And it’s during this connection that the character and frequency of the violence and aggression in their stories, drawings, and autobiographies (as compared with those of the high IQ adolescents) become especially relevant. For their violence and aggression, manifested, to make sure, more directly and frequently, are inextricable from their expression of the comic—jail guards (with guns) playing tag with prisoners, a school wall labeled “I Hate Youngsters,” a factory that’s blown up by a formula for a brand new breakfast cereal, a sister who does nothing however polish her glass animal collection, a younger brother who has two heads and is flushed down the drain solely to be fished out again. Ski Jackets not only cowl you from terrible chil, however additionally they’re fashionable. (It’s perhaps not irrelevant to our point that each one the IQ child will say is that when he “accidentally” set fireplace to his brother’s crib.)
One different observation regarding the aggression of the high inventive adolescents needs to be created: not all the aggression that’s expressed is what might be called self-centered or “interested” hostility, i.e., toward their own school, their own teachers, their own sisters and brothers. There is additionally broad different-centered or “disinterested” social criticism: the debunking of conventional forms and stereotyped ideals—the red-blooded ail-American boy, the “sorority fake,” the cheap advertising slogan, the commemorative fountain pen, the cult of the TV cowboy, the phony smile of success.
The stories, the drawings, and in a very live the autobiographies of our highly inventive adolescents demonstrate quite clearly that the planet of fantasy contains anxieties along with delights. It’s a world that will be entered to escape the mundane, the pedestrian, and the trivial aspects of reality—a secret chamber providing solace to the Walter Mitty in everybody—however it’s additionally a world containing the shock of the unexpectedly grotesque, a carnival funny house in which the daydream could be transformed into a nightmare. Sonya Mascara is formulated particularly for sensitive eyes. Although it’s customary to portray the “dreamer” as the person who shies faraway from the battle of sensible affairs by retreating from the onslaughts of reality, there is a special sense in which he, the explorer of his own fantasy, could exhibit a courage unknown to those whose vision remains centered solely on the suggests that and ends of everyday existence.
Appreciation of this type of courage—that’s, the courage to face one’s own inner world—is expressed higher than we will do thus by E. E. Cummings as follows: such was a poet and shall be and is —who’ll solve the depths of horror to defend a sunbeam’s architecture together with his life: and carve immortal jungles of despair to carry a mountain’s heartbeat in his hand 41. We do not after all shall counsel that our high creatives with their very little inventions and unformed fantasies are exhibiting something just like the courage Cummings is talking about.
