Wonderful question, Edna. Very suggestive and intriguing. Not that I have a particularly good answer to it, but would like to at least suggest a way to start thinking about it. The balloon, of course, has always served as a poetic index for childhood, and has been often invoked in the movies, for example, most famously by the French film the Red Balloon, recently "remade" into a beautiful film by the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao Hsien. the figure of the Balloon has also been invoked most recently in the great animated film UP. In brief we can say that the balloon belongs to an extent to a class of special OBJECTS that we designate as toys, and whose place in existence always belongs to a class of objects the psychoanalyst Winnicott named transitional objects (the most basic of which is a child's blanket) which mark as their name indicate a certain transional moment through between the dependence of childhood and the independence of the adult, the child needs the blanket - and the toys later on - as an object that will help him/her transition from the complete dependence of the mother to the independence of being grown up. to play with the toy is to slowly practice in this sense a separation from the mother or the parent in general. the toy both stands as a certain substitute, in a way a technical prosthesis, for the mother, at the same time as an object the child can control and through which to learn to control himself and be independent. The balloon seems to me to occupy a special place in such group due to its airiness and, in a way its own independence, being able to fly on its own. in a way the balloon is the child of the child, gaining independence from its first master, when it can fly on its own. As such the balloon both stands for the toy, but also in a way for the activity of freedom and adventure, when one goes off on one's own into the unknown, flying up. But there is also a sadness and a fragility to this wondrous object which is the balloon, both because in its independence and tendency to get away from the child if not held onto fast it seems to stand for an event of abandonment and loss, both from the point of view of the balloon, when it flies away it seems as if it was abandoned by the child, like a small kid who lost the hand of his mother for a moment and now is lost in a crowd without help, and from the point of view of the child who seems perhaps to have been abandoned by the balloon/protective parent (for remember that the transitional object is also a prosthetic replacement for the parent). the balloon thus seems to stand both for independent adventure as well as for fragility and abandonment, both at the transitional moment between the helpless child and the adult world. It is due to all these senses, it seems to me, that you were all of a sudden treated differently at the party. for a grown up to hold a balloon means that the grown up all of a sudden also occupies the transitional space of the child, both in a way calling for help, displaying a certain fragility of possible abandonment which the grown up would like to help, are called as protectors, and also as marking the beginning of independence and possible adventure (the proposed kiss). the balloon, marking the fragility and independence of the one thrown into the world, provokes all these reactions.
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Edna Stern tagged this post as Insightful and Very enjoyable.
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