Michael Jackson and the Consequences of the Lost Childhood: A Teaching from the Tao of Potter

It obviously cannot be proven, but I have been long of the opinion that much of the reason for the tragically abbreviated lives of geniuses like Mozart, Schubert, and Mendelssohn lay in the fact that childhood was stolen from them. They were pushed, rushed, driven into adulthood, and then soaked by a culture greedy for the products of their genius. As a result, their lives were poisoned with fame and expectation, and they suffered continually from their hurried or missing childhood experiences. I am fairly certain that, had they been allowed a normal childhood experience, their lives would have been longer and their creative output as great, and perhaps even more diverse, than it was.

I suspect the same thing happened with the late Michael Jackson. While I don’t for an instant put him into the same category of genius as the above-named composers, nevertheless he suffered the same type of loss in his life. When you lose your childhood, you lose everything, for there can be no recovery from that loss.

I think there is a lesson to this from the novels of J.K. Rowling, and I mention it in the Introduction to my Tao of Potter. As discussed below, the lost childhood sets up a lifetime of regression, the fruitless search for what will never be recovered. Thus, you find a grown man turning his home into an amusement park and dressing up like a pre-teenage girl.

To force conclusions aborts solutions; development that is driven to a fixed point of culturally-defined maturity only sets the stage for a lifetime of regression. Therefore, the students of Hogwarts both arrive and return via a long journey, pulled by an old steam locomotive, during which they will have time to adjust inwardly, form relationships, contemplate, and literally feel the time and energy that is needed for growth. This process is what the psychologist James Hillman refers to as “growing down”:

By now, the upward idea of growth has become a biographical cliché. To be an adult is to be a grown-up. Yet this is merely one way of speaking of maturity, and a heroic one at that. For even tomato plants and the tallest trees send down roots as they rise toward the light. Yet the metaphors of our lives see mainly the upward part of organic motion.

Hasn’t something critical been omitted in the ascensionist model? Birthing. Normally, we come into the world headfirst, like divers into a pool of humanity…Descent takes a while. We grow down, and we need a long life to get on our feet.

“Grow up” is a message of forced urgency; often the phrase itself is spoken in a kind of harried impatience, usually to a person who we think is acting immaturely (“can’t you grow up?”). In the linear, upward model, development is pictured as a rapid succession of stages, which can be compressed and foreshortened through the technologies of progress, until childhood comes to resemble the boot-sequence of a computer. Hillman goes on to point out the frequent consequences of development that is driven by this demand to “grow up”:

College kids with bright promise sometimes suddenly…fall off the fast track. They want to “get down.” Or drinks, drugs, and depression set in like Furies. Until the culture recognizes the legitimacy of growing down, each person in the culture struggles blindly to make sense of the darkenings and despairings that the soul requires to deepen into life.

Rowling’s Harry Potter novels are marked throughout by this tension between the natural, omni-directional movement of growth, in which the soul “grows down” as the body matures physically, and the culturally-defined “upward and onward” obsession, familiar to nearly all of us. This again reveals that tension between the magical reality and the Muggle delusion — the forced separation of heart and brain. But early on, as she introduces her characters and settings, Rowling is careful to remind us that true magic is found not in the flick of a wand, but during a slow train ride, or through long nights of solitary gazing into a mirror that reveals the images of an unknown and idealized past.