Today I’m giving my brother the first two volumes of my autobiographical trilogy. The fact that my surviving siblings haven’t read it is, in itself, proof of how normies repress family tragedies at all costs, even if they’ve witnessed some of them.
I’ve been highlighting on this site that fairy tales contain profound messages about the mistreatment of children by their parents, provided we recognize that adaptations like Disney’s have little to do with the original stories. Yesterday I watched with interest this video:
When James Barrie was a child, his older brother David died a day before his fourteenth birthday from a fall while ice skating. The effects of his death drove their mother mad, and were described at length by Barrie himself years later in the fictionalized biography Margaret Ogilvy: By Her Son, where he addresses in detail the feelings and emotions of young James, his strategies for helping his mother overcome the deep depression into which she had fallen, and his attempts to offer himself as a kind of replacement for the deceased boy.
“Offering himself as a replacement” means that Barrie sacrificed his true self due to his mother’s profound depression: a drama symbolized by Peter Pan, a character he created for a play that premiered in London in 1904.
Peter Pan is a boy who never grows up, is ten years old, and hates the adult world. The figure of Peter Pan is inspired by the Llewelyn Davies brothers. Barrie developed the idea for Peter Pan from his time spent with and friendship with the Davies children. He often performed small plays with the Davieses and actively participated in their childhood games.
But the most sinister aspect of the matter is that the commandment “thou shan’t grow up,” with which Barrie’s mother’s horrific depression had programmed the mind of her surviving son, was perpetuated by Barrie himself when he adopted these children after their parents died—watch the video above. Trauma demands repetition: something similar to what Beethoven did to his nephew, whom he also adopted and mistreated (the nephew, as an adult, attempted suicide by shooting himself in the temple), due to the abuse Ludwig van Beethoven’s father had inflicted on him as a child.
But that’s another story…
2 replies on “Peter Pan”
Rather than never growing up, I was left from my earliest days never quite understanding childhood (after all, from early on it had been brutalized out of me) but yet not knowing anymore what adulthood meant – from just before my 17 year I was kidnapped by the psychiatric system and never really spat out (and then, reluctantly) until 25-26, and then back into the fray, as that facsimile of a functioning adult, and then more psychiatric misery, increasing, for another decade. I haven’t had adult pleasure in my life, though I have done ‘adult’ things. I think for when I realised I wasn’t a boy anymore until now has been unblemished misery. But I don’t look for that childhood anymore either – no matter how much my father would still wish to thrust me back into it by his patronising attitudes – and am just here, drifting in limbo. I never knew it. That’s what most of my life has been, carrying on in an atomised void, wondering what I could have had, but never paying too much thought to it, lest it consume me in tears. I assume it’s the same for all abuse survivors. A vital chunk of life taken, it can never be replaced later, or compensated for. I realised soon enough that I existed for a purpose, not a self-gratification. I’m just here now still, waiting to serve that function, or I wouldn’t be here at all.
In a nutshell, from my perspective, you could offer me childhood again, but I wouldn’t take it. I’m an adult now, for all it’s worth. Every step from age (maybe) 4-5 until now has been misery, interspersed with brief moments of complacency, hedonism or automaton thinking. It leaves you like an angry ghost.
I don’t, and can’t empathise with Barrie emotionally, but I understand him at a rational only level I think. I always wanted a lot I will never have. Now all I am, when not in melancholic apathy, or the inertia of neuroleptic attack, is rage and hatred. Others shouldn’t have to experience this. I hope, eventually, that they never do at all. More for them than for me, as my own life is forever wasted.
The most ironic thing about it is that, to adopt those four words as a religion, you need to have suffered tons of unnecessary pain. I think Kalki will be one of us (in fact, if the third candidate for our Syssitia hasn’t appeared yet, it might be because he hasn’t reached the seventh circle of hell like us).
Let’s see what my brother says about the books I’m giving him today: memoirs of this hell that our parents and society dragged me into…