Sharing Joy

Several days ago, Helena Iara and I sat on the floor playing with some of her toys.  I took a small lion and pushed the button on its back, which inspired a low, electronic roar.  Helena beamed with joy, then looked at me with the most wonderful, innocent of gazes, a gesture that said "cdid you see that?" better than any words can do.

With that look, Helena taught me something that I've never read in a tome of philosophy or theology: the wonder of sharing wonder, and what that means about childish joy and adult anomie.

As children and teenagers, we learn to hide our joy.  I'm not sure quite why, though I shared some ideas with Helena Iara: might we think that if others see our wonder, they'll gain that power over us?  Or that we need to seem blasé and sophisticated, which are the opposite of wonder?  That the definition of adult is the loss of wonder?  Perhaps is is mostly about modesty: when we show so clearly what we love and what gives us joy, we become naked in front of the other, a kind of intimacy we learn to share with only a few people.  Certainly, if I think of my adolescence, one of the ways I could define it is as the process by which I learned to hide wonder from others... and sometimes, even from myself.

Helena, however, wants to share her joy and wonder.  Whether it is the feel of sand under her toes, the elation of water that splashes on her face, or a music video on YouTube, she not only expresses her joy, but also looks at Rita and me to insist that we admire it as much as she does.  And as we look at the world through her eyes, we come to the same kind of joy.

Almost twenty years ago, I climbed a 20,000 foot peak in Ecuador with several Swiss and Spaniards whom I had never met before.  When we came back from the summit, after (literally) pulling each other up the immense mountain, I wrote to my parents saying that I had seldom felt so close to other people in my life, that nothing builds intimacy like shared suffering, the rope that connects climbers and makes us responsible for the lives of out climbing partners.  Yet even so, I never saw any of those climbers again.  Perhaps the intimacy was too frightening, we had become too exposed.

Something does build intimacy even more than shared suffering, though: shared joy.  Not only that bond that Rita and I develop with Helena Iara, but the one we share with my parents, with Rita's parents and brothers and sisters... with anyone that will open herself to the wonder of a little baby.  It's a wonderful thing, but also a frightening one, so I suppose I understand why teenagers work so hard to cut themselves off from it.  But perhaps it's also the reason that many people have children: because it gives us a small chance to return to something like that wonderful innocence.

Creation from Water

Christmas in the south of Brazil means high summer, the sort of blasted, humid days I remember from August in central Pennsylvania when I was growing up.  It's the perfect kind of weather for a little girl who loves to play in the water, and Helena has spent wonderful afternoons over the last several days sitting in a a kiddie pool in the back yard.  She splashes and splashes until her hands and feet become prunes.  It seemed like a wonderful to talk about the history of water in philosophy.

The day Helena was born, she stared at me with utmost attention, and I felt like I had to say something.  I tried to tell her the history of greek philosophy, just because I knew that I'd be able to keep riffing on that theme for a long time, and I told her about Thales of Miletus, who tried to find the first principle of everything in water.  Yesterday, I started a little bit south of Greece, with the first words of the Torah: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."  It was one of the first texts we had to translate in Hebrew classes, and I still remember the strange vocabulary of "without form and void" or "hovered over the face of the waters."  The point, though, is that Moses (or whoever really wrote those words" associated water with creation.

The obvious connection with a baby is that a fetus is also created in water, and many mythical and psychoanalytic ideas about childhood start exactly there.  As Helena Iara splashed almost all of the water from the little tub in which she was sitting, however, I began to think of something else: for her (as for many babies, I imagine), water is the first experience of making a concrete impact on the world.  I throw my hands into the water and it splashes up to wet my face, my mom, the floor.  My actions have consequences.  Splashing water is an act of creation, one of the first that a baby experiences.

Water isn't like wood; it doesn't stay carved: however much you splash it, it returns to something like its original state.  Simón Bolívar tried to express the futility of his life with the phrase, "Él que hace revolución arra el mar," he who makes revolution makes furrows in the sea."  It might not seem the best metaphor for creation.  But in fact, when Helena splashes, she does change the world.  The surface of the water will not hold her furrows, but there is less of it in the kiddie pool than when she started.  I am wet, Rita is wet... and everyone is happy.  That's a pretty decent metaphor for the experience of most people with creation: it may not last, it may fade away, but for a moment, it makes us happy.

Happy Babies

For anyone who spends time around babies (or at least most babies; clearly, there are loads of exceptions), one of the most striking and wonderful things is their happiness, the contagious innocence of their smiles and giggles.  For someone like me who likes to think philosophically, this joy is wonderful, but it is also a philosophical problem: why?  Why are babies so happy so much of the time, while adults... well, simply, aren't.

There are lots of answers to such a simple question, of course, and I've tried out a bunch of them at different moments in this blog.  But as Helena Iara and I swung in the hammock yesterday, and she grinned at the swinging motion, at the huge lizard gliding across the yard, at the wind in the trees and the sound of my voice, I remembered some of my father's words from when I was a teenager: "The more different things you can enjoy in life, the better chance you have to be happy."

(Contrast with one of my favorite lines from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: "You know," said Arthur, "it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxication in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young."
"Why, what did she tell you?"
"I don't know, I didn't listen."

Sometimes, it's worthwhile to pay attention to one's parents.)

Dad's lecture... well, not so much a lecture, with the disciplinary tone that entails, but really a kind suggestion, came at the height of adolescent pretension, the moment when we show that we're better than other kids because of what we hate.  Country music, parachute pants, pet rocks, hot dogs, heavy metal... honestly, I don't remember what it was that brought on the conversation, but something I knew that I should not like, if I were to appear the sophisticated grown-up I wanted to be.  An American teenager puts a lot of time into learning how to dislike things, so that he can feel as if he is superior, cool, different, the same...

In truth, what what likes is more about identity, about constructing who I think I am and how I want others to see me, than it is about pleasure.  That's why the question, "What kind of music do you like?" is such a fraught one.  It's not really a question about aesthetics, but about whether you're going to be cool enough to be my friend.

Babies, as I told Helena, don't fall into those traps.  They can enjoy the play of light on the leaves without anyone laughing at them for being simple.  They can express their love for their mommies transparently without being accused of being "Mama's boy."  They haven't yet learned that enjoyment is a complex system of social controls.  They just enjoy.

Mimetic Desire

Helena hasn't spent much time with other babies.  Yesterday, however, Rita hosted a baby party for several of the women who had been in her maternity class, so Helena spent the afternoon with four other babies, all of them about her age.  It was a fascinating encounter, perhaps meriting an essay on the anthropology of babies, but I want to talk about just one event.

Helena sat on the living room floor, surrounded by toys and pillows.  Pedro, a handsome little boy about a week younger than she, was playing with a toy truck we brought this week on our long trip from the US.  Helena found her favorite rattle and began to shake it, attracting Pedro's gaze.  He dropped the truck and crawled as fast as he possibly could toward Helena, reached for the rattle, and ripped it from her hand.  Helena didn't even cry, she was so surprised, but Pedro's father took the rattle, explained the need to be kind, and gave it back to Helena.  For the next five minutes, the scene repeated itself, even as Pedro's father gave Pedro another rattle, distracted him with other toys, and tried everything he could imagine.

As I sat on the hammock, rocking with Helena some hour later, I told her about two French philosophers who have thought long and hard about this dynamic, though not necessarily with babies.  One of Jacques Lacan's most famous aphorisms, for instance, is that "Man's desire is the desire of the other," which can be read in many ways, among them that I want what the other wants. (Probably, the most accurate interpretation is that what I desire from you is not you yourself, but your desire for me, but I didn't talk about that with Helena.)

More to the point, though, is the literary theory of mimetic desire, developed most carefully by René Girard as he looked at romantic triangles in novels.  Two men love one woman: this is the stuff of Balzac, Tolstoy, Jane Austen, and who knows how many other great novelists.  For Girard, however, the basic question here is not, in fact, the object of desire (Anna Karenina, the femme fatale of film noir), but the relationship between the two men.  I desire the thing (the woman, the car, the whatever) not because of what lies essential in it, but because I see that another person desires it.  Girard extended this argument to our relationship with fiction (Don Quijote desires what Amadis de Gaul wanted, etc), but the basic point is there: our desires have more to do with imitating the desire of the other than with anything that comes from the object of desire.

 And there, I explained to Helena, is Pedro and his desire for the rattle.  The rattle is cool, of course.  It makes a nice sound, you can chew on it, you can bang it on the floor.  But what really mattered to Pedro is that Helena had it in her hand, that she was enjoying it.  Mimetic desire starts when we're little.

Happy Sleep

This post isn't really about the philosophy I've talked with Helena Iara.  In fact, it's much more about me (One could argue, with good evidence, that one could say this about every post on this blog, but I'll leave issues of projection for another day).

I've always seen myself, and probably correctly, as a happy person, and I've long wanted to attribute this fact to a certain reflexivity, perhaps even a philosophical orientation, in my character.  When things get tough, I can think through them, analyze them, criticize myself, and come out happy again.

Unfortunately, over the last year, philosophy hasn't saved me from the occasional black moods, emotions that have always seemed very foreign to who I am.  As is obvious from these posts, I have often been very happy with Helena and with Rita, but from time to time, a kind of sadness and irritability has passed over me, something I feel powerless to stop and change.

Over these months, I have spent time and effort trying to understand this emotional blackness, testing hypothesis after hypothesis in a kind of spiritual scientific method, but without any success.  I think, however, that I may have come to some kind of a conclusion.  It all has to do with sleep.

I had always attributed my better than average happiness to my better-than-average capacity to reflect and philosophize, so one can understand that I would be a bit disappointed to find that the real cause could be something much more jejune: the fact that I sleep 9 hours most nights.  Or more accurately, slept.  You can't keep that up with a baby in the house.  Sleeping less, I have found myself exhausted, unable to keep up the happiness that I always found so easy.

I suppose it shouldn't be a surprise that happiness is organic, a form of energy not that much different from the ability to run a marathon or climb a 20,000 foot mountain.  I couldn't do either of those without sleep either.  But ever since Aristotle declared that the purpose of philosophy was to seek felicity, thinkers have claimed that their way of seeing their world, their techniques of reflecting on themselves -- all of philosophy, in fact -- would serve as the royal road to happiness.

Helena slept almost 18 hours today, and she can't stop smiling.  Maybe we really just need more sleep.

New Michelangelo fresco found in the Vatican

I know I don't have time to play with Photoshop right now, but this one was just too much fun not to do. The original is below:

Christmas

OK, it isn't really Christmas yet.  We've got a good three weeks to go.  But since Rita and I leave for Brazil on Sunday, my parents came to Santa Fe this week to celebrate an early Christmas with us and Helena Iara.  It was splendid, with everything one could possibly want from a holiday: great food, presents, laughs with friends and family...


But since Christmas came early, I felt like I had to explain a little bit of the holiday to Helena.  I told her of a people who had been oppressed and abused by everyone, by the Egyptians and the Persians and the Babelonians and the Romans, and who dreamed of a savior, someone who would free them from oppression and slavery.  They imagined some great warrior, some heir of the fabulous David, who would throw the Romans into the sea with swords and fire... and they got a little baby.  Tiny, weak, and happy.  One who would soon have to flee into Egypt in fear of those some Romans.

Some savior!  But, as I explained to Helena Iara, I think that was the point.  A savior saves us, and we don't have to do anything.  A baby, on the other hand, acts by turning us into actors, makes us into agents.  We want to help, care, be kind, love the little baby.  And that was, after all, the goal of Jesus's ministry, later, too.  To help people to love each other, to do justice not only on the political level (he was pretty weak as a revolutionary leader), but especially on the personal one.  To do justice, to love one another, and to walk humbly with your God, as the prophet put it.

And babies, I have learned over the last several months, do that pretty well!

Prohibition and desire

Helena Iara isn't even a year old, but she already understands a the logic of desire: when things are prohibited, we want them more.  For instance, imagine that she is sitting in her baby seat, set on top of the table as Rita and I have lunch.  We will offer her toy after toy, which she will play with for a moment, and then throw aside.  A toy left barely within reach deserves a little more attention, if only because it is a challenge.  But... a piece of paper?  A hot teakettle?  The Tabasco sauce?  Anything that we do not want her to touch (and we don't even have to say it explicitly), that's what she wants.

A lot of intellectuals these days connect this idea with Michel Foucault, and he certainly did formalize the ideas in his political philosophy, but Foucault himself attributed the seed of the idea to Deleuze.  And as I explained to Helena Iara a couple of days ago, the idea goes back at least as far as Paul of Tarsus, with his famous, "Were it not for the law, I would not have known sin," and the rest of the epistle to the Romans.  Paul certainly didn't invent the idea, either: any mother paying close attention to the behavior of a baby will see the same thing.

But as a philosophy professor of mine once said, "The dirty little secret of philosophy is that most of the great idea have already been thought.  We try to complicate them up so that we look smart and original, but carpenters and grandmas had them long before we did.  Even so, it's worth while to repeat them, though."

And in the end, as I repeated the connection between prohibition and desire to Helena Iara, I knew I was not being original.  But it helped me not to get irritated as she reached, yet again, for the sharp spines on the crown of thorns plant in front of the window.

Peek-a-boo Two

When I wrote last week's blog, I forgot the great philosopher of the Peek-a-Book, Bishop Berkeley, so Helena and I had a quick talk about him this week.  He seems to make the same mistake that contemporary psychologists do about babies, thinking that what the kid is struggling with is merely object permanence, with the idea that things can exist outside of our perception of them.

Berkeley took philosophical idealism to its extreme, saying that in fact, the world itself did not exist.  All that was "really there" is the subject who perceives, and God who sends the perceptions directly into his soul.  The world "as it is", other subjects... all are merely my own projections, confusions of my relationship with God.  There is a certain mystical logic to this, at least as Western Mystics have always said that God is all that really matters, but both babies and most of the original thinkers of Judeo-Christianity didn't make that mistake.  After all, Jesus says, "As you do to the lest of these my brothers, you do to me."  It isn't as Berkeley suggests that others are a projection of the subject's relationship with God, but that God is an extension of the justice we do to others, especially the poor and vulnerable.

I think babies understand the basic premise, and parents do, too.  God is, to a certain degree, a byproduct of the love we bear for one another.