Martin Buber, You or Me?

I love ‘Outnumbered’, particularly Karen’s delivery of the potent logic of children. She showed their unabashed ego, their acute reasoning and curiosity and unconcern for the emotions of others wonderfully. It’s now a few years on and the young girl playing her has changed. She can’t quite pull off that magical trick. That’s no criticism just an observation. It’s this time of year the young highland cattle at the farm are separated from their mothers and brought into their own enclosure just like the first year of primary school. They’re delightfully unsure, curious and playful, and it only takes a few short months for them to find themselves and develop their own place in that new society. For me it defines a process of brain development where something essential, I’ll call it ego, is added to by a block of computational cognition of the self/other relationship. Karen has lost her clearly delineated ego for something much more complex.  Now earlier this glorious March morning I noticed a cat some 30 feet up a tree at the bottom of our garden. It was stuck poor thing and may be starving, should I try to rescue it? Was the way it swished its tail a sign of distress? Should I ask at doors if people have a grey cat that’s gone missing? I decided to wait and see. Later it had gone so I imagined it had summonsed up its last vestiges of bravery and, weak limbed, clambered down and joyfully regained the ground. I told Mothermouse who said she’d seen it jump down casual as you like. So there you have it. Young Karen would have said, “Why is that cat up a tree?” and maybe the slightly older Karen would have pestered her dad to try to save it. As in ‘Mice do Theatre’ she now has a long journey back to where she started. It may take some time.