In elementary school, I remember, it was wildly popular to make fun of Hooked on Phonics. When I was three years old, my baby sister was born, and mom bought me Hooked on Phonics. (The two are probably coincidental, as no one would ever do something just to "get me out of their hair." That wouldn't make any sense.) Reading was just what people did in my house, which looks sort of like an overstuffed library, books spilling off the shelves like sugar and pooling on the ground and against the walls, so I taught myself to read: excited and tiny and probably listening to my Winnie-the-Pooh tape player under the dining room table while mom tended to a fussy baby. (That baby just turned fifteen, and she's only gotten fussier.)
Anyways, I remember hearing my first HoP joke, or maybe the first time I'd heard one and connected it to the way I'd learned to read -- by that time being three years old was a little hazy, and I hadn't thought about it. It had seemed normal. I was mortified. Hooked on Phonics was for retards and dummies? I laugh about it now, because, seriously? I let little kids that probably read below grade-level make me feel stupid for learning to read at three years old?
I don't have many memories of being read to because of that; the fact that there isn't much time in my memory that I couldn't read to myself, but I did a lot of reading then, to myself, and to the new squirmy bundle, Exhibit A, or Bethany:
(Even now, I occasionally read to the squirmy bundle who is practically an adult. "No one does voices like your big sister." I am grateful for this connection and time even when my throat is raw and splintered.)
Now, I read anything I can get my hands on; Whitman and Tennyson and Gregory Maguire and C. S. Lewis and John Green and Yann Martel, the way I did in elementary school when I read books under my desks (they were very worth it) but my understanding of literature is different.
My understanding of words is different. Where in childhood, I was wrapped up in words only of the written variety, dismissing music and paintings and dancing because they had nothing to do with articulation, and I knew from elementary school that I'd be an english major. Have always known.
Except, I'm not. I'm majoring in communications because now, with my practically-adult-eyes, I am finding that everything is about connecting, everything is about telling stories, everything is about herding someone towards seeing things through another's eyes, if only for a few hours. Bob Dylan meanders his way through the story of the love of his youth in Tangled Up In Blue, and I think who wouldn't call this literature? Anis Majgoni, spoken word artist, says "all I did was shake my ribcage like a library in an earthquake; I spilled book like holy water... I was one thousand tattered spines, splinters on my tongue from licking the cathedrals. I had worked hard for my sorrow." and my heart stutters the same way it does when I hear The Hollow Men read, or Song of Myself, every atom of me belonging to the story, the way it belongs to you.
I don't know what purpose literature has except to be the roots connecting us, letting us see what life is like for someone who has their own thoughts, to remind us that other people are real, and not props on our stage, to build in us empathy and sympathy and larger vocabularies, and something to talk about on Monday morning.
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