Music and Speech

Since I got back from Bolivia, one of the major changes I have seen in Helena is that she loves to sing.  Now, I don't want to over-state her musical capacity here: she has only one note and one volume level, and we probably wouldn't even know that it was music were it not for the fact that she only does it when Rita and I sing to her.  There is also an important difference between this vocal activity and the "conversations" that Rita has with her: when she sings, she doesn't wait for us to stop talking so that she can respond.  She sings in a chorus with us.

With this in mind, yesterday morning, after I sang several of her favorite songs to (or with) Helena Iara, I shared with her some of the traditional myths about the origin of music.  In Plato's Phaedrus, for instance, Socrates shares the idea (without really endorsing it) that men got the idea of speech from the singing of birds.  The myth of Marsyas goes into much more detail: Marsyas was a satyr in Asia Minor (now Turkey) who, depending on the story, either found a musical instrument that Athena had cast down from Olympus, or invented the two-barreled pipe by himself, using reeds from a lake near his home.  Regardless, he came to be known as the greatest musician of his day.

Being the best was not necessarily a good thing in the Greek world: myths always have the most competent humans either challenging the gods in an act of hubris, or the gods challenge them to bring them down to size.  In this case, Apollo was the problem: he and Marsyas faced off in a contest between the god's lyre and Marsyas's flute, which has also been interpreted as a dispute between the pentatonic and diatonic scales, Eastern and Western harmonies, reason and genius, Apollo and Dionysus...  And as always happens in Greek myths, the mortal loses.  In this case, Apollo tied Marsyas to a tree and flayed his skin while he still lived, which apologists throughout history have excused as a proper punishment for someone with the arrogance to challenge the gods.

In my last semester at Harvard, when I was taking a course on Greek archeology, I spent a lot of time researching Marsyas and Niobe, pre-Roman nature spirits from Asia Minor who get extreme punishments for daring to place themselves on a level with the gods.  I had been studying a series of beautiful bass-reliefs in the theater Hieropolis, and tried to show how the artist had used these myths to think about politics, with Marsyas and Niobe standing in for the oppressed locals and Apollo and Artemis for the unjust Romans, a rather tendentious argument but a very fun one to make in the stuffy religion department at Harvard.  (There is a decent connection, by the way: Marsyas imagery was associated with the right of free speech in Rome, both by liberty's partisans and its opponents.)

Strangely, Helena continued to listen to this whole story, especially since I broke it up from time to time so we could sing together.  And those songs make, I think, the same argument as the myth of Marsyas and the story of language and birdsong related by Plato.  We often think that song is a kind or ornament, an art that depends upon speech.  Speech proceeds song: speech is involved in the serious business of communication, while song is just play or decoration.  Plato himself, in the Republic, said he would banish singers and poets, because they messed with the real business of speech, which was the communication of profound ideas.

A young refugee with whom I worked in Colombia made the same argument as Socrates in the Phaedrus: he told me of the terrors of life in the northern jungles, where he had seen his uncle murdered by paramilitaries as they rode together on a motorcycle, then of his forced flight to Bogotá when his father was accused of participating in a massacre committed by the guerrillas.  When he came to the city, he refused to speak.  Words were too heavy.  People might kill him for what he knew.  Even so, he found a group of rappers in his neighborhood and began to sing with them, and found his voice through music.  "I had to sing to learn how to speak," he told me.

As I told Helena his final story, I thought about her singing.  She too is learning to sing before she learns to speak.  And I hope with that, she will learn the intonations and poetry of elegant speech: not mere communication of ideas, but beauty expressed through sound.

Poetry and Desire

I have never much liked children's music, so the songs I sing Helena Iara are mostly songs I like, and of these, one that she seems to enjoy is "Minha Casa", by the singer-songwriter Zeca Baleiro.  This afternoon, after singing the first verses to her, I began to think how very difficult it must be to get all of the references, especially the line, "Não quero ser triste, como o poeta que envelhece lendo Mayakovsky na loja de conveniência": I don't want to be sad, like the poet who grows old reading Mayakovsky in the convenience store.  The fact that a Brazilian pop song could mention a Russian futurist poet already shows how different it can be from American commercial music, but the real problem is how to explain Mayakovsky to a baby girl.

Like many figures of twentieth century marxism, Mayakovsky works much better as a myth than as a man: the great poet who condemned capitalism and banality in his pre-revolutionary poems, and then, while in Petrograd in 1917, participated in the Smolny revolt and the storming of the winter palace.  He continued to write poetry after the revolution, but also did beautiful propaganda posters, prose, and helped to stage the annual re-creation of the storming of the Winter Palace, a ritual insisting that the revolution belonged to the Russian people, not the Bolshevik Party.  And then, even better, he not only saw the corruption and oppression of the Stalinist era, but first condemned it and then, as a final protest, committed suicide.  He came to represent both hope and disillusion, the promise of communism and its betrayal.

The story is romantic for a girl or teenager, but as I told it (and quote the occasional line I remembered, like "I am not a man, I am a cloud in pants.") I had to wonder if it really made any sense to a baby girl, or what I could imagine of the perspective of a baby girl.  And the truth of the matter is that it's not an easy story to make interesting for a child... and that is, after all, the point of these conversations.  So I told her a little bit about the Mayakovsky museum, one of my favorite places in Moscow, his trip to the United States... but it still didn't work.

Which brought us back to "Minha Casa," the song that started the whole story.  The verse continues, "Nor do I want to be happy, like the dog who goes for a walk with his happy master below a Sunday sun.  Nor do I want to be stagnant, like a man who builds roads but never travels.  I want in darkness, like a blind man who touches the distracted stars."

Mayakovsky desperately desired, and was betrayed.  I think that's why he is such a romantic figure and worth writing a pop song about.  If you read about the young Mayakovsky, as he traveled from his home in Georgia to Moscow and then to revolutionary St. Petersburg, you get the sense that he was like a blind man touching distracted stars, reaching out for anything that he could believe in.  He desired in darkness, and grabbed on to what he could find.  The problem was, I think, not so much that he was wrong in his desire or that he had grabbed the wrong distracted star, but that once he grabbed the star, it was the only one.  And as the star changed, from Lenin to Stalin, democratic to totalitarian, he couldn't believe there were any more to grab.

Babies' desire seems exactly what Zeca Baleiro is singing about: babies don't want to be happy or sad: they just live those emotions.  Their desire is the blind man's reaching, unsure of what he wants, but knowing that something is out there.  Not art for the sake of art, the formalists' creed, but desire simply because it is there.  Desire justified by itself, not by its object.  And I think this idea of desire is an important lesson for adults, who so often "know what we want", only to find that what we wanted only makes us miserable.  And, for me in the case of a daughter, what I didn't think I wanted at all is one of the most wonderful things I have experienced.

The One, The Many, The (U)2

Almost two weeks ago, Rita, Helena, and I went to Rita's parents' house to celebrate her father's 73rd birthday, and though Helena loves being around people, sometimes she needs time alone, so one morning we left the busy kitchen, full of siblings and in-laws, to find a quiet place in another room.  I rocked Helena in her cradle and watched her watching her own hand, varying between looking at only her index finger, then her index and thumb, and then her entire hand.  She was researching her hand, fascinated by the fact that she could control it, but also learning something about the difference between one and many.  And since that is one of the most serious questions in the history of philosophy, it seemed to make sense to talk with her about Parminides and Democritus.

Perhaps the first text we have from Greek Philosophy is a fragment from Parmenides, "All is One."  This idea echoes through the history of philosophy and religion (monophysite Christianity and Islam both grow out of the idea, as does New Age Gaia spirituality and many other forms of mysticism): Parmenides contended that the plurality and diversity of life we see everyday is an illusion covering an essential unity of Being.  The changes that happen over time and space are in fact all a part of one coherent whole, which we can call God or Being or the One.

On the opposite end of the philosophical spectrum was Democritus, I explained to Helena as she opened her hand to look at all of her fingers.  Democritus insisted that everything is broken into infinitely small parts, which he called atoms (indeed, the origin of the term used in modern physics).  Each one of these little pieces was, for Democritus, independent of the other little pieces of the world.  There is no unity, only division.

Whether Helena had reached the end of her patience with my philosophizing, had learned what she wanted about her hand, or was just tired, I'm not sure, but at this point she got impatient.  She hadn't slept well the night before, so I thought she might want to sleep, and one of the best ways to help her along that path is to sing.  And the first song that came to mind, given what we had been talking about, was "One", by U2.

Is it getting better 

Or do you feel the same 

Will it make it easier on you now 

You got someone to blame 

You say... 

One love 

One life 

When it's one need 

In the night 

One love 

We get to share it 

Leaves you baby if you 

Don't care for it 

Did I disappoint you 

Or leave a bad taste in your mouth 

You act like you never had love 

And you want me to go without 

Well it's... 

Too late 

Tonight 

To drag the past out into the light 

We're one, but we're not the same 

We get to 

Carry each other 

Carry each other 

One... 

"We're One, but we're not the same."  What would Parmenides have made of this line?  It strikes me as an interesting attempt to synthesize the two Greek ways of looking at the One and the Many, a recognition that unity and plurality are both true descriptions of the world, looked at from different angles.  We can say two opposing things honestly: Helena was looking at her one hand; Helena was looking at her five fingers.

Perhaps I am simplifying a theme that is far more complicated than the song of an Irish rock band, but perhaps not.  And in the end, what matters most is that the song helped Helena to sleep, and when she woke, she was happy again.

More on Mirrors

Several posts ago, I mentioned the importance of the mirror in a lot of contemporary (and not so contemporary, in fact) theories of subjectivity: how a person comes to see herself as, well, herself.  Last week, before I left for Bolivia, Helena Iara spent more time in front of the bathroom mirror, which gives me some more insight into the way that she is beginning to recognizer herself as an "I".

Helena Iara doesn'tjust watch herself in the mirror.  Her eyes often begin on her own face, then go to my eyes (looking at her, rather as I would with no mirror), then back to her own face, or often her body (especially her hands).  It isn't just that she sees herself in the mirror: she sees me seeing her in the mirror. She sees me, sees that I am "the same" in the mirror as I am "in real life".  She sees me looking at her.  Then she sees herself.  The process of subjectification is, in fact, social.  It doesn't just happen through the strange reflecting object that is a mirror, but through the interactions of multiple people in front of the mirror.

The second thing about the mirror is that Helena doesn't necessarily look at herself as a whole, at least not yet, and that is the basic premise of the Lacanian theory of the mirror stage.  She looks at her own eyes (particularly beautiful eyes, if I do say so myself, blue with a hint of violet), and at her own hands.  Given that she spends so much time playing with her own hands, looking at them and moving them for hours, the fact that she sees her own hands in the mirror strikes me at particularly important.

The mirror metaphor is a particularly visual one for the construction of identity and subjectivity, but hands are something different.  One feels with one's hands, and one feels where one's hands are, even without looking at them.  One also sees one's own hands, and can feel the effect of them on another part of the body when they swing around.  Since Helena has been able to recognize her own hands, she has also gained control over them: she now moves them deliberately (when she wants to, at least) instead of thrashing around as a subconscious expression of happiness, anger, or hunger.  Her control is especially good when she is looking at her hand.

Perhaps the construction of subjectivity is better seen as synesthesia, as the ability to conjugate different senses and see them as pertaining to the same event, than it it about seeing oneself.  Helena sees her hand, feels my hand on hers, and feels where her hand is.  Then, she looks in the mirror and sees herself seeing her hand, felling herself seeing the hand, feeling my hand, which she knows as my hand, touching hers...  What she is learning is to put all of these sensations and experiences together.

Lacan insisted that because one becomes a subject in the image, subjectivity is imaginary.  From what I have seen of Helena, however, it is better seen as gregarious, as the process of gathering together sensations, people, and the perspectives of those other people.  More complicated than a simple mirror, but much more interesting, too.  Maybe that's why Helena smiles so much when she sees herself in the mirror.  You can almost hear the joy of the synapses popping.

Baby Teleconferencing

Since I'm in Bolivia, while Rita and Helena Iara are in Brazil, the only way we've had to see and talk is through skype.  I had been rather worried that Helena might not recognize my two dimensional image on the computer screen (understanding the relation between two- and three-dimensions is much harder than it seems like it might be, not to mention the absence of smell and touch.

Well, this morning, she didn't seem to connect the image to me, unless, at least, I sang her "In the Jungle", her favorite song.  And instantly, a huge smile extended over her face.

With just sight, she might not be able to connect a two dimensional image to a three dimensional father, but add another sense, like sound, and it was all there.  I'll go into that a bit more in the next blog, where I talk about mirrors and subjectivity again.

Maria Bonita and Lampião

This week I'm in Bolivia, working on a telenovela (Latin American soap opera) made by indigenous kids from the shantytowns above La Paz, which sadly leaves me far from our beautiful and smart daughter.  None the less, I can at least tell some stories from last week and keep her in mind, even from far away.

Last weekend we went to visit Rita's parents in Braço do Norte, a small town in the foothills of the Serra do Corvo Branco, because it was her father's birthday.  On the wall of their living room, there is a wood-cut print that Rita and I gave him several years ago when we were working in the northeast: the print shows a family leaving the countryside to move to the city because of drought (the attached image is similar to the one on the wall, but made by the artist's father).  Even when she was a tiny baby, Helena fixed her eyes on the picture, perhaps because of its simple, black and white forms, orperhaps for more existential reasons.  Rita's parents faced the same tragedy when she was a little girl: they lost their land and had to move to the city to make a new life for themselves.  Rita's mother learned to sew clothes, and her father became a stonemason, a hard life for people accustomed to the rich farmland of Santa Catarina.

I started off by telling Helena Iara this family history, but then moved on to the historical reasons why so many people have been forced from their land in Brazil: the unjust distribution of land, Portuguese colonial policy, slavery.  And while many families have responded by moving the huge favelas that surround every Brazilian city, many have also resisted.  And since Helena Iara and I always talk about philosophy, I decided to tell her a little of the most philosophically sophisticated of these rebellions: the cangaço led by Maria Bonita and her husband, Lampião.

Different cangaços had long been a part of the northeast of Brazil, small groups of men without land or possessions who robbed the rich o sustain themselves, and Lampião grew up in one of these groups.  However, as Maria Bonita integrated herself into the group (she fell in love with Lampião when his group camped near her husband's ranch), their band began to develop a real philosophy of social justice: not just to rob from the rich to support themselves, but to undermine the unjust system of huge landholders and military leaders who lorded over landless peasants.  The redistributed land, taught the peasants reading, writing, and history, and united many of the varied bandit groups into a sort of proto-state struggling against the injustice they had lived.

In the end, Lampião and Maria Bonita were killed by the army and their movement lives only in memory, in music, and in dance and crafts pioneered by the group (they believed that culture and fashion were an integral part of the revolution).  But as I told Helena the story, I got an insight into the connection between childhood and political philosophy.

Every kid knows the basic tenant of any political critique: "That's not fair!"  Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Marx... they all start with that basic issue: Life isn't fair.  The bandits of the cangaço had the same insight, and they wanted to get a bigger piece of the pie for themselves, just as a boy declares that it isn't fair that he gets less birthday cake than his brother.  Real political philosophy emerges when one universalizes the question: not how life can be more fair for me, but how it can be more just for everyone: that was the move we see in Lampião and Maria Bonita, and one that I contend is the basic insight of many great children's movies today (A Bug's Life, Robots, Monsters Inc).  [I'm afraid I have only written about this in Spanish, but it is great fun to use philosophy to analyze Pixar!]

Maybe this story will help Helena see, as she grows up, that what matters isn't getting more for herself, or her family, tribe, country... but for everyone.

Baby photos

Helena Iara is the first kids on my side of the family to grow up in the age of digital photography, when the only real cost of photos is the up-front capital investment (the camera), so different from my own parents who worried about the cost of film and developing.  As a result, we have hundreds of wonderful photos of Helena in her first two and a half months of life.  My parents have just a couple: Rita's parents took no photos of her at all until she was more than a year old.

One doesn't have to be Amish or a member of a tribe that thinks that photographs steal the soul to wonder what the impact of all of these photos will be on a baby's subjectivity later in life.  As I was thinking about this (and after Rita and I took some great photos of Helena a couple of mornings ago), I decided to talk to Helena about Walter Benjamin.

The premise of Benjamin's essay "The work of art in the age of its mechanical reproducibility" is pretty simple: he talks of the sacred work of art in medieval Europe, like the statues of saints kept hidden away in churches, to be circulated only once a year in parades on the saint's day.  These works of art, Benjamin suggested, had an "aura" about them, something of the work of art that was more than the work itself.  We have something of a sense of the power of this aura when we walk into the Louvre and try to get to see the Mona Lisa, only to find access impossible because of the hordes of people who just want to get close to the painting.  Truth is, a good quality reproduction will give you a better idea of the Mona Lisa than fifteen minutes of pushing and shoving to get within twenty feet of it, but when we go to Paris, we still have to go through the ritual of going into that room.

Compare the aura of the Mona Lisa, then, to a great movie or photo.  Is there one copy of Casablanca or Le Meprise which has that kind of aura?  Of course not: each one is just like any other copy.  We might remember our experience of the movie (I saw it in that old theater on Main Street...), but that is a different kind of aura.  Benjamin says that one of the major characteristics of art in the 20th Century was this reproducibility and the loss of aura; to a certain degree he lamented this loss (and most of his interpreters have focussed on this part of his analysis), but he also said that the political consequences would be more positive: when there is no aura, it steals the authority of priests and kings over art and over the ideology that comes with it.

As I explained all of this to Helena (she paid much more attention than you might have expected), I thought about baby pictures.  Rita's grainy baby pictures have definite aura: there are only one or two, so we pay attention to each one, looking for clues to the future her.  There are more pictures of me as a baby, but several of them share something similar: I particularly remember one photo of me with a hose, getting ready to pour water all over the house.

Personal history is almost infinite: so many things happen to us that we can't "remember" them all... or more accurately, few of them are in active memory.  I see that photo of me with the hose as an image that points to me today, while many other images have just slipped out.  And Rita's few baby pictures have to seem like the seeds of her determination and intellect.  But what happens when there are literally thousands of photos of a baby?  How will she select the ones that she considers important, the ones that will point to what she will become?

As this happens, I think that photography becomes more and more like memory.  What matters isn't so much what is there, but how we edit and select it.  But perhaps I'll need another long talk with Helena to figure that one out.

Hands, Feet, Self

Helena Iara has been on a voyage of discovery recently.  First, during Brasil's world cup victory over Chile, she discovered her hands, and since then, has been finding out new things about them every day, and seeing new things she could do with them.  Rita and I have had a wonderful time as we see her move them slowly, using one finger and then the next.  And today, she discovered her feet, and found out that she could control them, as well.

Putting these discoveries together with her love of mirrors, I have been thinking a lot about Jacques Lacan and his idea of the mirror stage.  According to Lacan, the self is actually constructed over time and through technology: particularly, the mirror.  All of the sensations a baby feels are not necessarily coherent: the baby does not feel that they all apply to him or her, because the border between I and the other has not yet been clearly formed.  But, the moment that baby recognizes herself in the mirror, something new happens: the multiplicity and confusion of sensations gets brought under a single sign, the image of herself in the mirror.  The image in the mirror is stable "in contrast with the turbulent movements that the subject feels are animating him."  To a great degree, the subject is constructed through the mirror, not a something natural or innate, but as the result of a contingent process.

Now, there are some very interesting results to this idea: I remember, for instance, a program for street kids in Brasília which said that the most effective intervention it had made with the kids was to put mirrors every place in the drop-in center, because it assured the kids that they existed as coherent, whole beings, while at the same time making them think that they could improve their appearance (which had as a result improving lots of other things).  And in fact, great part of the contemporary edifice of psychoanalysis, and the thought of great philosophers who I love, like Slavoj Zizek, depends on Lacan's idea of the mirror stage.

But as I told these ideas to Helena Iara this morning, after watching her research her own hands, I think there is a basic epistemological error in the idea of the mirror stage.  Watching Helena, it is clear that the first step to recognizing herself as a subject, as someone with different body parts that come together to act in the world, is the baby's effort to research her own hands and feet.  The first wonder is that she is able to control these things -- and in fact, since Helena recognized her hands (and now her feet), their movements are more coherent and projected.  But then, she begins to see that these things have results, and that she is, to some degree, responsible for these results.  Last night, for instance, as Rita and I watched, she reached out her hand to touch her favorite toy, Pinkme the pink hippo, first in an uncontrolled way, then just feeling the fabric in a kind of caress.  This morning, she hit the hippo lightly, just to see what might happen, and seemed to show regret when the toy fell down (I wrote a long essay on regret on doing harm to the other as the font of subjectivity, but it might be premature to project that onto her...)

It's too early to discard the mirror stage all together -- after all, it's a great theory, and I use it all over the place -- but Helena is already making me rethink Lacan's idea.

A Flower

Helena Iara has been a little cranky over the last several days, probably (at least as the pediatrician tells us) because of a reaction to the many vaccines she took last week.  Today as she was crying, Rita tried to distract her by showing Helena a hibiscus flower.  Helena, in turn, yanked the flower from her hand (something we didn't think she could do), and took it for her own.  She also stopped crying, as the following series of photos shows: