Baby Einsten, Etcetera

Finally, and this is the second reason why phobia does not disappear but slides beneath language, the phobic object is a proto-writing and, conversely, any practice of speech, inasmuch as it involves writing, is a language of fear….Not a language of the desiring exchange of messages or objects that are transmitted in a social contract of communication and desire beyond want, but a language of want, of the fear that edges up to it and runs along its edges. The one who tries to utter this “not yet a place,” this no-grounds, can obviously only do so backwards, starting from an over-mastery of the linguistic and rhetorical code. But in the last analysis he refers to fear—a terrifying, abject referent….The writer is a phobic who succeeds in metaphorizing in order to keep from being frightened to death….

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection

Baby George W. Bush

julie aigner-clark
searched for ways to share
her love of music and art
the baby einstein
company was born
a $200 million business
julie represents
the great enterprising
spirit of america
julie says
i believe children
have a right to live
in a world
that is safe

— state of the union 2007

Baby Einstein

While cruising along in the car-car strapped into his safety seat, Baby Einstein invents a cure for cancer but can’t tell anybody. He fusses, fidgets, bangs his sippy cup, howls in desolate wrath, won’t be consoled.

“Pookie’s having a meltdown,” says his mommy.

“What can you do, he’s two,” his mamma says. “Want a snack, Albie?”

(Baby Einstein has two moms and a donor dad.)

She hands him a Ziploc baggy of Pirate Booty.

Baby Einstein hasn’t acquired the fine motor skills to write his flashes of genius down, but he goes nuts over that picture book about Katie the tractor.

“He’s such a guy,” say his moms, and smile indulgently when he makes them read it over and over again.

Baby Einstein sits in the corner of his carpeted and gated play environment for hours at a time, going over in his head some mathematical calculations having to do with the environmental impact of Sudden Irreversible Climate Change. His moms worry that he might have Asperger’s syndrome. He seems way introverted. Over-focused.

He utters his first full sentence: “Mommy, Mamma, I pooped!”

“Good job, Albie!” everybody cheers.

Who knows how Baby Einstein heard the news that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has advanced the hands of the Doomsday Clock again? It’s now five minutes to midnight.

“I warned you not to tease your baby brother!”

Baby Einstein confronts abjection. A slimy banana fills him with horror. The mild, sweet scent, the yellow scimitar shape.

“Pookie’s having another meltdown,” says his mamma.

“Albie, listen. Stop it! Listen to mamma’s words! You’re getting a time out if you throw your food again! I’m not kidding! I’m. not. kidding.”

Baby Einstein becomes obsessed with an orange plastic duck embedded in an ice sheet that’s formed in a wading pool left out in the yard in winter. He points, grunts, groans, heaves great gargling sobs.

“Use your words,” they tell him.

Use your worlds is what he hears.

“Out! Get it out!” he screams and keens.

“It’s okay,” his moms croon, gently pinning his flailing arms. “There’s nothing there. See? It’s only a toy duckie that’s swimming in the ice. Albie, buddy. Hey, calm down. Albie, it’s okay.”

He’d like to use his worlds but all that comes to him is a sentence he must have read in a magazine somewhere:

I am become Death, destroyer of words.