Winnie-the-Pooh, Ora pro Nobis

“I saw a heffalump fall like lightning”

Detail from a Winnie-the-Pooh sketch by E. H. Shepard

Consider a stuffed animal: a teddy bear, for instance. Does it strike you as a particularly profound thing? When you look at one, do you find that your faculties are thrown into wonder? Or is it the case, rather, that you regard it as most do—as yet another prosaic accoutrement of childhood: the sort of thing one might find in a big box with train sets, building blocks, floaties, and coloring books? Yes, that is probably how you think of it. That is, you are probably thinking of it squarely in the context of childhood—for instance, in an adorable little scene involving a small boy holding onto one for comfort while his mother turns on the nightlight and tells him he has a very big day tomorrow and must go right to sleep! In that sort of context, the stuffed animal often seems as unremarkable as the nightlight or sleep itself. But now consider it in another: imagine an adult with a stuffed animal.

In Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh’s most famous novel (now the stuff of two unequally regarded screen adaptations) there is just such a peculiar thing in the person of Sebastian Flyte—a tragic character with whom the novel’s protagonist, Charles Ryder, forms an attachment, which by dint of its peculiar attraction leads him almost inevitably to another with the former’s sister. (Waugh-protagonists have a curious habit of hopping out of the frying pan and into hellfire.) In an early passage, Ryder recollects that he knew of Flyte at university long before he met him and that in spite of the latter’s various qualities, particularly “his beauty, which was arresting,” that when he first saw him, he “was struck less by his looks than by the fact that he was carrying a large Teddy-bear.” And it is with this detail—that Sebastian Flyte, an adult, has a stuffed animal—that Waugh gives us a sort of key to Flyte’s character with which it seems all his mysteries can be unlocked: his extraordinary charm, jealousy, alcoholism, mistrust, later devotion to a wayward German sponger, and, most of all, his hopeless longing to serve as a missionary in some sort of idyllic setting with cannibals or pygmies or lepers in a church by a river, “which he could look after when the priest was away.”

He is one of those men—and he is a man in spite of his childishness—who is possessed by an all-consuming love of the lovely and is led by it like Keats’s knight-at-arms is by the faery maiden into that cold dream on the hillside with all the other pale would-be kings and princes to feast on the conceits of his fancy with starved lips in the gloam.¹ He hungers for something he cannot find in the world. He grows thin and drinks cocktail after cocktail precisely because he is not thirsty for anything that would nourish his all-too worldly flesh. His heart will not let him find happiness here—and so he never abandons his faith. His sickness and cure are one and the same.² That is the sort of man Sebastian Flyte is. That is why Charles Ryder is drawn to him. That is why he has a teddy bear.

It is no wonder then that children are generally fond of stuffed animals: they are not grown up. They are not what they would be. They are born perforce to dream: before they grow up, they must imagine growing up; before they live in the world, they must imagine the world; and before they are themselves, they must imagine someone to whom they are that self. This, of course, is not a novelty. Long before they emerged in their mass-produced, plush form (thanks to the pioneering work of Margarette Steiff in the late 19^th century), children played with more or less analogous cloth dolls, examples of which regularly turn up in archeological sites in Egypt, Greece, and Rome. In fact, flip open the pages of human history, turn to whatever chapter in whatever language you like, and there you will find humanity exercising its imagination upon some convenient object or another to stand in relation to itself. Take a good hard look at the Löwenmensch of Hohlenstein-Stadel, the so-called “Venus” of Hohle Fels, the Urfa Man—and you will see that whatever it is they actually meant to their makers that they could only really mean that by virtue of imagination. (Were it otherwise, they would not be mysteries to us.) We do not, though, seem to have an exclusive claim to this particular virtue.

At about the midpoint of the 20^th century, a psychologist named Harry Harlow conducted a series of experiments nowadays often described by his ever-growing legions of critics in such terms as ‘violating ordinary sensibilities,’ ‘offensive,’ and ‘evil,’ which—though they shed light on questions pertaining to maternal-separation, dependency, and isolation—were on the whole concerned with the question of love. And in their aftermath, in 1958, he made a now-historic address discussing his findings to the sixty-sixth Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association in Washington, D.C., which he fittingly titled, “The Nature of Love.”

Ostensibly, in deference to that endearing tradition of all great (and purportedly ‘misunderstood’) scientists who engender greater heaps of censure, Harlow began to make the case for his work by waxing poetic, saying, “Love is a wondrous state, deep, tender, and rewarding,” before going on to lament that his colleagues seemed thus far to have either ignored it or said nothing more substantive than what had already been said by poets and novelists. These men and women of science, it seemed to him, regarded love as something quite secondary to hunger, thirst, pain, sex, and the like. But he disagreed with their assessment. He suspected that love was a far more primary sort of thing and therefore resolved to study its foundation at the foundation of life. “Unfortunately,” he explained, “the human neonate is a limited experimental subject for such researches because of his inadequate motor capabilities.” So, he turned his sights to baby macaques given that they are “more mature at birth” and that their “basic responses relating to affection,” he figured, are more or less the same.

The experiments started with the separation of sixty infants from their mothers six to twelve hours after birth. Remarking on this shocking measure, Harlow explained by way of reassurance that the ensuing mortality rate “was only a small fraction of what would have obtained had we let the monkey mothers raise their infants.” His infants, he said, by contrast, “were healthier and heavier” than the naturally-raised, noting, “We know that we are better monkey mothers than are real monkey mothers thanks to synthetic diets, vitamins, iron extracts, penicillin, chloromycetin, 5% glucose, and constant, tender, loving care.”

His team noticed something interesting at first: the babies, who were all totally isolated from one another, all seemed quite attached to the cloth pads used to cover the floors of their cages to the extent that when his team attempted to remove them for sanitary reasons, that they “engaged in violent temper tantrums,” an observation that seemed to tally with others in “allied” studies: namely, that baby monkeys raised without the benefit of such pads, who only had bare wire mesh to contend with, survived only “with difficulty, if at all during the first five days of life.” “The baby,” he said, “human or monkey, if it is to survive, must clutch at more than a straw.”

So, Harlow like some sort of mythical demiurge looked down upon all his little orphans—a menagerie of monkey-Adams alone in their ersatz Edens with nothing but light and the nutritional sufficiencies of life—and pondered this remarkable observation in connection with theories then prevalent at the forefront of infant psychology having to do with the importance of touch. Then, he explained, he dreamt up an idea: he would create for his beloved little orphans a helpmeet of a sort, “an artificial, inanimate mother,” the imago of which would be “dependent neither upon the capriciousness of evolutionary processes nor upon mutations produced by chance radioactive fallout,” but which would rather be conceived “in terms of modern human engineering principles.”

He began with a plan for a “perfectly proportioned, streamlined body stripped of unnecessary bulges and appendices” with a “unibreast” (to avoid “redundancy”) placed in “an upper-thoracic, sagittal position.” He made its skeleton of wood, its viscera of rubber, and its skin of cotton terry cloth. Then he heated it very slightly with a lightbulb. “The result,” he said, “was a mother, soft, warm, and tender, a mother with infinite patience, a mother available twenty-four hours a day, a mother that never scolded her infant and never struck or bit her baby in anger.” He quipped, “It is our opinion that we engineered a very superior monkey mother, although this position is not held universally by the monkey fathers.”

But do not be at all deceived, for another artificial, inanimate monkey mother was made. And into this mother, Harlow poured his cruelty and malice. (No good demiurge myth is complete without a pair of primal twins.) In many respects, this second mother was like the first, but instead of soft materials sheathed in cotton terry cloth, she was made of bare wire mesh.

At first, Harlow left some of his little monkeys in cages with access to two cubicles, each of which contained one of their new mothers. For four lucky little monkeys, the cloth mother was outfitted with a sort of lactation device and the other was not, and for four other little monkeys (for whom Harlow fated more interesting childhoods), vice versa. Unsurprisingly, he said, the monkeys in the first group vastly preferred their cloth mothers to their wire ones. But, he noted, this same preference was also held by the second group in spite of their wire mother’s advantages.

Other groups of monkeys were subjected to different experimental configurations. One, for instance, was raised solely with cloth mothers and another with wire ones. Both groups, Harlow said, gained weight, though, he observed, the monkeys in the latter produced softer, unhealthier stools—the sort which in lieu of a dietary explanation could be attributable to severe stress. It seemed to him therefore, “The wire mother is biologically adequate but psychologically inept.” “Man cannot live by milk alone,” he said.

Harlow continued with the experiments, giving some of the monkeys access to significantly larger cages in which he would introduce a “fear stimulus” or two (for instance, a toy bear making loud noises). In these cases, he observed that, at first, when one of the mothers was present, that after encountering novel stimuli the monkeys would typically rush back to her, clutching, hugging, and tugging at her face. In time, however, after the monkeys were repeatedly exposed to the stimuli, he said that they seemed instead to treat their mother as “a source of security, a base of operations” to which they would regularly return after bouts of exploration.

Then Harlow proceeded with a variation, removing the surrogate mothers from the larger cages. In these cases, he said, the behavior of the monkeys was “quite different.” In response to the stimuli, the monkeys would typically freeze in a crouching position and in cases where given monkeys had previously been in the same cage with a surrogate mother, they would typically rush at first to the place where she had been and not finding her there “run rapidly from object to object, screaming and crying all the while.”

At the conclusion of his address, Harlow said that in comparison with monkeys that had been raised with real monkey mothers, “Love for the real mother and love for the surrogate mother appear to be very similar,” and “whether the mother is real or a cloth surrogate, there does develop a deep and abiding bond between mother and child. In one case it may be the call of the wild and in the other the McCall of civilization, but in both cases there is ‘togetherness.’” He then speculated that given his findings, Americans probably need not worry themselves over the trend in mothers spending more and more time in the workforce and less and less in child-rearing given that the “American male is physically endowed with all the really essential equipment to compete with the American female on equal terms in one essential activity: the rearing of infants.” (That equipment being skin.)

There is, however, another plausible conclusion that could be drawn from the results of these experiments, which is not that artificial, inanimate mothers could be doled out to the American public by a specially created government agency as economically efficient substitutes for the real thing, but rather that the love of stuffed animals is not uniquely humane: that perhaps the rest of the animal kingdom likewise yearns for teddy bears and peter rabbits—that coursing throughout the whole of creation there is (or is latent) a real love for the imagined other made manifest so powerful that it can, for instance, give a little orphaned monkey the wherewithal to endure the several hells of Harlow’s making.³ But how could that really be possible? How could something like a sock puppet give life itself the will to live?

The real question, though, in an exacting sense, is not how, but why—we all know more or less how it is that a child loves a stuffed animal whether from observation or fondly recalled experience: it is in this why that there is the mystery—why is it the case that we love stuffed animals? Why do children (or laboratory monkeys) get a real sense of comfort from a stuffed animal when they are presented with something scary? A stuffed animal does not seem at first glance like the sort of thing with which there even could be anything like love: after all, everything a child loves about a stuffed animal is not in the physical stuffed animal itself, but rather in the child. What the child properly loves is only in his imagination. True, children project this object of their love externally, but that projection is always only accomplished in imagination.

If some little girl with no knowledge of another’s beloved stuff animal were to pick it up, what it is she would then be holding could not amount to what it is to its rightful owner. She would be picking up, as it were, an empty vessel, which she could then herself imbue with a totally different personality. And yet—and this is where there is the mystery—a child’s love for a stuffed animal seems to manifest as a real, tangible relation. Seeing the beloved stuff animal on a shelf does not suffice. Children must be with their stuffed animals. A given child holds onto a plush lilac dinosaur with googly eyes whom he calls ‘Mortimer Jr.’ and in his embrace, there is a sincere love. No one with a heart could doubt the absolute sincerity of that love! (In any case, for those without, there is the suitably appealing scientific authority of Harlow’s published and peer reviewed work to go by.)

Even when children are old enough to understand the strange dynamic of their relationships with stuffed animals: that what they love is in their imagination, that the physical object has no interiority, etcetera—they nonetheless typically hold firm to their love. We adults, even, with all the much-touted benefits of our accumulated wisdom and understanding, often cannot help but look upon our childhood stuffed animals fondly. The how of our love does not need to understand the why. But there is, perhaps, a clue as to this why to be found in a resemblance of sorts.

All too often, we do not think of the why of God’s love. We take it for granted as if it were some sort of natural law that God should love us, but it is anything but that: after all, if it were, it would mean nothing. How would any lover react to hearing that a beloved’s love was not a matter of real feeling? That the beloved’s attraction was analogous to that which attracts an apple to a center of gravity? Or that its logic was analogous to that which obliges two and two to equal four? That could not be what it is; that is not the love of the lily-fed Lover in the Song of Songs who at times “cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills” and at other times “had withdrawn Himself, and was gone.” When we are twice-told in the fourth chapter of John, “Deus caritas est,” that God is love, it cannot be that we are simply being informed of something as hum-drum as a Euclidian principle. No, we are being told about a real mystery—that is, a real problem for philosophers.

Aristotle, for instance, in Book XII of his Metaphysics argues that since God is perfect, His thoughts must likewise be perfect, and that therefore He must only think thoughts of His own perfection: that though the world is moved by God, that God is never moved in the slightest by it. In Book VIII of The Nichomachean Ethics, he even argues that so much as a sort of friendship between man and God is impossible because that would require a degree of equality or proportionality, which a man great as he may be could never have with a perfect being.⁴ Of course, there are ways of seemingly getting around this problem of implied providential narcissism: for instance, in the First Part of the Summa, Aquinas presents an elaborate argument the gist of which is that since God has an intellect, it follows that he has a will, and if he has that, it follows further, given that the first movement of a will “and of every appetitive faculty” is love, that “we must attribute love to Him.”

Now, it is all well and good to round up a bunch of innocent-seeming propositions and beat them over the head with logic until they yield a confession of secret love. But there is nonetheless a problem with the result of this instance of merry intellectual exercise: namely, that the love in question does not have the feel of the one we know colloquially: that is, it does not admit any sense of necessity. (If God is perfectly sufficient unto himself, no amount of logical fussing could allow one to say that He also needs anyone or anything else.) After all, when we talk of love, especially of the sort that inspires people to devotion, we generally talk of just that thing that Socrates (quoting Diotima, his instructress in the Art) describes in Plato’s Symposium as the bastard of Plenty and Poverty: that which inspirits our desire to possess what we lack.

When we overhear lovers saying to one another that they need each other, that they would be nothing without the other, that they would rather die a thousand agonizing deaths than live for an hour without the other, and so on—we can all confidently affirm that what we are hearing at the very least has the ring of love to it. But if we were to overhear someone say to his professed beloved that he does not really need her in the slightest, that he is quite perfectly sufficient unto himself, and that nonetheless, she should be assured that he loves her somehow or another because that proposition follows given his logically necessary possession of an appetitive faculty—who in all the world would be confident in the authenticity of his love? (One is tempted to say that anyone who would believe such a declaration of love deserves it.)

So, we have our conundrum: If we take it as a given that God, a perfectly self-sufficient being, loves us, we do not at first glance seem to have a way to explain why it is He does so in a way that reminds us so strikingly of our own loves for one another.

Yes, Why does God love us? Well, perhaps the answer to this question is related to that of another: why did God make the world? After all, if God lacks for nothing, why bother? And then, when God created man in His image and set him in Eden where the latter likewise also seemingly lacked for nothing, why did God look down upon him and say, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him”? And why did God make Eve out of Adam while he was sleeping? While he was ostensibly dreaming?

In any case, when we consider the love of stuffed animals—a love the object of which is properly within its subject, but which nonetheless appears, especially to the young and naive, to manifest as an external, tangible relation—we have at our disposal a relatable, widespread type of love that both strikes us as worthy of the name—given that is replete somehow or another with the rapturous feeling of necessity—which nevertheless cannot by its nature have as its basis a deficit.

But is this all ridiculous? The idea that we are God’s stuffed animals? That the world is His Hundred Acre Wood? (and the Devil a heffalump?) Yes, perhaps it is ridiculous: we do not quite seem to be stuffed animals. But, then again, it could not be entirely ridiculous to suppose that the love of stuffed animals has some sort of relation to God’s love given that by virtue of being His it is the form of the thing and that all loves, even this very peculiar one, therefore must in some meaningful sense be refractions of it. What is more, ridiculous as this analogy may well be (or not), it is nonetheless remarkably palpable in humanity’s most endearing literary depiction of the love of stuffed animals—namely, A.A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner, particularly in the last chapter.

At the beginning of the chapter, the stuffed animals of the Hundred Acre Wood come to learn that Christopher Robin, the little boy whom they all love, “is going away.” None of them know where he is going or even how it is that they know he is going. But they know that they know and that knowledge is sufficient reason for Rabbit to call together an assembly at Winnie the Pooh’s house so an appropriate resolution can be made on the matter. At the meeting, Eeyore, whom Rabbit has specially tasked with the drafting of this resolution, takes the floor. He tells everyone, “hitherto … all the Poetry in the Forest has been written by Pooh, a Bear with a Pleasing Manner but a Positively Startling Lack of Brain,” but now he has prepared “a surprise” for them: a new poem written by himself “in a Quiet Moment” entitled, “POEM.” It is a brilliant modernist work that puts the best of James Joyce to shame and ends with a collective expression of farewell and love. Eeyore tells the assembly, “If anybody wants to clap…now is the time to do it” and everyone claps. Then Pooh tells Eeyore the poem was “much better” than his and Eeyore says, “it was meant to be.”

The assembly unanimously resolves to sign the poem and present it as a parting gift to Christopher Robin. So, they sign it and go to Christopher Robin’s House. But at the house, once Christopher Robin has greeted the company, all the animals suddenly feel “awkward and unhappy.” They had realized “it was a sort of good-bye they were saying, and they didn’t want to think about it.” Eeyore is nudged to the front, but he cannot quite manage the task at hand. He complains of crowding, protests that Christopher Robin surely “wants to be alone,” and storms off. All the other animals also leave with the exception of Pooh. Nonetheless, Christopher Robin expresses his thanks and invites Pooh to follow him.

So, Pooh and Christopher Robin leave the house and Pooh asks where they are going. Christopher Robin says, “Nowhere.” Then he asks Pooh what he likes “doing best in the world” and Pooh pauses to think. At first, he reflects upon “Eating Honey” and how it is “a very good thing to do,” but then considers, “there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better.” Then he reflects again and considers the goodness of being with Christopher Robin as well as Piglet, and answers that what he likes “best in the whole world is Me and Piglet going to see You, and You saying ‘What about a little something?’” Christopher Robin says he likes that too, but what he likes doing best is “Nothing.” In wonderment, Pooh asks, “How do you do Nothing?” and Christopher Robin answers that they are doing just that at the moment: that doing nothing “means just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.’” Then the pair go on until they arrive at “an enchanted place” at the summit of the forest named, “Galleons Lap.”

This place, “Nowhere,” is a grove at the forest’s summit with “sixty-something trees in a circle” that no one has ever been able to count accurately, even with the help of string. “Being enchanted,” it is different than the rest of the forest: its floor consists of “close-set grass, quiet and smooth and green,” upon which one can sit “carelessly, without getting up again almost at once and looking for somewhere else.” There, “they could see the whole world spread out until it reached the sky, and whatever there was all the world over was with them.” Then all of a sudden, Christopher Robin begins telling Pooh about “some of the things”: kings, queens, factors, Europe, an “an island in the middle of the sea where no ships came,” technology, rituals, foreign imports, and Pooh says, “I didn’t know,” and thinks to himself “how wonderful it would be to have a Real Brain.” At length, however, Christopher Robin comes “to an end of the things,” and is “silent.” He sits “looking out over the world, and wishing it wouldn’t stop.” Then Pooh asks whether it is “a very Grand thing to be” a knight, muddling the word at first, and Christopher Robin says, “it’s not as grand as a King,” but certainly grander than other things. Then Pooh asks if “a Bear” such as himself could be a knight and Christopher Robin says he could and takes a stick and with it touches Pooh on the shoulder, saying, “Rise, Sir Pooh de Bear, most faithful of all my Knights.”

Pooh thanks him and immediately falls into a dream and in his dream, he is with other knights who are faithful to “Good King Christopher Robin.” But he does not think he is getting the whole thing “right.” He laments inwardly that he is but “a Bear of Very Little Brain.” He thinks perhaps that because of his lack of understanding Christopher Robin will not tell him “any more,” and wonders “if being a Faithful Knight meant that you just went on being faithful without being told things.”

Then Christopher Robin calls out to Pooh and tells him, “I’m not going to do Nothing anymore,” before adding, “Well, not so much.” He falls into silence again. Pooh says “Yes.” Then Christopher Robin asks him, “when I’m— you know— when I’m not doing Nothing, will you come up here sometimes?” Pooh asks, “Just Me?” and Christopher Robin says “Yes” and promises to be there with him. Then Christopher Robin asks Pooh to promise that he will not ever forget him and Pooh, being a Knight of Faith, makes that promise. Christopher Robin then asks Pooh for his understanding in the event of whatever might happen, but Pooh does not understand. He asks, “Understand, what?” Then Christopher Robin, says, “Oh, nothing.”

1. See Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.”

2. In this vein, in the Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot writes,

“Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam’s curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.”

3. See also: Punch-kun (パンチくん), a macaque living at Ichikawa City Zoo in Japan whose relationship with a Djungelskog orangutan plushie has earned him the sympathy of millions. [This footnote is included solely for S.E.O. reasons. Forgive me. It was either this or a paragraph on labubus.]

4. Along this line of reasoning, Aristotle also makes an amusing argument as to why one should never wish one’s friend to become a god.