Mirrors

A couple of days ago, Helena Iara's mirror neurons were in high dunder.  I would stick out my tongue, and she would imitate me.  The same with arm motions, the curl of a tongue as I made the shhhh sound.  It was great fun for both of us.  So that evening, when I had some time alone with her in the hammock, I started to tell her about those mirror neurons... only to find my lecture wonderfully undermined by irony: instead of looking at me as she normally does, she had begun to look in a mirror, and she couldn't take her eyes off of it.

Now, in most of the history of western philosophy, people use mirrors in order to look at themselves.  There is the myth of Narcissus, of course, and Plotinus' comment that "the soul is a mirror that creates material things reflecting the ideas of the higher reason."  Even Lacan, normally so far out of the philosophical mainstream, declares the Mirror Stage as the moment that a baby is able to recognize herself seeing her reflection.  Helena, however, didn't have much time for philosophical commonplaces: she liked the mirror not because it reflected her own image, but because it showed the back of the hammockin which we were sitting.  She could see both the front and the back of something, and she was thrilled.  Rita tells me that the day before I saw this game of mirrors, Helena was doing the same thing with Rita's image reflected on the computer screen through the PhotoBooth program, looking back and forth from Rita to her image on the screen, trying to make sure that both were really there.

It's nice to think that Rita and I are raising a daughter who is not a narcissist, but I think that something more is going on.  Mirrors do show us our own reflections, but even more significantly, they alter perspective, allowing us to see the world through eyes that are not our own.  When Helena was able to see both the front and the back of the swinging hammock, she got an exciting look at the plurality of the world, its three-dimensionality, and its complexity in the eyes of many different people.  I have mentioned the different concepts of knowledge in the west and among Amazonian tribes, and this game of mirrors seems to represent exactly that difference.  In the west, the mirror is a chance to stand outside ourselves and see ourselves as an object.  In Amazonian thought, in contrast, the point is to incarnate a different perspective, to use the songs of another tribe to feel what they feel, to use ayahuasca to see through the eyes of a jaguar.  Helena Iara, faithful to her second guaraní name, was using the mirror in the second way: to change her perspective on the world.

Alenka Zupancic says that this shift in perspective is central to comedy:

Thanks to the redoubling, we leave behind the imaginary mirror-turn logic for another logic, that of the shift: we get a reality slightly out of place in relation to itself... This shift opens the space for the symbolic Other as immanent to the given situation (as opposed to the Other constituting its framework or outer horizon.). [The Odd One Out]

The pleasure and laughter of comedy comes from this small shift: not to see the world from some God's eye view, but only a little askew, a little different.  And as Helena looked into the mirror, seeing the back of the hammock instead of its front, she smiled.  It was wonderful.

The world cup

The world cup here in Brazil is quite something: it's basically a month long vacation with soccer four and a half hours a day, and when the Brazilian national team plays, everything shuts down.  Everything: including health centers and even most of the police.  So as one might imagine, Helena Iara has seen a lot of soccer in the last two weeks; or perhaps to put it better, she has been with me as I have been watching  lot of soccer.

A couple of nights ago as I tried to entertain Helena for a bit (she wasn't sleepy, but everyone else was!), I started off quoting Sartre on soccer, and then wove an argument that I found interesting, and which kept her looking in my eyes attentively.  "In football everything is complicated by the presence of the other team," he declared, and anyone who sits through a 0-0 tie, suffering with a team that simply can't penetrate the other defense, will sympathize with the great existentialist.  On the other hand, talking with a baby, somehow that didn't quite makes sense, or perhaps it just reminded me of another and more thoughtful comment, this one by Emmanuel Kant:

The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space. (From the Critique of Pure Reason)

In fact, Kant is suggesting, the things that we imagine are barriers to what we want, are in fact exactly what we need to get that result: to use a phrase beloved by Zizek, "the conditions of impossibility are truly the conditions of possibility."  The bird needs the air that seems to hold him back, while the soccer team needsa strong opponent in order to play well, to challenge it to do something better: compare Brazil's performance against North Korea to its elegant soccer against Ivory Coast.

Now, what does this have to do with children?  How did I talk about this issue with Helena Iara?  Well, there is a similar kind of common sense about infancy, that life would be much easier if we came out of the womb like a horse, all ready to run.  Instead, we have to teach Helena almost everything: walking and talking and thinking and running (and in a couple of years, playing soccer...).  We even have to teach her to sleep!  Wouldn't it be easier if humans were just born with these capacities?  Especially this week, as we have tried to teach Helena to sleep on her own, I'm very sympathetic with the Sartrean perspective on soccer.

But what would humanity be if we were born with all of these skills?  According to Giorgio Agamben,

Imagine a man already equipped with language, a man who already possessed speech.  For such a man without infancy, language would not be a pre-existing thing to be appropriated, and for him there would neither be any break between language and speech nor any historicity of language.  But such a man would thereby be at once united with his nature; his nature would already pre-exist, and nowhere would he find any discontinuity, any difference through which any kind of history could be produced.  Like the animal, whom Marx describes as "immediately at one with its life--activity", he would merge with it and never see it as an onject distinct from himself. (From Infancy and History)

What does it mean to be human?  According to Aristotle, man is the logicoon zoon, the being with speech... yet we are born without speech.  We come into our essence, we aren't born with it.  So in the end, though Helena challenges us with her inabilities, she also shows us what it means to be incomplete, lacking... human.

The Fold

A couple of nights ago, Helena Iara was crying inconsolably.  None of the techniques that Rita and I have developed over the last several weeks could calm her, so eventually I just took her into another room and shut the door so that other people in the house didn't have to hear her scream, and perhaps Rita would be able to sleep a bit.  The second strategy certainly didn't work: a couple of minutes later, Rita came in to help, and we put Helena on her back on the bed and started to bicycle her legs, something that sometimes helps her to pass gas or digest.

She continued to cry, if a little less desperately, until suddenly, a backpack lying next to her caught her attention.  The cries stopped instantly, and she simply stared at a fold in the cloth of the backpack, the pain in her belly (and everything else that was bothering her) forgotten in the excitement of discovery.  I don't know if she was excited by the shadows, which she has always liked, or perhaps by the fact that the same material looked so different in different places, but the crying was over.

Now, I could just get excited about the way that her intellect had helped her overcome suffering, and that is pretty cool.  But because she still didn't want to go to sleep, I decided to take advantage of her discovery to talk about, of course, Deleuze (the "of course," is, of course, a joke.  Connections aren't that obvious) and his idea of the fold, the way that doubling something over can turn the two dimensional into the three dimensional.  I stayed in Paris one time with a French architect who had made this concept the center of her work, which always fascinated me, but it didn't seem to interest Helena Iara at all, and she started crying again.  So I decided to talk to her about a part of Delueze's philosophy that I understand a little better: ideas of difference and repetition.

Anyone who has read to a child knows the basics of Deleuze's argument, which I think Alenka Zupancic may synthesize best:

"When a child demands that his parents should textually repeat the story of the previous evening, he expects -- as strange as it might sound -- a surprise.  And he gets it." [The Odd One In, p. 181]

Helena Iara isn't quite old enough to demand the same bedtime story again and again, but she does like this kind of novelty-in-repetition, playing the same little games, wanting to dance before sleeping every night, and enjoying the constant repetition of similar sounds in her "conversations" with Rita.  For her, this repetition does not mean sameness: in fact, there is something new that she gets out of it each time.  [I wonder, by the way, if we might be able to diagnose a calcified mind as one that finds no novelty in repetition, while the growing mind finds difference in repetition).

I shared all of these ideas with Helena, and she seemed to find them more interesting than Deleuze's philosophy of the fold.  I'm more interested by them, too, of course, and I am sure she picked up on that. But the real contradiction, which helped her to fall asleep, is Deleuze's conclusion: having already proved that repetition leads to a certain kind of novelty, he asserts that the only thing that remains the same is difference itself.  We can see a kind of jejune insight here, the "the only constant is change" of consulting company advertising, but if we try to perceive through the eyes of children, I think there is something more interesting going on.  The only constant in repetition (as, in fact, in change), is surprise.  The wonder of finding our minds and our selves changed by what we encounter in the world.  When we lose this, we lose childhood, I think.  And a good bit of our humanity.

Ordinary Language

Over the last several weeks, Rita and Helena Iara have been talking quite a lot.  I'm not joking: Helena is responding thoughtfully, engaged in a real conversation with her mother.

Helena isn't even eight weeks old: clearly her proud father is exaggerating.  Everyone knows that children may speak their first word at about twelve months, and certainly won't converse for a good time after that.  And etymologically, "infancy" comes from the Latin of "do not speak".  So what in the world am I talking about?  These reflections became the theme for a long conversation with Helena Iara a couple of nights ago, after she and Rita had spent a good half an hour talking back and forth.

Now, if language is essentially the communication of meaning through verbal symbols, as most people have defined it through history, then I'm just writing nonsense.  However, over the last sixty or seventy years, beginning with Wittgenstein and JL Austin, philosophers and anthropologists have looked at other ways to define language, not merely as meaning, but also as a social practice.  Austin called his famous series of lectures How to do things with words, trying to show that meaning was only one of many activities that one can do with language.  When a priest or a judge says "I hearby declare you man and wife," for instance, he doesn't mean anything.  His words change the world, create or formalize a relationship that did not exist before.

Austin focussed on these kind of uses of words, but we can also see lots of other ones.  When two teenagers flirt with each other, for instance, the meaning of their words is less important than the romantic game they are playing.  Many modernist poets insisted that they wanted to create beautiful sounds more than convey meaning: after all, poein in Greek, the origin of poem, means "to make".  And words always work as a way to bring people together or force them apart, to create relationships, to develop intimacy.  They are a tool for sociality.

Since this theory that I'm proposing is a major part of Rita's research, it shouldn't surprise me that she would play these sorts of games with Helena Iara.  She speaks or giggles or grunts, and then waits for Helena to respond with a different sounds.  To which Rita will then respond, and the game goes on.  "Game," I say, but it is really the social practice of language: not the language game (Sprachspiel, in Wittgenstein's terms) of meaning, but a language game even so.  Helena has learned to speak long before she has learned how to mean.

The Mexican baroque (Part II)

Last week, I began to talk with Helena Iara about the Mexican Baroque, hoping that reciting Sor Juana's "First Dream" would help her get to sleep.  In fact, I was so successful that she and I didn't have the chance to complete the conversation and get to the part that actually has to do with babies; she was so entranced by the phrase "me corazón deshecho entre tus manos" that she fell right asleep.

So a couple of afternoons ago, I sat with her in the hammock in the afternoon sun, seeing if I could find something in my favorite Mexican poetess and philosopher that might appeal to a baby girl -- or more accurately, an interest in Sor Juana that I could project onto what might be interesting to a baby girl.  So we talked about a text that has gotten short shrift in Sor Juana scholarship, the Carta Atenagórica, one of the most unexpected and revolutionary theological texts I've read.

I'd already told Helena Iara something about the portuguese Jesuit theologian Antônio Vieira, weeks ago when I tried to draw a stretched parallel between Amazonian philosophy and a babies longing for constant new perspectives on the world.  Vieira, the leader of many of the Portuguese missionaries, worked hard to replace this Amerindian way of thought with Christianity.  I'm not sure whether this history of imperialist theology was behind Sor Juana's decision to attack Vieira, but she certainly chose as her target a thinker much loved by the church hierarchy, and she must have known it would get her into trouble.

Vieira's Sermon on the Holy Spirit, in which he tried to establish what was the greatest fineza, or virtue, of God, had made quite an impact in Mexico.  He listed all of God's virtues and, using a method reminiscent of St. Thomas Aquinas, tried to establish which was the greatest virtue.  Truth is, I don't remember much of the Sermon, beyond that it struck me as conventional and boring, so I mostly talked with Helena about Sor Juana's extremely unconventional and unorthodox response.  God's greatest virtue, she argued, is to do nothing.  For by doing nothing, God forces human beings to act, and shows us how powerful ad capable we are.

Even today, such an argument sounds heretical, but in 17th century Mexico, it was also revolutionary.  The Spanish colonial system rested on the co-dependence of patron and client, where each person or group won its recognition and social position from his patron above him, while the patrons depended on their clients for food, wealth, and military power.  God stood at the very top of this pyramid of patronage, guaranteeing the power and position of kings and priests.

Sor Juana based he argument on what she saw as good child-rearing: often, parents have to do nothing, so that their children can become autonomous adults.  If their parents always do everything for their kids, the children will always be passive, robbed of the agency and protagonism that makes us human.  By putting this argument on a theological plane, she showed that traditional theology and politics had turned humans into passive babies, incapable of independent thought and action.  It was a powerful critique of both church and state.  Though most current studies of Sor Juana focus on the fact that the archbishop of Mexico prohibited her from writing more theology because she was a woman, the content of her thought was just as dangerous as its author's gender.

I don't know many babies.  Before Helena was born, I had never liked being around them.  It seems, however, that they are, in fact, much less passive than the clients in a patron-client system.  Their agency is mediated trough their eyes, their screams, their cooing, and their loosely controlled movements but they still have desire, which clientelism robbed from just about everyone under Spanish colonial rule.  What Sor Juana condemned was not being a baby, but being treated as a baby, and how it turned people into something that wasn't even human at all.

The Mexican baroque (Part I)

The last several nights have been hard for Helena Iara... and of course, as an extension, for Rita and me, too.  The result has been several interesting philosophical "dialogues" at midnight, but no energy during the day to write them down.  This Sunday afternoon, however, Helena is talking calmly with Rita here on the back porch, where the sun is warming a cool early winter day, so I have a chance to relate a little bit about our talk about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the great 17th century Mexican poet, scientist, and philosopher.


As Helena and I have talked over the last six weeks (she turned six weeks old last Thursday!  Time both flies and drags at a time like this, which may turn into a lecture on Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty at some point), we've talked mostly about men doing philosophy.  But the clear night out the window as we sat in the hammock made me think of one of the great philosophical poems: Sor Juana's Primero Sueño (First Dream).  In a time when the philosophical or scientific treatise hadn't yet become the official way to do serious philosophy, many thinkers -- especially those in Southern Europe -- preferred to think through poems and plays and fiction.  So Sor Juana wrote her magnum opus, combining the most advanced science of the day, Greek and Aztec mythology, and her own concerns about politics and gender.


All of that is a lot for a little girl, of course, and though I tried to recite for her the magnificent first lines of the poem:

Piramidal, funesta, de la tierra
nacida sombra, al cielo encaminaba
de vanos obeliscos punta altiva,
escalar pretendiendo las estrellas;

The poem didn't attract her attention, but the story of Sor Juana, another smart little girl living across cultures, drew her eyes to mine again (I doubt that has anything to do with the content of my words, but much more the way I said them; I memorized parts of the poem long ago and my tongue tripped).  Juana Asbaje y Ramírez, I told Helena, was also born to parents who came from different worlds.  Now, I'm hardly a minor Spanish hidalgo, and Rita is certainly not from an Aztec family, but I don't think anyone is looking for exact parallels: what's more interesting is that both Juana Inés and Helena Iara have two rich cultures to draw upon from their birth.

The second part of the story is closer to Rita's life than it will be to Helena's: a smart girl from the countryside who desperately wanted to go to the city to escape provincial life, and as always when I talk about her mother, Helena Iara got even more interested (this is, of course, partly projected emotion on my part, but no less real for that).  For Juana, there were two ways that she could keep learning: in the court and in the monastery, and for her teenage years, the court served her well, where her wit and beauty helped her become lady-in-waiting to ever more powerful women.  The Mexican viceregal court in the 1660s wasn't that different from the intrigues and flirtations you see in Dangerous Liasons and other period films, but there was also an intellectual tinge to the place, and Juana's first poems made her a minor star.

The problem was, however, that sexy, clever ladies-in-waiting are kind of like teenage pop idols: they have a very limited life-span.  Once they became women, they had to either marry or become simple servants.  Neither option seemed a good one to Juana, so tried to opt out: she entered the convent.  In Rita' father's family, many aunts also saw becoming a nun as the only way a woman could continue to study, to escape the drudgery of country life and machismo.  Fortunately, by the time that Rita was finishing her teenage years, the university had become a live option for a poor, smart girl.  Juana Asbaje y Ramírez didn't have that option.

Perhaps to show her displeasure with the limited options available for a smart girl in Mexico in the 17th century, Helena Iara fell asleep, leaving me to tell the rest of the story another night.

Other ideas about light

Last week, as Helena Iara looked at shadows, I told her Plato's allegory of the cave, which strikes me as an interesting way to think about how babies learn about shadows and light.  The end of the allegory, however, is just stupid: after all of the interesting process of learning how shadows play on the wall, how fire burns, and how to climb out of the cave, the philosopher just sits and stares at the sun.  From the interesting history and diversity of the cave, he ends up getting bored just looking at one light, which will end up blinding him.  A silly metaphor for knowledge.

So, several nights ago, I sat in the hammock with her and told another story about light, one I heard when I first started to study Liberation Theology, in Chile the year after the fall of the Pinochet dictatorship.  I heard it from a young priest who worked with the poor.

One upon a time," he began, "there was a poor man who lived deep in the forest.  Each morning her woke before dawn to break a path through the thorns of the wood to get to work, where he struggled and struggled to make enough money to feed his family.  Then, after dark, he would make his way home, once again constantly cut by thorns, and he would arrive to give what food he had been able to buy for his family, seasoned with his own blood, cut by the thorns of the forest.

But one day, a man came to the man's hut and gave him a gift: a flashlight.  He showed the man how to turn it on and off, and gave him enough batteries for weeks.  The worker thanked him and promised he would use the light.

Several weeks later, the man who had given the flashlight returned to see if his gift had made life easier for the worker, and he was sad to see that the man was even more cut and wounded and tired than he had been before.  "Oh, I am so sorry that you have lost the flashlight," he told the worker.  "I wish I had another to give you."

"Lost it?" the worker asked.  "No, it is right here.  And it has given me much comfort in my difficult life."

Comfort? the man asked himself, and then asked aloud, "Can you show me how you have used the light?"

The worker took the light, turned it on, and shown it into his own eyes.  A beatific smile opened up on his face.  "You can see," he repeated, "how you gift has been a comfort to me."

The priest who had told me the story then took a bible from the table before him.  "This is a flashlight," he said.  "We have always thought that we should use it like this [he turned the pages toward himself], but in truth, we must use it like this [then he turned the pages away from him].

It is interesting to compare this idea of light, knowledge, or God as something useful, something to make the world better, with the silly mysticism of Plato or much of traditional religion.  Light isn't just to make shadows, of course.  Helena will learn that in time.  But light certainly isn't just something to stare into.  It is something to use to understand our complex, compelling, and difficult world.