Chapter 4: From the child's eyes

4) From the child’s eyes

Even though there is a universal approach to the recognition of particular emotions, signs on faces, body language, and corporeal temperature changes, which are visible in people’s behaviour, recognition is also related to our personal past experiences and tastes, themselves invisible. That is why it makes each emotion so individual, and why it is perceived with so many nuances. Indeed, our first discoveries during childhood obviously influence our perception of what is for us one or another emotion. Some emotions might then be suppressed, such as anger, and certain significations might be understood in the wrong way, according to how parents qualify and communicate with their own emotions.

Anyway, I would like to highlight the fact that, through an innocent child’s eyes, as we all have been first, and learned necessarily from it, emotions are properly experienced, lived quite purely, as if we have eaten them raw. To me, raw sensation evokes something fresh, but not totally digested, unfinished. Conversely ‘cooked’ emotion presumes some learning, understanding, growing, cultivating, which still has a capacity of evolution. So the first raw emotions we had were true of course, impressed upon our life, but they were kind of missing other cooked acquisitions, as emotion is such a particularly unique feeling, each time different and surprising.

I shall start with two important memories in my mind – very personal and detailed – keeping the flow of the narrative. I am telling these stories through the eyes of a child from this period of time, trying to capture the correct emotion in context. Context seems to be slightly linked to the emotions in question, or rather emotions occur in a specific way, dependent on a particular context, with an order of things that can amplify the intensity of one emotion. We must not forget that an emotion arises in order to adapt to certain changes in the surrounding environment.

First personal memory: How a sweet everyday “gouter” turns into a drama…
Every Wednesday, after taking drawing lessons in the Beaux-Arts of Cherbourg – I was about nine years old – I was walking to my grandmother’s house, thinking about the snack awaiting me… In France, it is called “gouter”, a full-fledged moment like afternoon tea, and is especially meant for children. The snack consists of a baguette, with butter, nutella and a drink. I knew she was expecting me, so I couldn’t be late.
I have twenty-three cousins, my father being the last one of his eight brothers and sisters; we are consequently the youngest for my grandmother, nicknamed “sweet grandma”, because she always has some sweets in her pocket…

My grandmother had a particular house built at the foot of the hill, which was very impressive and frightening – all the larger when you are a child. I always had to climb quickly up the precipitous, completely irregular stairs to the leaning garden to avoid rocks, which could have fallen from the enormous hill…
This particular afternoon with my younger brother and sister, we stepped over a barbed wire to go and play in the closed garden. As we were playing the game “Bioman”, fighting to death, I was dragging myself along the ground, and suddenly, a broken glass gashed deeply my knee… Scared by the blood, I didn’t want to look at it, but I knew directly it was very serious; so still focused, I forced myself to climb back quickly down the dangerous stairs without falling… Realizing that my old grandma would probably not know what to do, without my mother, I just sat down, and fainted. Fortunately I think my mother appeared as my saviour minutes after and took me to our doctor friend. He stitched up my wound directly. Eight stitches. Still a mark today, after fifteen years, though not so serious, but it certainly connects me to those to emotions of that moment.

Things happened so fast, and my emotions changed radically as well… Though this memory that is still so clear to me, I can count happiness, I was playing innocently, enjoying time with my family, frightened already a bit by the hill and the garden, as a premonition, but with excitement, of course, being not reassured to be in another forbidden garden, and totally turning to another trouble, feeling faint and breathless, in distress, seized by fear.


A second memory with the other grandma: the murder of a hen…
I am lucky that contexts encourage my imagination to get involved in the story, in places, which are not surreal, but that are all well and real…

On holiday in my grandparent’s big farm, it was like a dream to gambol and discover many places, between attics, barns and henhouses. There were many animals, horses, cows, a dog, cats, and lots of hens and chickens. And you can imagine the daily work to feed all of them. My grandmother left us the funny task of looking for eggs, which were carefully laid and dropped off everywhere on hay bales. In a sense, they were members of the family, and we took care of them everyday.
Now and then, a special ritual took place. And I did not know what to think about it. My grandmother would say: “All right, this coming Sunday, I am going to cook a chicken; one is ready.” She forbade us to go out for a while. The moment of the murder for sure… Sometimes afterwards she would ask us to help to pluck the chicken, which was still warm – my God!
The fact of keeping us inside was understandable, but worst for our crazy imagination… Once older, we spied on the murderer and her crime; she attracted a chosen chicken, catching it by the legs; sometimes, the chicken would run away, understanding the game; sometimes, it would struggle with its wings, groaning horribly…
And the terrible thing is that, now, every time I enter their house, and recognize the smell of grilled legs (they need to be grilled directly on the gas to burn off the rest of the feathers), I instantaneously have a picture of the murder, symbolized by the legs. At least she was catching more chickens than my sweet hens!

Well, of course, we need to live on food, and we need animal protein, but in this example, it is quite a weird mix of joy, fear, disgust, sadness, guilt and, not to say, anger. From those two memories, purposely detailed but, perhaps, too long, I have noticed that our memory can recall perfectly a precise and complex emotion, especially when it is connected to food, or more generally to some physical feelings. Indeed, sensations are the first stage in the process of emotion. Through our skin and our five senses, all things we touch, smell, taste, see or hear provoke the first reactions. Like the “Madelaine” of Proust, as soon as I am confronted with a similar situation, or when the smell goes into my nostrils, it also enters my brain by association; the memory is occurring again in pictures and the context reminds me why…