Once upon a time

Yesterday, unexpectedly, Helena began to tell stories.  She can't really keep up a narrative, because she has trouble putting more than two or three words together in a phrase, but she has the structure right.

"Once upon a time," she began, and then paused, waiting for Rita and me to look at her.

"A butterfly..." again, a pause.

"What did the butterfly do, Helena?"

"It flew and played!"  A longer pause.  "And then..."

"And then what, Helena?"

"There was a girl.  They met."  Another pause, "And then..."

"And then what?"

"They played!"

Her first story went on like this for quite some time, and the rest of the day, she played the same verbal games whenever she had a chance, bringing each of her stuffed animals into the story.  And in the end, they all end up playing together or caring for each other, the two verbs which make Helena happiest.

I love stories, and always have, perhaps loving the plot so much that I am willing to overlook serious problems in character and theme and language just because I like a tale (thus my very un-intellectual love of Clive Cussler, Robert Jordan, and Elizabeth Peters, who I'd rather read than James Joyce any day).  It's interesting, though, that if Helena is right, plot isn't the first element of story.  Phatic communication is: the special words that don't really mean anything, but that point to the fact that this is a story.  "Once upon a time," or "And then...", the words Helena used as the skeleton of her story, are more a frame than a content.  They say, "Pay attention, I'm telling a story."

When we read the Bible, we often trip over the "And then it came to pass," as a translation of egeneto in Greek or (darn, I don't remember what it is in Hebrew... too many years away from grad school!).  It sounds staid and boring.  But the truth is, that the biblical authors are just doing Helena's "And then".  They're marking the story, reminding the reader/listener to pay attention.  Clive Cussler's car chases (always in antique cars, of course) or Elizabeth Peters' clever asides in the voice of Amelia Peabody are the same.  They don't so much mean anything as they draw attention.  "Look at me, I'm telling a cool story!"

And what more does a baby want that "Look at me!  Listen!"?

Chamomile for the eel

Helena, like many babies, loves to play at cooking, and she loves to make tea.  Recently, she has been selecting which type of tea she wants to serve us: mostly green tea, mate, and chamomile.  She is also very excited about sea life: sea horses and starfish and sharks and jellyfish.

One time, as she was expressing fear of moray eels (which look about as nasty as any critter can look), she was also serving tea.  For some reason, Rita pointed out that chamomile is very good for calming down before sleep.

"Chamomile for the eel, Chamomile for the eel," Helena insisted.

I can't think of anything philosophically profound to say about her rhyme, but it is so clever I wanted to write it down.

"The juice doesn't want to come out!"

This morning, Helena had her sippy-cup full of juice in her hand, but she hadn't opened it completely, so the juice didn't come out.  After trying various positions, she turned to us and complained, "O suco não quer sair!" (The juice doesn't want to come out [of the cup])

We understood perfectly well what Helena Iara meant, though the phrase, on further examination, is a strange one.  The juice doesn't want?  Does juice have free will, that it can decide to leave the cup or not?

Babies aren't the only ones to attribute desire or will to inanimate objects.  I often hear myself say things like "The car doesn't want to start," or "What a stubborn screw!  It just doesn't want to come out."  It's a way of talking about cause an effect... or more exactly, why a cause doesn't lead to the effect I expect.  If I turn the key and the car doesn't start, there must be a foreign will in the way.

Almost fifteen months ago, I was excited when Helena came to realize the connection between turning the knob on the faucet, and water coming into the sink.  Back in the 18th century, David Hume challenged this easy connection between cause and effect, saying that there was nothing "in the world", certainly nothing visible or palpable, that could be called a cause.  "Between the movement of one billiard ball and that of the second, I see no third term," he famously said.  A good bit philosophy for the rest of the century was dedicated to responding to this problem.

One of my favorite answers, and one that Helena's comment about juice seems to endorse, came from the Scot Thomas Reid.  "Cause is our externalization of what we recognize in ourselves to be an active power," he said, in prose less clear than is usual for him.  What he meant (I think) is that we act, and these acts have results.  The connector between my action and its result seems to come from my intention, what I wanted to do.  Imagine, Reid says, an intelligent being without will or desire: he doubts (and I agree) that this being might never develop the idea of cause and effect.  We see causes and effects in the world, because we perceive them in ourselves.


So Helena is right, if in a metaphorical way: the juice doesn't "want" to leave the cup.  In her innocent way, she's captured why we humans connect cause and effect.

Santa Monica

Our kitchen -- or at least part of it -- has turned into the beach.  Several times a day, or perhaps quite a bit more, Helena declares that she is on her way to Santa Monica, loads up several of her stuffed animals in her toy stroller, puts on her sunglasses, and heads off.

Santa Monica is a fun place: there's a beach, big swings, a place where people walk and play music, and (most important to Helena Iara) an aquarium.  She goes to the aquarium, picks starfish out of their tank (the tank is actually the iron support that holds the loft up), shows the seahorses to her stuffed cats, and trembles in fear of the sharks (she does it quite well, so much so that we sometimes wonder if it is just playacting).

When we were in Los Angeles last month, we did all of these things with Helena: she is both playing and remembering (and, to a certain degree, campaigning: she wants us to see how much she loves the ocean and the things around it!).  But there is something wonderful about this make-believe, a joy that seems even more intense than when she was swinging on the beach.

"Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit," are the words Virgil puts into the mouth of Aeneas as he and his comrades suffer outside the walls of Troy: "Someday, perhaps, even this will be sweet to remember."  And when the sweetness of memory gets mixed with the play of a child, the smile on a baby's mouth is wonderful for everyone.

Take Care of Her

Over the last several weeks, all of Helena Iara's toys have become mothers and daughters.  The little mouse is the daughter of the big mouse, who is in turn the daughter of the little cat, who is daughter of the big cat, who is daughter of Pato the duck...  In each of these cases, size is much more important than race or appearance.  Natural "enemies" like cats and mice can be mothers and daughters to each other.

Over the last couple of days, she has made it very clear why and how this parenting relationship develops: they take care of each other.  Today, as I held her frog puppet and had it sing songs to her, she put first the little moose (called "Mimoosinho") and then the larger mouse ("Mimoosão") between the frog's long arms and said "Care for her" (cuida dela!).  At that point, she made the relationship clear: "This is their mother."

One of the great philosophical debates of all time is what kind of emotions lie at the base of what it means to be human.  According to Heraclitus, "all things come about through strife". (war, conflict... it's hard to translate the greek polemos).  In the Gospel of John, we see that all comes about through "the word" (logos, sometimes better understood as reason, thought that's probably not what John meant).  I wonder if Helena isn't taking up with another school of philosophical thought, where care lies at the foundation of all things.

Heidegger was famous for putting Sorge (care) at the center of Dasein (being-there), but I think Helena is pointing at something different: for Heidegger, this care was associated with worry and anxiety (he was, after all an influence on loads of pessimistic existentialists later in the 20th century).  Heidegger did see care as the idea that things or people are important, that they matter to us (in Spanish, for instance, one of the ways you can say "I care about x" is "x me importa", it matters to me.).  People are different from animals because we feel this kind of care and concern in discerning what is important.  For Helena's stuffed animals, care for the next smallest member of the group is the way they come to be "her" toys.

Donald Winnicott may actually be the best resource here: he talks about the "holding space" that babies and small children need to feel loved and supported.  For him, like for Helena, "caring for" is not an intellectual exercise (like Heidegger's existential worry), but a physical act: a hug.  When each of her toys "cares for" the next, it holds the next smallest baby: the frog embraces the cat, who embraces the little moose.

A little game, but philosophically profound: and I think it says that Rita and I are doing a pretty good job at showing Helena we love her.  So that she can show others (even her imaginary friends) down on the line.

Learning to buy

Over the last couple of weeks, Helena has become... well, "obsessed" is too strong a word, but certainly very concerned, about economics.  Specifically, she wants to understand what allows us to go into a store and take certain things home, while we don't or can't take others.  She seems to have resolved this conundrum with a single word, "pagou." (Paid).

Helena's concern with payment serves as a way to de-normalize something that we do every day.  It seems so normal to buy stuff, but in fact it's a relatively new and strange way to exchange good and services.  For most of human history, barter and other informal forms of exchange were much more common, as were sharing, potlatch, and completely non-commencial forms of distributing goods.  It takes a lot of work for a baby to understand how capitalism works.

It's not just babies, of course: people from traditionally non-capitalist cultures famously have a hard time adapting to the money economy.  I remember very clearly, for instance, the way that the cooking oil market worked in Cazucá, a shantytown above Bogotá where I worked for many years.  Most of the people who lived there were refugees from the war, peasants, indigenous people, and traditional blacks who were used to subsistence agriculture as the basic way to sustain themselves.  They had always grown their own crops, shared a successful hunt or catch of fish with everyone (knowing that others would do the same later), and bartered their produce for things they didn't grow themselves.  Then suddenly, in Bogotá, none of those resources were available.

Cooking oil, then: these refugees bought oil each day, just enough to fry what they wanted to cook that day.  Unfortunately, however, buying in small amounts made bad economic sense: in 10 days, they might spend five dollars on oil, while if they had bought the same amount all at once, they would have spent less than a dollar.  If we think about why these people spent so much of their salary on food, and had so little to save or invest, knowledge of how capitalism works was part of it.  (Another serious problem was that the paramilitary gangs controlled the oil market, and they had a vested interest in people not learning.)

Helena Iara is just learning this stuff as we shop.  Not an easy lesson, but an important one.

Do your shoes control you?

Sometimes it's tempting to turn this blog into a series of commentaries on Pocoyo (don't worry, I won't really do it, but the Spanish cartoon does open so many amazing ideas in little kids' heads...).  Here's one I found particularly interesting:

Like many other things we buy, Pato's shoes seem at first to be magical: they allow him to do things he never could before, they give him and intense kind of joy... and they make him better than his friends.  It's what we want from our athletic shoes, isn't it?

Pato soon finds, though, that the magic in his shoes isn't completely under his control.  In fact, they soon control him much more than he controls them.  Though the metaphor is childish and drawn in primary colors, it is also quite honest: Rita and I were just in Los Angeles, for instance, and found the bus and metro to be much better than anyone thought, and we were amazed at the friendly atmosphere in public transit.  In contrast, most people drove their cars alone, with a grimace on their faces, and then had to pay $10-25 a day to park.  Might these cars be like Pato's shoes?  After all of the financial and emotional investment we put into them, we simply can't take the bus.  The car, to some degree, comes to control us.

Marx says this about the products we consume, words that seem even more interesting today than in the 1950s when he wrote:

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.

Pocoyo shows some of these theological niceties, more exactly how the shoes come to function as a magical power outside of ourself, not too different from a charm in animist religion.  But in general, Pocoyo is quite a bit more fun than Karl Marx... and it has better colors.