Thoughtfulness as a way to Surmount the Fear of Others

Part XI: Review of Sam Garton's I am Otter by Béatrice Dumiche

There can’t be a better homage to evolution indeed than creating by love for love to be spread around as the best means to be at peace with oneself and others thanks to tolerant humor. It appears the most efficient way to adapt a creative individuality to the challenges of survival in a society based on Manichaeism and simplification as the result of industrialization which aims only at rationalized productivity. It is a strategy which reacts at its global ambition by restoring imagination as the unique faculty which can bear contradictions as part of personal realisation leading necessarily to the refinement of social relationships which will have consequences on the whole organisation of the society where any individual behaviour matters even if it only surprises or disturbs. Assuming one’s difference is an indispensable challenge for his mental flexibility and his capacity to evolve whilst it is a provocation for conformism which is confronted with the strength conscious adaptation gives him as the accurate expression of his inner sovereignty under the existing conditions. That’s why Keeper bets on evolution as the aptitude of life to renew itself and surmount the obstacles which might been opposed to it although it might seem currently inappropriate, or even weird. Otter never appears as a fantasy which would let him look silly because from the very beginning, he believes in her autonomy and treats her like a sensible living being he can communicate with and he is sure will be able to evolve at his contact, how different they might apparently seem to be. That’s why the readers themselves perceive her transgressions as fun and keep her in their hearts as precisely her unpredictability let them look at her like Keeper does - with much love and indulgence because her exceptional vitality gives them again confidence in life and its resources to strike its inner balance on its own. Keeper’s love proves its efficiency and reinforces at the same time his public’s trust in their own as a constructive feeling which will not been disappointed when it is expressed with discernment towards individuals who are able to appreciate it, Otter answers his attentions by evolving and learn to know him and his needs better. So, she recognizes that he needs sleep to spend time with her and she even accepts eventually to let him go to work after she got able to tie symbolic bonds with Teddy whom she begins to love as her personal friend. The way he played with her responding to her desire to express herself while interacting with him, opened her mind to respect his own needs from the moment she got more aware of them and even guessed that the more one grows up, the more diverse become his activities. She slightly develops her own occupations whatever might be their outgoing since she becomes aware that she must share Keeper with others although she doesn’t guess who they might be.

Thus, thoughtfulness reveals the evolutionary integration of love into a culturally responsible behavior which surmounts the fear of being contradicted and hurt by others as it strengthens self-confidence to do what appears to be right at the moment even if it can’t be explained yet: it sums up a feeling which relies on experience to aliment an instinctive trust in the future which will be able to relativize oppositions through better reciprocal knowledge and the constructive energy it will release. So, the disappearance of Teddy after Otter had treated him badly reveals the saving power of the deep link she has with Keeper and which she owes to their common life and the trust in the other’s kindness it developed. From the beginning, he has explained to her their relationship is based on individual actions one is supposed to be responsible for. That’s why she has been taught very early by him the meaning of an emergency. It allows to wake him up as love tolerates transgressions and exceptions so far they are motivated by a reflected appreciation of the situation, even if it refers to subjective standards: thoughtfulness is indeed the faculty to act adequately thanks to an acquired consciousness which also lets one guess his ineptitude to solve a problem autonomously and the necessity to ask for help as something perfectly natural. This enables her to surmount her pride being confident in Keeper’s love who will help her unconditionally and avoid whatever could humiliate her and would let her regret the choice which symbolizes her belief in the best in others. Her cuteness is particularly touching at the moment when she decides to involve Keeper because she tries first all she can to get Teddy back being so ashamed by the way she behaved with him. She would prefer nobody knew of it although it is already evident for the readers that it is too painful a secret for her to keep; when it becomes obvious she can’t sleep, plagued by remorse. Her dilemma underlines that she is most sensible and unable to calculate.  Her decision to wake up Keeper is mostly instinctive since she can no longer bear her guilt and the anxiety she might have lost her most precious companion because of her uncontrolled reaction. Before she does so, she had indeed spent a certain time sadly staring at the photo of them both which she took when they opened their toast restaurant. She had also drawn posters with his portrait asking for help to get him back. So, she had done all she could on her own when she wondered whether Teddy’s loss could be an emergency serious enough to wake up Keeper. This thought is an immediate relief for her as it frees her immediately from a responsibility she can’t take over alone and this is even more important than the object of the emergency since her trust in him is almighty and highlights simultaneously how much she loves him.

That’s why she dwells with a sort of jubilation on the importance of her decision which she is sure was well reflected and taken despite her own fears and sensibilities. At last, she found a way out of her torments by soliciting help from Keeper whose authority she respects. The illustrator writes “emergency” in red letters when she notes: “This was an emergency”. Her conclusion sounds like a sigh of relief when she deduces - “Luckily, in an emergency, you are allowed to wake up Otter Keeper.” He gave her the certitude that he would help her every time she needed it making her subjective feeling the only motivation which matters to him since he trusts the self-appreciation she learned while living with him. He foresaw the case when she would have to ask for his help and he gave her the opportunity to decide on her own when she needs it to let her experience her autonomy, so sure he is that she would bother him only for reasons which she believes serious even if they might be incomprehensible for him. He knows her so well that he trusts her thoughtfulness and her discernment according to her own level of consciousness. So, she wasn’t disappointed when she followed her instinct, hoping he would understand her distress even if Teddy has only such importance for her. Although it was quite hard for him to wake up and to search for him almost everywhere in the house, he is fully aware that from her point of view, this is an emergency which can’t be postponed until morning.

Thoughtfulness needs no words as it is based on the intuitive understanding of otherness which Sam Garton favours with his drawings, demonstrating that you need not be at the same level of evolution and maturity to guess what is essential for the other’s well-being. So, they might look not well assorted at all when they try to find Teddy in the middle of the night since Keeper wears his pyjamas while Otter is equipped with her backpack and her gear clothes as if she was going on an exploration. What matters is their inner harmony which lets them work in the same direction since it is essential for both to get well although only one of them is directly implicated. Those who laugh at them, at Keeper because he let a minor incident disturb his sleep and at Otter because of her unappropriated wear appear are unable to figure out symbolic significations which are however essential to notice what’s really getting on in the others mind. Only the ability to appreciate individual situations lets them react adequately even though it doesn’t look like this from an external point of view. Normality is an abstract notion which doesn’t make any sense here as it is based on an average which nobody corresponds to while love is able to consider emotions an objective reality although they can’t be materialized. It kept in touch with instincts throughout evolution and led them to a cultural expression which includes the ability to integrate strangeness as taking part in life and generating curiosity and an adventurer’s spirit.

He comforts her just because he takes her fear seriously and doesn’t use the opportunity for any kind of moral considerations which would increase her distress. His full active support lets her find back to a reasonable and adapted appreciation of the situation. Since she is no longer left alone with her self-minoring feelings, she becomes able again to concentrate on what he shows her really matters: searching systematically for Teddy and whilst she gets involved in this action, she loses her fears and surmounts her inhibition. She notes: “After hunting almost all night, we were running out of places to look. Then all of a sudden I had a clever thought….” while the drawing shows her grabbing the box with the toys and then hugging Teddy in the next picture while shouting his name. She guesses that she found the solution on her own because Keeper didn’t leave her alone when she didn’t feel good: he did exactly what she needed at the right moment since he was there when she feared to be abandoned by Teddy because she did wrong. So, this experience she shared with him, becomes a symbol as it gives her the assurance that love has its own rules and doesn’t judge as it is based on reciprocal tolerance: that’s why it helps put things in the right perspective, even the fact that she was rude to Teddy. That’s why the highly emotional scene when she hugs him is compensated by the humoristic drawing once the acute crisis has been surmounted. With the caption “Now everything is normal again”, it features both, Keeper and Otter, sleeping at the breakfast table. Even she is sleepy and no longer only him since their common adventure they brought to a happy ending let them get closer than they already were so that she got included in Keeper’s tender self-derision, underlined by the artist, who at the same time mocks a normality which he shows doesn’t exist as such in life since it is only due to the temporary exhaustion of the two protagonists.

Through this example, Sam Garton stimulates again the dialogue between adults and children as he stresses that moral is an obstacle to their understanding because it uses guilt to educate and inhibit feelings instead of giving them an opportunity to evolve through an adapted action as the result of a better self-appreciation. It’s because Otter can’t cope with the consciousness of her own responsibility for Teddy’s disappearance that she lost her clear mind and Keeper only readjusted her to reality by reassuring her that she was lovable.  This was enough to give her back the self-confidence she needed to find him on her own while a sense of morality wouldn’t give her an opportunity to get over a mistake she made in a careless moment when she was in trouble herself. It always supposes the other to be an abstract authority instead of a living being who will be able to interpret an individual behaviour and give it again a social orientation. The humorous and ironic touch is that Teddy is “just a toy” personalized in Otter’s mind, which lightens the drama for the readers who are in Keeper’s position and know he will turn up. Yet it stresses how naturally sensible she is as she reveals much empathy with him as well because she has been educated by Keeper’s love which let her feel related with any creature who has a soul. This stresses the inappropriateness of moral considerations in children’s education as they transform their innate consciousness of what is right or wrong, which love must only encourage, into the fear of an irrevocable sanction by an abstract pitiless otherness which might catch them up wherever they might be. Keeper does exactly the contrary with Otter according to his personal experience of evolution which he owes his faith in the self-surmounting power of life and to the wisdom it leads.

While moral judgements remove children’s innocence letting them believe there is a causality between what they do and what affects them as if there was an immanent justice, Keeper helps Otter activate her own survival resources since she has guessed she couldn’t do without Teddy. He gives her self-confidence at the same time he lets her feel that love is what relates every creature who has a soul for someone. Casting this way a very original symbolical bridge between reality and fiction inside the book itself, he teaches her that love is unconditional as it is able to liberate all the instinctive power of imagination which activates unconscious links with others and helps assume even the most improbable relationships. Otter gets Teddy back from the moment when thanks to Keeper’s support she loses the fear provoked by her guilt and has no other purpose than to find him because she is sure now that her love is stronger than her pride and she believes that it will be the same with him. There is no obstacle left from the moment the faith in it has been restored as it is unconditional and grows with the generosity to forgive and not dwell on the other’s mistakes.

Sam Garton underlines that children need to be sure adults will not leave them alone with emotions they can’t cope with whatever might have provoked them. He makes clear that they have no right to use them to serve their own purpose and add their natural superiority they already have as grown-ups an abstract moral authority they have no chance to understand since they can’t experience it. This usurpation will only make them doubt the confidence they had naturally in their disinterested care. It will make them become hesitant and ready to adapt to their expectations even if this means to them a self-denial which they might not get conscious of because their natural instinctive qualities have been abused by a narrow-minded conception of love which doesn’t trust nature. At the opposite of that, Keeper’s unconditional love doesn’t need any justification as he recognizes that everyone has the right to have his own secrets so far he is an autonomous person who instinctively learned to protect his own weak points in the interest of his survival;  what is of higher value is his preservation for what he represents to another one whom experience taught that it can be worth surmounting self-protective instincts for the enrichment of life and one’s own pleasure.

Hence, the search for Teddy turns almost imperceptibly into a game from the moment Keeper helps Otter, entering her world to solve a problem he knew it was motivated by a fantasy although he had no idea which one. This sympathy which lets her appreciation appear wronged by her emotions changes the meaning of their common search and transforms her excessive affective implication into adapted activity through a trick relating her with what he is sure she can - playing.  Thanks to his participation, her gear wear, which signified how seriously she was taking her task, makes readers smile as the foreseeable happy ending lets it appear as a disguise suggesting that at her stage of evolution most of life is still a game and has to be it. Any projection of adult values on her behavior is just inappropriate and those who try to do so aren’t part of her life so long as Keeper is watching over her.

A book to all who love Otter

Part X: Review of Sam Garton's I am Otter by Béatrice Dumiche

The book’s dedication “to all who love Otter” is definitively programmatic. Sam Garton stresses the structural link which relates playing with reading and shows that playfulness is indispensable for mental development and must be favored for a lifetime because it is the foundation of human love which helps mankind evolve continuously by integrating individual experience in a larger culture to refine its perception and generate a better adapted behavior. Then, education is no longer a canonized curriculum anyone has to go through. As it gives value to the personal implication in shared experiences which won’t create a standardized equality on abstract expectations but restore the reciprocal balance between emotional sensibility and rational thinking. It will lead to the respect of adults’ authority which will eventually be understood by the children as being in their interest to preserve their freedom to learn how to adapt according to their age and their maturity since educating by love can’t mean demanding to answer the representations others have of one’s life. The author makes clear that, on the contrary, it has to stimulate self-confidence and discernment of what is good for each of them personally in a dialogue which is oriented by adults according to their larger experience to alleviate them from becoming involved in situations in which they can’t cope. The tensions which might result of it as the expression of an over-exalted and impatient imagination aiming at an exclusive identification with adults to hopefully get more freedom are most useful from this point of view - Otter’s experience demonstrates that this generates inadequate projects provoking chaos which request Keeper’s intervention to be solved. It highlights that imagination must be used adequately according to one’s personal abilities which can be properly appreciated only through adapted experiences. That is why it can’t be disassociated from love to be efficient and generate the readers’ own constructive sympathy.

Those who are in the privileged situation to observe Otter and Keeper interact and comment on them from the point of view of the author, who is involved in the story, discover that they are becoming actors in it at a symbolic level - they guess that it is developing instantly through a succession of episodes and become aware that the tensions between the protagonists, which come from their different stage of evolution, form actually the plot progressing by associations through the illustrations. This autonomy, which makes the whole story evolve according to the action of the two protagonists in their quest of reciprocal recognition and understanding, lets them experience that imagination serves love as the natural evolutionary response to the challenge of otherness because it can create unpredictable links to surmount it which will enrich life with new forms of cooperation generating a new autonomous dynamism. Initiated by the participation of the artist who nevertheless avoids any naïve identification with his heroine, the readers discernment is solicited by the multiple different impressions to make their own opinion about what is getting on whilst taking into account the different perspectives to interpret the characters’ behavior and realize that Otter appears so cute also because she is loved by anyone she comes in contact with. They experience that being loved makes one lovable and that empathy can transform not only the judgement on somebody else, it can change the person itself by giving it the consciousness it will never lose this fundamental support which responds the unconditional love which has been at the origin of its birth. Love appears a never ending involvement in life through the ability to imagine its continuity through the intimate knowledge how it evolves which the story itself features from the moment you not only read it, but live it and transmit your own interpretation of it.

The complexity of Sam Garton’s multi-layered book takes into account this perspective as it doesn’t reveal all its stakes at the first read although its plot is plainly efficient from the beginning as it evolves through interaction at different levels of understanding. Yet only the reflection on the images in relation with the text reveals Keeper’s secret through the illustrator’s smiling compassion: his self-ironic distance which expresses his inner strength not to renounce of his individuality and his authority so far he knows it is rooted in his life experience to which he owes his survival. So, he might sometimes appear mysterious and difficult to appreciate for Otter, for those who are able to observe him properly and understand what he is aiming at, he reveals a humorous character who has internalized self-irony as the best way to adapt in a society he isn’t able to change as a whole without losing his temper and failing like Otter when she tries to create her toast restaurant out of nothing.
That’s why his wisdom exists in the primitive form of the drawings, which conciliate the artist’s and Otter’s perspective instead of the text which expresses exclusively her ramblings although it is the current medium of rational thought: this inversion hints to his intellectual flexibility which enables him to bear contradictions for the sake of evolution. He has understood indeed that looking back from a higher stage of development doesn’t lead to a ruthless feeling of superiority towards others, yet to a reflection on the person he had been before and whom he can but love if he has enough self-esteem to still consider himself evolving and enjoy life as a never ending adaptation the challenges of which represent a permanent stimulation for his mind and its creativity. He will always be able to express his own personality – even despite Otter’s narration – because he knows how to master all sort of communication.

Only this exceptional subtlety lets him appreciate Otter’s unique personality and relate it for those who are getting to know her through her relationship with him; so, he is indulgent to her because, whatever she does to hinder his behaving like the adult he is and go to work, she reveals so originally and inventively that he can’t but sympathize and feel happy to be loved so much by such an amazing creature. The illustrations showing her mischievousness, when she drowns the alarm clock in the fish bowl or when she is sitting, puffed, amidst his lunchbox, point this complicity he can’t express openly to not lose his authority, yet makes the readers’ smile or even laugh at her cute smartness, he unveils the secret of his tolerant love - the capacity to understand others without giving up his own cleverness and the conviction that there will be enough readers who will be able to sympathize with him. Otter must recognize that all her attempts to keep him home failed, yet the drawings which reveal how Keeper sees her, let everyone feel how much he enjoyed to be challenged by her just because she brightens his life in such an unforeseeable way. The artist, as Keeper’s self-commenting alter ego, can’t but stress through his humorous illustrations that she is the source of his inspiration which originated his own change and led him to his philosophical distance towards his past he now considers a necessary part of his development to find back to himself from a higher perspective. Otter, whose passion is to draw almost ragingly everything which affected her, made him aware of his own talent which allowed him to express his emotions and let him hope to share them with those who would feel stimulated by Otter.

Thus, his book as his major work is his intimate, symbolic response to the pressure of social standards he can’t get into a direct confrontation with: it represents his personal change and the serenity it brought him just to dare being himself whatever others might think. He underlines that Otter transformed him imperceptibly, letting him look quite maladjusted and odd whilst he was in fact getting nearer to what he would like to be. He has enough humor to be conscious of this contradiction and to accept it, as the creativity Otter awoke in him, let him relate social values to which he tried awkwardly to adapt before and convicted him that he would find his own support among “those who love Otter”. Thanks to her, he ceased to be passive, yet instead of opposing to an impersonal, abstract society, she instigated in him the use of his fantasy with the same originality and cleverness as her to gather around him people who aim at being creative and symbolically express their originality. While he appears always sleepy in the morning because Otter’s vitality exhausts him, he begins to spread around him some of the color she brought into his life with her drawings. He accepts that evolving means to be considered quirky by those who didn’t experience it and stick to immovable principles preventing them from an originality the contradictions of which they fear: the “zzzzz”, Sam Garton adds to the drawings representing Keeper at Monday mornings or after he had been searching for Teddy overnight, hint to his self-irony while the multi-colored clothes worn when he reluctantly goes out into the grey workday-world, let him look quite heroic. He appears a precursor who doesn’t fear to show his difference openly, without caring about others since his self-confidence is rooted in his relationship with his creature and “those who love her”. So, his book reveals a modest and however ambitious project to change mentalities individually to break conformism which relies on mass phenomena. Moreover, it invites his readers not to trust the appearances and not to follow too easily public judgments which are quick at discrediting an otherness which disturbs their habits and which they prefer to evacuate by considering it “strange” instead of surmounting this first impression via empathy.