Baby pictures are cute and funny and all that, yet I find that there’s also something unnerving about them. When I look at my own baby pictures, I know that they are the pictures of me, who is still alive, yet at the same time they portray someone else who might actually be dead. You see, these baby pictures are of someone who was supposed to turn into something, but am I what this someone was supposed to turn into? Because if not, then it means that what I am looking at is not really me; it is the me that could have been, but has not been, and therefore now is dead, if you know what I mean. OK, I have to admit these thoughts were not always my thoughts; they were once the thoughts of one Marsha Norman, whose play I got to read in college. Her thoughts, in combination with the thoughts of one John Stuart Mill, seem to have found fertile ground in me to grow and eventually become my own. Here’s what Marsha and John whispered to me all those years ago.Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing. (John Stuart Mill – On Liberty, 1859)
Mama: You are my child!
Jessie: I am what became of your child (Mama cannot answer). I found an old baby picture of me. And it was somebody else, not me….That’s who I started out and this is who is left (there is no self-pity here). That’s what this is about. It’s somebody I lost, all right, it’s my own self. Who I never was. Or who I tried to be and never got there. Somebody I waited for who never came. And never will….I’m what was worth waiting for and I didn’t make it. Me…who might have made a difference to me…I’m not going to show up…. (Marsha Norman – ’Night, Mother, 1983)
Of course Norman’s character is not content with her life and is actually considering suicide, which is not the case with me, but what she says does actually make sense.
And can one honestly claim that we people develop on all sides like a tree, as Mill says we ought to?
The chubby baby with the huge eyes staring beyond the frame most probably did turn into the alien that I am, but can anyone really be sure?
And one final thought: because of all of the above, in a way, baby pictures are actually the only visual documents we have of our TRUE selves; because in us, as babies, lies our true POTENTIAL self, which might find the necessary space to grow (like a tree) but also it might not...
