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.