body towards the object of interest.
The child’s visual picture of the world is mosaic. Firstly, the child is more «caught» by the object he is looking at at the moment. He cannot, like an adult, distribute his visual attention and intellectually process a large area of the visible field at once. For a child, it rather consists of separate semantic pieces. Secondly, he tends to actively move in space: if he needs to consider something, he tries to immediately run up, lean closer — what seemed smaller from a distance instantly grows, filling the field of view if you bury your nose in it. That is, the metric of the visible world, the size of individual objects, is most variable for a child. I think that the visual image of the situation in children’s perception can be compared with a natural image made by an inexperienced draftsman: as soon as he concentrates on drawing some significant detail, it turns out that it turns out to be too large, to the detriment of the overall proportionality of other elements of the drawing. Well, and not without reason, of course, in the children’s own drawings, the ratio of the sizes of the images of individual objects on a sheet of paper remains unimportant for the child for the longest time. For preschoolers, the value of one or another character in a drawing directly depends on the degree of importance that the draftsman attaches to him. As in the images in ancient Egypt, as in ancient icons or in the painting of the Middle Ages.
The child’s ability to see the big in the small, to transform the scale of visible space in his imagination, is also determined by the ways in which the child brings meaning to it. The ability to symbolically interpret the visible allows the child, in the words of the poet, to show “the slanting cheekbones of the ocean on a dish of jelly”, for example, in a bowl of soup to see a lake with an underwater world. In this child, the principles on which the tradition of creating Japanese gardens is based are internally close. There, on a small piece of land with dwarf trees and stones, the idea of a landscape with a forest and mountains is embodied. There, on the paths, sand with neat grooves from a rake symbolizes streams of water, and the philosophical ideas of Taoism are encrypted in lonely stones scattered here and there like islands.
Like the creators of Japanese gardens, children have the universal human ability to arbitrarily change the system of spatial coordinates in which perceived objects are comprehended.
Much more often than adults, children create spaces of different worlds built into each other. They can see something small inside something big, and then through this small one, as if through a magic window, they try to look into another inner world that is growing before their eyes, it is worth focusing their attention on it. Let’s call this phenomenon subjective «pulsation of space».
“Pulsation of space” is a shift in point of view, which leads to a change in the spatial-symbolic coordinate system within which the observer comprehends events. This is a change in the scale of the relative magnitudes of the observed objects, depending on what the attention is directed to and what meaning the observer gives to the objects. The subjectively experienced «pulsation of space» is due to the joint work of visual perception and the symbolic function of thinking — the inherent ability of a person to establish a coordinate system and give meaning to the visible within the limits determined by it.
There is reason to believe that children, to a greater extent than adults, are characterized by the ease of shifting their point of view, leading to the activation of the “pulsation of space”. In adults, the opposite is true: the rigid framework of the habitual picture of the visible world, which the adult is guided by, keeps him much stronger within its limits.
Creative people, on the contrary, often look for the source of new forms of expressiveness of their artistic language in the intuitive memory of their childhood. The famous film director Andrei Tarkovsky belonged to such people. In his films, the “pulsation of space” described above is quite often used as an artistic device in order to clearly show how a person “floats away” like a child from the physical world, where he is here and now, into one of his dear spiritual worlds. Here is an example from the movie Nostalgia. Its protagonist is a homesick Russian man working in Italy. In one of the final scenes, he finds himself in a dilapidated building during the rain, where large puddles have formed after the downpour. The hero begins to look into one of them. He enters there more and more with his attention — the camera lens approaches the surface of the water. Suddenly, the earth and pebbles at the bottom of the puddle and the glare of light on its surface change their outlines, and from them a Russian landscape, as if visible from afar, is built with a hillock and bushes in the foreground, distant fields, a road. A maternal figure appears on the Hill with a child, reminiscent of the hero himself in childhood. The camera approaches them faster and closer — the hero’s soul flies, returning to its origins — to its homeland, to the reserved spaces from which it originated.
In fact, the ease of such departures, flights — into a puddle, into a picture (remember V. Nabokov’s «Feat», into a dish («Mary Poppins» by P. Travers), into the Looking Glass, as happened with Alice, into any conceivable space that attracts attention is a characteristic property of younger children. Its negative side is the child’s weak mental control over his mental life. Hence the ease with which the seductive object enchants and lures the soul of the child / 1 into its limits, forcing it to forget itself. Insufficient «strength of the «I»» cannot hold the psychic integrity of a person — let us recall the childhood fear we have already discussed: will I be able to return? These weaknesses can also persist in adults of a certain mental make-up, with a psyche that has not been worked out in the process of self-awareness.
The positive side of the child’s ability to notice, observe, experience, create various worlds built into everyday life is the richness and depth of his spiritual communication with the landscape, the ability to receive maximum personally important information in this contact and achieve a sense of unity with the world. Moreover, all this can happen even with outwardly modest, and even frankly miserable possibilities of the landscape.
The development of the human ability to discover multiple worlds can be left to chance — which is most often the case in our modern culture. Or you can teach a person to realize it, manage it and give it cultural forms verified by the tradition of many generations of people. Such, for example, is the training in meditative contemplation that takes place in Japanese gardens, which we have already discussed.
The story of how children establish their relationship with the landscape will be incomplete if we do not conclude the chapter with a brief description of special children’s trips to explore not individual places, but the area as a whole. The goals and nature of these (usually group) outings are highly dependent on the age of the children. Now we will talk about hikes that are undertaken in the country or in the village. How this happens in the city, the reader will find material in chapter 11.
Younger children of six or seven years of age are more fascinated by the very idea of a “hike”. They are usually organized in the country. They gather in a group, take food with them, which will soon be eaten at the nearest halt, which usually becomes the final point of a short route. They take some attributes of travelers — backpacks, matches, a compass, sticks as travel staffs — and go in a direction where they have not yet gone. Children need to feel like they have set off on a journey and cross the symbolic border of the familiar world — to go out into the “open field”. It does not matter that it is a grove or a clearing behind the nearest hillock, and the distance, by adult standards, is quite small, from a few tens of meters to a kilometer. What is important is the exciting experience of being able to voluntarily leave home and become a traveler on the paths of life. Well, the whole enterprise is organized like a big game.
Another thing is children after nine years. Usually at this age, the child receives a teenage bike for his use. It is a symbol of reaching the first stage of adulthood. This is the first large and practically valuable property, the absolute owner of which is the child. In terms of opportunities for a young cyclist, this event is similar to buying a car for an adult. Moreover, after the age of nine, parents of children noticeably soften their spatial restrictions, and nothing prevents groups of children from making long bicycle rides throughout the district. (We are talking, of course, about summer country life.) Usually at this age, children are grouped into same-sex companies. Both girls and boys share a passion for exploring new roads and places. But in boyish groups, the spirit of competition is more pronounced (how fast, how far, weak or not weak, etc.) and interest in technical issues related to both the device of the bicycle and the riding technique «without hands», types of braking, ways of jumping on a bicycle from small jumps, etc.). Girls are more interested in where they go and what they see.
There are two main types of free cycling for children between the ages of nine and twelve: ‘exploratory’ and ‘inspection’. The main purpose of walks of the first type is the discovery of still untraveled roads and new places. Therefore, children of this age usually imagine much better than their parents the wide surroundings of the place in which they live.
«Inspection» walks are regular, sometimes daily trips to well-known places. Children can go on such trips both in the company and alone. Their main goal is to drive along one of their favorite routes and see “how everything is there”, whether everything is in place and how life goes there. These trips are of great psychological significance for children, despite their seeming lack of information for adults.
This is a kind of master’s check of the territory — is everything in place, is everything in order — and at the same time receiving a daily news report — I know, I saw everything that happened during this period in these places.
This is the strengthening and revival of many subtle spiritual ties that have already been established between the child and the landscape — that is, a special type of communication between the child and something close and dear to him, but not belonging to the immediate environment of home life, but scattered in the space of the world.
Such trips are also a necessary form of entry into the world for a preteen child, one of the manifestations of the “social life” of children.
But there is another theme in these “inspections”, hidden deep inside. It turns out that it is important for a child to regularly make sure that the world in which he lives is stable and constant — constant. He must stand still unshakably, and the variability of life must not shake his basic foundations. It is important that it be recognizable as «one’s own», «the same» world.
In this regard, the child wants from his native places the same thing that he wants from his mother — the immutability of the presence in his being and the constancy of properties. Since we are now discussing a topic that is extremely significant for understanding the depths of the child’s soul, we will make a small psychological digression.
Many mothers of young children say that their children do not like it when a mother noticeably changes her appearance: she changes into a new outfit, puts on makeup. With two-year-olds, things can even come to conflict. So, one boy’s mother showed her new dress, worn for the arrival of guests. He looked at her carefully, wept bitterly, and then brought her old dressing gown, in which she always went at home, and began to put it into her hands so that she would put it on. No persuasion helped. He wanted to see his real mother, not someone else’s aunt in disguise.
Children of five or seven years old often mention how they do not like makeup on their mother’s face, because because of this, mother becomes somehow different.
And even teenagers do not like it when the mother «dressed up» and did not look like herself.
As we have repeatedly said, a mother for a child is the axis on which his world rests, and the most important landmark, which must always and everywhere be instantly recognizable, and therefore must have permanent features. The variability of her appearance gives rise to an inner fear in the child that she will slip away, and he will lose her, not recognizing her against the background of others.
(By the way, authoritarian leaders, feeling like parental figures, well understood the childish traits in the psychology of the peoples subject to them. Therefore, they tried under no circumstances to change their appearance, remaining symbols of the constancy of the foundations of state life.)
Therefore, native places and mother are united by the children’s desire that, ideally, they be eternal, unchanging and accessible.
Of course, life goes on, and houses are painted, and something new is being built, old trees are cut down, new ones are planted, but all these changes are acceptable as long as the main thing that makes up the essence of the native landscape remains intact. One has only to change or destroy its supporting elements, as everything collapses. It seems to a person that these places have become alien, everything is not like before, and — his world was taken away from him.
Such changes are especially painfully experienced in those places where the most important years of his childhood passed. A person then feels like a destitute orphan, forever deprived in the real space of being of that childish world that was dear to him and now remains only in his memory.