When Pablo Picasso was in his later years, he explained that when he was in his teens he could already paint and draw like the great masters, but it took him a lifetime to learn how to do it like a child.

I believe it wasn't the child's technique that Picasso was interested in acquiring, but the child-like zeal and fervor that goes into the wayward finger-painting, or the bedroom wall mural, or the split-second decision to turn a paper plate into an arctic origami albatross. For the children do not fear losing the patronage of a collector, or being ridiculed by an art review, or starving on a candy bar a day. Their intent is to rage through life with the intent to overthrow the dark monsters who loom in midnight bedroom closets, and duplicate the feel of a summer's lawn between their toes in a crayola landscape. To unscrew the sermons, regulations, and laws set upon them and remain true to the holy codes of disorder, chaos, and to the fight for victory over oppression. Because oppression is the greatest beast. It is the one that chooses your clothes, chooses your foods, chooses your sports, chooses your friends.

Perhaps it was during World War Two when Picasso was under Nazi surveillance in Paris that he felt that bulge in his throat-the kind that a child feels when Lima beans are force-fed and there's no exit but surrender. Maybe it was then that he truly sensed that omniscient pressure tumbling down narrow alleys with their footsteps of lead and eyes of shard glass, the kind that would draw the line between degenerate and socially productive; the same that could decide at any time if he would be "removed."

Children are fantastic exorcists. They can exorcise bedroom ghosts with makeshift tents and flashlight swords, or by drawing protective heroes on their walls where the dark lords linger.

What can adults learn from these magicians, these Merlins of some deep magic no clergy can ever comprehend? We can learn about passion, and the thirst and hunger to survive, and the hope to see daylight again with one less demon to oppose when once again the curtains close and the lights dim and the night is turned over to silence.

Learn more about this author, Gerald Yuscavage.
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