Little Labours
AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEARA droll and dazzling compendium of observations, stories, lists, and brief essays about babies.‘Beguiling … A wunderkabinett of baby-related curios … A peculiar book, and astonishing in its effect.’ Boston GlobeOne August day, a baby was born, or as it seemed to Rivka Galchen, a puma moved into her apartment. Her arrival felt supernatural, she seemed to come from another world. And suddenly, the world seemed ludicrously, suspiciously, adverbially sodden with meaning.But Galchen didn’t want to write about the puma. She had never been interested in babies, or in mothers before. Now everything seemed directly related to them and she specifically wanted to write about other things because it might mean she was really, covertly, learning something about babies, or about being near babies.The result is Little Labours, a slanted enchanted miscellany. Galchen writes about babies in art (with wrongly shaped head) and babies in literature (rarer than dogs or abortions, often monstrous); about the effort of taking a passport photo for a baby not yet able to hold up her head and the frightening prevalence of orange as today’s chic colour for baby gifts; about Frankenstein as a sort of baby and a baby as a sort of Godzillas. In doing so she opens up an odd and tender world of wonder.
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4th Estate
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2017
First published in the United States by New Directions in 2016
Copyright © Rivka Galchen 2016
Design by Erik Rieselbach
Cover image © Cougar (coloured engraving), German School, (19th century) /
Private Collection / © Purix Verlag Volker Christen / Bridgeman Images
Rivka Galchen asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
“Notes on Some Twentieth-Century Writers” originally appeared in Harper’s Magazine.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008225186
Ebook Edition © October 2016 ISBN: 9780008225193
Version: 2017-04-03
Contents
A long, long time ago, in late August
A reason to apologize to friends
Literature has more dogs than babies
How the puma affects others, one
How the puma affects others, two
Notes on some twentieth-century writers
A baby is an ideal vector for a revenge plot
Things that one was misleadingly told were a big part of having a baby
Sometimes it can seem like many hours with a baby
How the puma affects others, three
Most of the great women writers of the twentieth century
A friend who is not a close friend
People who get along well with babies
Books for young children rarely feature children. They feature animals, or monsters, or, occasionally, children behaving like animals or monsters. Books for adults almost invariably feature adults.
My mother tells me that people tell her, when she is out with the baby, that the baby is a crystal child. Some people ask for permission to touch the baby, because contact with crystal children is healing. “You should research what it is, crystal children,” my mother, who has a master’s degree in computer science and an undergraduate degree in mathematics, says more than once. From the moment my mother first met the baby, she found her to be an exceptional and superior creature; her ascribing of crystal child qualities to the baby is part of this ongoing story.
I finally go ahead and research crystal children. On the Web. I learn that, unlike rainbow children, crystal children have a difficult time because they believe they can change the way people think in order to heal the world; rainbow children by contrast understand that people cannot be changed, they can only be loved as they are; rainbow children are therefore less frustrated than crystal children. Crystal children were born, one site explains, mostly in the nineties, whereas rainbow children arrived, by and large, in the new millennium—prior to the generation of crystal children there was a generation of indigo children—and so maybe the puma is in fact a rainbow child, rather than a crystal child, or maybe she is part of an even newer generation, as yet uneponymized.
Maybe in the same way that children in the Middle Ages who were born with congenital hypothyroidism (as was common before salt was iodized because iodine is essential to thyroid development) had a certain look, and were mentally different from the mainstream, and were referred to as chrétiens—a term which unfortunately over time became cretins though all it meant at the time was Christians—crystal and rainbow and indigo children are terms used mostly if not prescriptively to refer to children who are unusual in ways most commonly associated with autism or Down’s syndrome.
Somehow I begin to believe in crystal children, and in the idea that my child has the special healing powers ascribed to crystal children. I start to believe this even though, unlike my mother, I don’t have a master’s degree in computer science, or an undergraduate degree in math. When I read one day that Isidor of Seville, back in the seventh century, was already saying that the world was round, he somehow knew so intuitively, I decide this is relevant.
