Patrycja Orzechowska

Our children are all.
J.M.
. . . that is, there is neither height nor depth,¹
says Deleuze.

In the sandbox the sand is black—it imitates the original chaos. From the chaos children swell up and die. Stealthily.
Our children have it good. They besiege monstrances, stick to letters, point fingers at each other. They seek order. They’re curious. Their bold glances look into black holes. They see death in them. They wave their hands to her. They are clean, hygienic, ready. Or dirty, rotten, unready. We wait for them after school and in the passage ways. We have bad news for them. The prescript says—deprive them of joy. We only lack the strength of God, so we don’t take away everything from them with a gesture or a decree. We would like to summon them by name, but our children have none. This lack brings them happiness. They are one mass and swarm. They hide in fox holes. The adult’s summons goes off into emptiness, bounces off the earth. They don’t need our language—they think up their own. It’s a language for short cuts, so a language of magic. Their method is to cut corners and to attack the right road. To happiness no path leads, nor any regulation, nor any map. Happiness is the utterance of the word. Happiness is hocus-pocus. We will not explain ourselves to you!—they call out from underground.

Oh, yes, you will!
Oh, no we won’t!

One may find a schizoid “position” in the child, before the child has risen to the surface or conquered it. Even at the surface, we can always find schizoid fragments, since its function is precisely to organize and to display elements that have risen from the depth,² says Deleuze.

Just a short while ago, sixty years ago, children stood in ranks or in pairs. They waited for the PE teacher. He was freaky about education. Efficiently he threw off his uniform to throw on his track-suit. He spread the taint of the adults: order, rigor, and death. Those were his tools. His pockets are stuffed full of them. He thought up a perfect gymnastic configuration, one that perfectly reworked the rank in a thousand-fold manifestation. He is a specialist in subjection. He adores the norm, the principle, the regulation, and short hair cuts. He does not permit questions and gets to work. He must know what he’s doing, because no child takes part in monotonous exercises of its own free will. For a child, the difference between exercise and play is that exercise tends toward “enough, I want to stop,” but in play it’s a matter of “I want more and more.” The former tends toward the instructor’s ideal, but the latter is purposeless, tends nowhere, there is no order behind it. To make an exercise of play is a perversion of grown-ups. That is, in fact, what we call education. Just a little more time and we’ll make a person the like of which the child never was. We will train the child; we will get to our goal. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. The instructor wipes his hands. He’s an expert in clean work. He writes an assignment up on the board. Take shape, fill out form, be ready for assessment. And later let yourself feel guilty. As if guilt were supposed to be the promise and the motivation for more work and prayer. The beginnings of religion lie in discipline and understanding. That is why K in The Trial runs about in the attic, and wraps himself in the sheets and bedclothes that hang there—in order to postpone the punishment that is owed his guilt. Unready and undone. I don’t want to think, he says. I want to live without shame—like a child. Then shame will never know me.

But shame does come. It is patient; it has the face of an instructor. It inscribes on the forehead the first letter of your name.

We ran more closely together, several held hands, you couldn’t hold your head up high enough, because the road went downwards. Someone called out an Indian war cry, our legs went at a gallop as never before, when we hopped the wind raised out hips. Nothing could have stopped us.³ This is what K. says about children. Inscribe it on your foreheads. Even so, you’ll never stop us.

Our children are Franz Kafka. They must be Franz Kafka. For first, Franz Kafka is a child. Second, Franz Kafka breeds on T-shirts and in the heads of those who visit second-hand book stores. Third, Franz Kafka is about everything, in other words almost how J.M. sings. His words are filled with sense as used children’s toys are with life. He has never laid them aside on the shelf or on the window sill where they would go yellow from the light. He laid them out each day anew, after work, constantly returning in his thoughts to the black sand box. He locked himself up in his room. He cut himself off from a reality in which writing that has no inclination to lay itself out for assessment, is called a childish whim. Franz was a mortally consistent child. He did not love wholeness and closure, for he left his most important books without endings. He played strange games—he played at twitching his face muscles; he went about with his hands folded behind his head. He constantly called for attention to what was overriding, but also, right after leaving the room, unfounded. Just like our children—he performed a shameless, alternative gymnastics.

Our children are undead. Chance, fate, the demiurge—all these together—have relieved them of death. The chill of the scissors—their refined sensitivity—made of their being a rupture in the usual order of things, where the old text books go to be pulped. We want to know who they are and where they’re going. We have these fundamental desires, which a learned sarcasm condemns as kitsch. We get smiles with them. Kitsch permits fantasies—it removes shame and taste. In the haunted orphanage with its scored walls and rusting beds, there comes a monstrous cry. There’s a terrible echo. In the corridor your duty is to pass by a black-haired girl. It’s the same in the hospital—the same scored walls, the same corridors, secret passages, and underground canteens. In the canteens it smells of porridge, compote, and fear. Ladies in stained aprons call out: Eat, eat, little one, you must be strong or in the evening we’ll do you harm. Experiments, injections, cuts, scalpels. It is bad and black. We follow the trail of the black one. We look for the soul. We touch it through the body. I have to have a body because there is something dark in me, says Leibniz, mathematician, philosopher, and frequenter of baroque cathedrals. The dark mean, our materia prima requires a body, he adds. This is the soul’s demand—the bodily alibi—and it permits the soul to operate unnoticed. A monad has no windows; no light reaches it. The same is true of the soul, once called the monad. Whatever is most important is black and unidentified. It only works through general law, the law of growth, the law of immoderate proliferation.

This is something neither individual nor personal, but rather singular. Being not an undifferentiated abyss, it leaps from one singularity to another, casting always the dice belonging to the same cast, always fragmented and formed again in each throw,⁴ says Deleuze. He speaks of them—of monads and children. Of scraps of paper. The demiurge rolls the dice. He sprays the soul with objects. He curses matter, giving it movement. Hey, where are you going, children? We’re going to think a world in motion.

Our children are old. They smell of dust and second-hand book stores. They waited out good times there. Now they carefully rub their eyes and get up slowly from their lairs. The door bell tinkles—in second-hand bookstores there are always bells on the door, always bibles, and Kamienie na szaniec [To Build a Barricade]. A man comes in—a collector of old things. He greets the owner. Someone for you, children. He’s got homework for you. Today we start with morning archeology. The collector tells the children to dig into their memories. He says something about mysticism and astrology, about searching for the traces of redemption. He is interested in unshaped words, chance clusters of syllables and sounds, those moments when the tongue makes contact with the world, moments in which nothing is fixed yet, and the order of words and things is only beginning to be made clear. To dig down to those regions is to get breath and to feel the world before the repetition of those very established meanings and senses, which only proclaim the death of language. And now, my dears—the man says—let’s go back to the sphere of unknowing, even if it doesn’t hold anything special and is only the tinkling of speech imitating a gesture. The children listen, frown, and scrawl their first words on a bit of paper. At this moment, the man takes their toys away. He packs them up in bags and pockets. He takes them back to his house – to the temple of the object. There he place them or scatters them—such freedom gives him joy. Collecting things is to save them from usefulness; it is possessing them for themselves. An adult’s room full of toys is anarchy and destruction, a mad contradiction of all that should be.
The children stay in the second-hand bookstore; they have paper and pencils. They scribble more and more painful onomatopoeias.

When sounds fall back on (se rabattent sur) bodies and become the actions and passions of mixed bodies, they are no more that the bearers of agonizing nonsense,⁵ says Deleuze.

Our children are lazy angels. They bring empty annunciations—no message and no words. They are silent. They use only gestures. They have the faces of hunchbacks, dwarfs, little monsters—of all those childhood helpers who were invisible friends, spirits, playmates. Now they return. They are what’s left over from a vanished world. Everything that is most important has already happened in it. That’s why you can cross out all plans without a care. Only we don’t know yet that there’s nothing to lose. Children trip people up, throw knives into the ground, put on lights at night. They bring unease and fear, by which they remind us of our unsatisfied longing for something else, with which now not much can be done. This longing comes into our studio, crawls among the letters, coats with stickiness the construction of laboriously assembled installations. This is what their revenge looks like for being stuck in the background, for insufficient cherishing, for our complacency. They waited for their moment. Just a little more time and they will take our voice away. They will show how to be silent.

This depth acts in an original way, by means of its power to organize surfaces and to envelop itself in surfaces,⁶ says Deleuze.

Our children are marionettes. They make their appearance in the last chapter of the history of humanity. They are like dolls—they have no shame. They are innocent, in other words light. They like it equally up high or down low. They bounce off the earth, they move with grace. Everything in accordance with the nature of the orderly arrangement of points of balance. Grace imitates the path of the puppeteer’s soul, and the movement of his fingers is to the quivering of the puppets as a number is to its logarithms or as the asymptote is to the hyperbole. Here they grit their teeth and no one knows what anything is to anything. And here is the secret of puppets. In this way the spirit wanders where it is not. Among letters, lines, and symbols. In the back vertebrae and in the elbow. That’s what Kleist says in his treatise on marionettes. We don’t know if he’s speaking seriously, or if this is an example of the famous Romantic irony. For he adds: “to the extent that in the organic world, reflection becomes darker and weaker, the grace therein emerges more and more shining and dominating.”⁷ Grace replaces thought—it has the shape of an asymptote. Cognition after looking into infinity returns in silence. It turns into a light gesture and dance. This is a deserved rest after looking into the depths measured by the level of shallows. There remains only a stain—hence it is hard to distinguish a puppet from a god.

It is a bad play on words to suppose that nonsense expresses its own sense since, by definition, it has none. But this objection is unfounded. The play on words would be to say that nonsense has a sense, the sense being precisely that it hasn’t any,⁸ says Deleuze. He holds the hyperbole in his hand.

Our children are bacteria. They are purple in color. They survive in the mitochondria. They are what remains of former alliances concluded in the circumstances of the primeval soup. We cannot live without them. This is what biology tells us. Biology is important. Thanks to them our blood and oxygen circulate—circulate in our veins and everywhere. We can believe that in broad terms it’s a matter of oscillation—up, down, inbreath, outbreath. Our children are the best alien in the house. They remember the past. Torn from sleep, they repeat the whole phylo- and ontogenesis. We bear them within us to the end, but we teat them badly. First they still live in the same room with us, but they’re shoved onto the windowsill or under the bed. Later we throw them out into the corridor. We give away their toys to strangers. We feel ourselves to be beyond punishment and adult. We master positions of distance. In the end, now completely stuffed with deadly boring importance, we shut them up in a cell and feed them dry meal. From that they swell, they become tumors on our lives, and die.

A tree, a column, a flower, or a cane grow inside the body; other bodies always penetrate our body and coexist with its parts. Everything is really a can—canned food and excrement,⁹ says Deleuze.

Our children are a mistake. In this one case, their fate is a prize. They shouldn’t be here. Demiurge, chance . . . , and scissors too—show us their alternative gymnastics. As in Hugh Everett’s theory, in which in forking alternative worlds all possible states of things are realized. However, we cannot see into those worlds. The bottleneck of perception casts us into deep ruts, while all around the multiversum blossoms. But sometimes we believe in the rut, which for a moment turns out to be flat enough so that we can stick our head up out of it. Just like now, when we see children in their best possible form—for a moment, before the end of childhood, or in other words in the fullness of their development. Yes, in the fullness—it is absolutely unnecessary to go any further. Here Leibniz may be right—in the best of all possible worlds one stops growing. The instructor does not come. He’s late or they’ve thrown him out of a job. He doesn’t manage to disenchant everything; he does not line kids up in ranks; he does not give the order to march. This mistake and accident save the children from enlightenment and its commandments. March, disenchant the world, set up the molding machinery. Prepare the person. Watch out, watch out—in the selection machine all numbers are the same. We’re all headed in the same direction. The machines work, let out steam, and keep on producing a subject, who is a vassal and treats him/herself as a means to an end, even if sometimes he/she wakes up and places all ends in a thick square bracket. Ugly is the light of reason. It burns offensively like a florescent tube. It digs out all lines and folds. It makes you lay out shirts on shelves according to color, and to get up early in the morning. And finally the home of the collector of toys changes into the center of the district administration.

In each world, the monads express all the singularities of this world—an infinity—as though in a murmur. . . ,¹⁰ says Deleuze. The murmur comes from the florescent tube.

Our children are ornaments. They blow up the interiors of a baroque cathedral. They press against the façade; they slide into all the holes and cracks.“It is impossible to understand the Leibnizian monad. And its systems of light/mirror/point of view/interior decoration without relating them to Baroque architecture,”¹¹says Deleuze. For a certain time, the ideal of the interior of this kind of building was the mechanism of the camera obscura. Light penetrates the dark marble chamber through openings cut at such an angle that it is impossible to see anything on the outside. You can only look inside. In this way the interior decorations gain color and light. So—hocus-pocus and fakery. Monads have no windows, that’s true, but they have little holes, cracks, and lovingly prepared passages. The ornaments are like plants. Under the influence of the sun’s rays they grow and spread. Through invisible cracks life emerges, and it shimmers in the faces of our children. It leaves the dark interior, the cold marble, and the broken mirrors. It multiplies and wins new beachheads. It runs on the stairs, holds hands. It passes Leibniz by. It knocks the wig of his head.
Children close their eyes. They run forward. They think the world in motion.

A problem . . . has conditions which necessarily include “ambiguous signs” or aleatory points, that is, diverse distributions of singularities to which instances of different solutions correspond,¹² says Deleuze. He looks for signs on the ground.

Our children are litter. Their unconcern must end. As opposed to a good game, a ordinary game has its limit. It ends in school. It ends outside school and in the long recess. From the moment the first gymnastic sequence is mastered—from that moment forever ends. Our world is ordinary , imperfect—it stands in mid-stride, in the middle of the road. In it there is nothing of the best of all possible worlds. Leibniz was an old babbler. First, reason displaced this world, then Kant, and then duty. Now it’s displaced by a host with the new face of an instructor. He comes out of the refrigerator, from the television, he hides in presents under the Christmas tree. He speaks to you. His voice gets stronger, as if he were speaking into a microphone. He puts on a soutane. Today is the holiday of ruined toys—he says—the adoration of the normal world. For the children that means a day free of gymnastics.Today they’ll sing and dance—in the sandbox, among remains, without any melodic line.

Only when the world, teaming with anonymous and nomadic, impersonal and pre-individual singularities, opens up, do we tread at last on the field of the transcendental,¹³ says Deleuze.

Yes. And beyond the field is the world. And the world is the children’s monster.¹⁴

Our children are old, lazy angels. They have not been permitted to vanish and die. They come in the figure of ornaments and bacteria. They are all too visible. They are invisible. The light shines on them, the light before which they flee. They haunt books, marionette theaters, and cathedrals. They are refuse, remain, and mistake. They exist in inter-life, between things. With their selves they fill out empty places.