Previous edition of The Teething Review here
Horsey Up and Down (2013), 12 pp.
Illustrated by Caroline Jayne Church, written by Kei Bernstein
Rating: 0.0
Some scientists and philosophers think consciousness is weird and inexplicable; other scientists and philosophers think it is not so weird and totally explicable. I am not a scientist or a philosopher, but I think it’s weird. Part of what makes it weird is that it is an entirely private phenomenon. I know my wife very well, and I hope I am an empathetic person, but I do not know what it is like to be my wife. Not really.
Even if I used all of the information available and did everything I could to imagine it and walk a mile in her shoes, it would still be me, with my own dumb consciousness and subjectivity, doing the imagining. That would be me wearing her shoes. The subjective experience of being her is not and cannot be directly available. I am very good at estimating how something might make her feel or act—but I cannot know precisely what it feels like to feel those feelings as her. Even in some sort of sci-fi Being John Malkovich situation, as long as it was me tooling around in her mind or walking around in her body, that’s still me and my subjective experience observing what it’s like to be in her head and body. Consciousness isn’t occupying the vessel. It’s what it feels like to be you. If you somehow turned the knob so that I literally was her and having her conscious experience, you’ve given the game away. It’s then no longer me, so there’s no sense in which I know what it’s like to be her.
I’m using my wife as an example because it’s heavy, when you first start to think about it, that there is this kind of hard limit on how much you can truly know another person. It’s deeply beautiful, when you think about it a little more, that you are nevertheless able to share such astonishing closeness with someone. And the part that is the most beautiful of all is that it is precisely this unbreakable border that creates the little edge of difference—the resistance and static—that makes the experience of connecting with another autonomous soul so transcendent. It is why the memory of someone can never compete with the real thing. I know my wife more deeply than I’ve ever known anyone. But a thousand times a day she does or says something that I couldn’t have scripted or predicted just so. So even if she doesn’t surprise me on a given day, the day is littered with surprises. The little frictions in what you can know when you know someone so deeply: That’s love.
This gets weirder still to think about when you have a baby, since they have such a different sort of consciousness than adults, or at least it seems that way. In this case we can’t even remember what this form of consciousness was like for ourselves. I don’t think it’s quite as extreme as the bat example. (A famous philosophical argument notes that it’s pretty hard to even begin to imagine what it’s like to be a bat—maybe impossible.) If we try to conjure a general sense of the subjective experience of a human baby, we can at least get closer than trying to conjure the subjective experience of echolocation, probably. But as soon as I try to think about it I find my thoughts employing language and logic that a baby does not have.
Consciousness aside, it’s hard to think about babies as wholly separate beings. They need so much help that they don’t yet feel like autonomous beings in any meaningful sense. Indeed, early on, they are nearly always attached to one of their parents’ bodies. In the case of mom, they literally were attached just a bit before. I like the analogy of the fourth trimester as mothers ease babies into the world in those early weeks. Newborn dads, I think, likewise feel basically attached in this way, like their babies are a part of themselves.
But eventually, the otherness will emerge. The baby gets older and private thoughts become fueled by language and agendas. The friction and static. Mamas and papas, listen: It will be difficult, but you will love it, in time. Love depends on it, on that separateness and that inaccessibility.
For me, my daughter’s otherness emerged, almost fully formed, when she was around one. This was when we wound up with the book Horsey Up and Down. I don’t remember how we acquired it. I just remember that we started reading it to our daughter and she loved it.
She insisted we read it again and again, even as I openly discouraged the idea. She couldn’t get enough. Her response was a kind of completely unqualified delight and ecstacy that even babies rarely reach in quite this measure. A deep satisfaction. It was one of her favorite experiences, a peak of her young life, to have me read Horsey Up and Down.
This opened a chasm of otherness between us. I would always love her, but there was some part of that baby that I could never truly know.
Horsey Up and Down is the worst book ever written. “Written.” I use the word because the book has a writer byline on the back, in addition to the illustrator, Caroline Jayne Church (the illustrations are adequate if lifeless and uninventive). It was “written by Kei Bernstein.” Here is the entirety of the text:
Horsey up. Horsey down. Horsey jumping all around. Horsey white. Horsey black. Horsey rolling on the track. Horsey big. Horsey small. Horsey sleeps in cozy stall.
This is a situation where I think it is okay to just decide the book was written by staff. I would love to know what went in to Bernstein’s writing process. Was this verse typed out and sent over in a 26-word Word document? Or did Kei just call in and provide the text over the phone? Was there a lengthy editing process? What opposites or rhymes were initially proposed, only to be nixed by a persnickety guardian of quality control at Cartwheel Books, an imprint of Scholastic?
These 26 words sound like the strained efforts of an adult with an office job trying to speak like a baby. There is nothing more callow than when an adult’s imagination misfires in this way. The very idea of “baby talk” is a provincial mistranslation of gibberish. Try a little harder, Kei.
The prose here is mechanical, the selected opposites dull and didactic, the repeated use of “horsey” condescending, the attention to scansion scant. There is a misunderstanding at the heart of this reductive brand of baby talk language. Books like Horsey Up and Down operate from the assumption that babies simply don’t know anything, can’t do anything—that they are helpless horsey dumbos in an intellectually fallow period of pre-personhood.
In fact, researchers in neuroscience and other fields have helped reveal what is obvious to an attentive parent: Babies are expansive but wildly inefficient thinkers. It’s not that they experience less than adults, it’s that they experience too much. They are less good at filtering information. The complex, confusing mess of noise and signals inside their body and out in the world—they take it all in and they are properly baffled. They are correct to wonder what a stapler might taste like, and to give real contemplative focus to the sheer audacity of that flavor as compared to a mango slice. As I said, we cannot fully grok their subjective experience, but it sure seems like they look out on the world and have the thought, outside of the strict confines of language, whatever that might mean: Who am I? Why am I here? And we tell them to stop squiggling so we can get their arm through the hole of a shirt that they don’t particularly need to be wearing. Who’s got a better grasp on the world as it is? Who’s the smart one?
Eventually, your brain gets better at disregarding irrelevant information. If you want to be good at hunting, gathering, or writing Substack posts, you have to become more efficient and start filtering. Otherwise, as parents of toddlers can tell you, the inexhaustible wonder of it all makes it very hard to get your shoes on in the morning.
Now, you might ask me: Okay, but your daughter liked the book! They must be doing something right!
Here is where the board book designers step in to feed this drivel, like candy, to our tender babies. On the cover, a girl is riding a merry-go-round. She’s on a horsey, which can be manipulated up and down, literally, with a tot-sized finger hole to maneuver the figure. It provides the baby the opportunity to create and control enough simple action to arouse their curiosity. But rather than foster that curiosity with rich concepts, or inventive language, or world creation, or storytelling, or something—Horsey just distracts them as they are fed vapid, incurious prose.
The two-page spread for “Horsey jumping all around,” gets another finger hole, allowing the horse to jump back and forth over an equestrian pole. Or I guess that’s the idea. The illustrator has not bothered to properly use perspective or place the pole anywhere near the jumping horse.
None of these special effects feature the artistry of a pop-up book or even the page-by-page variation in textures of animal board books, electing instead for repetitive tasks—up and down, back and forth—as if training babies for the assembly line.
When our baby daughter kept reaching and motioning for Horsey Up and Down, I went to my wife, alarmed. “Have you been reading the Horsey book?” I asked.
“I have,” she said.
I related to my wife that the book sucked. I used a grownup’s adverb to explain the high degree to which it sucked. I try not to curse (unlovely!), but here I found myself cursing to try to articulate the extent of my displeasure.
My wife agreed.
My daughter did not. I respected her independence and continued to read her the insipid volume. But I could not help but feel that she was being manipulated. The book employs just enough motion and simple declarative energy to capture a baby’s attention. But that’s all it does, like television: attention is captured like a jailer, but never nurtured. The book is a kind of opium, cruelly exploiting the hard-wired channels of a baby’s curiosity. Babies are wild experimental thinkers, like little R&D machines for human life, but get a horsey going up and down and they just get stoned. It is poison, persuasive only in its addictive grip, seeping through the soft spot in an innocent baby’s head.
The book’s subtitle is “A Book of Opposites.” The notion of opposites is a rich and playful one for babies to explore. But the book treats the concept with the rote joylessness of an artificial intelligence powered by a dreary algorithm. Up, down, black, white, big, small. In its tedious and didactic lessons about opposites, the book is a sort of anti-imagination vacuum. It contains no surprises, no unexpected twist. It is a terrible, uncompromising void—like a nightmare with no connection to our waking life.
It’s worth being skeptical about the just-so stories of evolutionary psychologists, but the longer ontogeny of humans—essentially helpless for several years, then highly dependent on their parents or elders for years after that—is striking. This was dangerous stuff for human beings once upon a time. A youngster who couldn’t fend for themself was trouble on the savanna. Crying is contraindicated. Likewise aimless wandering. But they have spongey minds and a radically experimental approach to life. This has advantages. They learn. With more time, they can be more creative, more imaginative. And they can learn more, much more. This turns out to be a pretty good mechanism if you want to pass down knowledge across generations in a cumulative way. Eventually, you get culture, mores, cooperation, technology, civilization, and so on. Humans are pretty good with tools but really good with ideas. Babies are the tip of the spear.
The devious Horsey board book designers, as I mentioned, exploit certain evolutionarily advantaged traits, now misapplied in the modern world, to bamboozle the modern one-year-old and stun them into submission (the book actually claims to be for “ages two and up,” which only makes me feel worse). A great children’s book activates the imaginative capacities of the child; Horsey instead snatches the child’s attention like a thief and then abandons the child to be smothered by the soporific goop of the prose. As if our final stage of evolution was to ditch the rich complexities of communication for the dim comfort of white noise.
But even those designers are barely trying. The opening pages—“Horsey up. Horsey down.”—get no accouterments. Likewise the “big”/“small” pages as the book reaches its climax. The “white”/“black” pages get the classic texture treatment, though sadly the counter to the fuzzy white horse is a black horse with a bit of fuzzy trim but otherwise the same smooth texture as the rest of the page. “Horsey rolling on the track,” the moment for more ambitious depictions of motion if there ever was one, slaps a bit of shine and colorful gloss on the horse-on-wheels and calls it a day. The “cozy stall” closer at least has a barn door that opens. It’s the book’s only bright spot; peek-a-boo is fair play.
Like many modern board book illustrations, the drawings are staid and generic. The eyes are black dots—eyes you might draw to represent dolls, or the dead. The cheeks are rosy. If there is emotion being depicted, I do not detect it. These are not characters, they are stand-ins. Bloodless child mannequins.
We saved nearly all of the baby books from that time, and brought them back into rotation when we had our son. But we did not keep Horsey Up and Down. Once our daughter got too old for it, we removed it permanently from the collection. In her unknowable otherness, she dug it. But my son will never take that horsey’s ride.
For us, the depressing mystery was our children’s fascination with a book called Rainbow Fish. If you’re unfamiliar with this book, it’s about a fish (Rainbow Fish) with dazzling colors and scales that makes the other plain fish jealous. The plain fish ask Rainbow Fish for his shiny scales, and when RF declines, the plain fish ostracize him. RF goes to the “Wise Old Octopus” for advice, and he’s told that he should give away his scales for even though he will no longer be the most beautiful fish in the sea, he will at least be happy. RF takes the advice and gives out his shiny scales, keeping only one for himself. The formerly plain fish swim about smugly, and RF is no longer alone.
This story rankles in about a hundred ways, the most obvious being that we shouldn’t be teaching folks, especially young girls, that happiness can be found in the eyes of others, and that one should hand out (literal) bits of oneself to fit in.
But we read it over and over and over because our kids wanted us to. We pretty much knew that they kept bringing this book over to our laps because it was so beautifully done, with a Scandinavian modernist font and foil scales that really did sparkle on the page and feel slick and good when you ran your fingers over them. We sure were pleased when we could finally slip it into a donation box without anyone missing it.