Big Fear

As I mentioned a couple of blogs ago, Helena is trying to figure out the feeling of fear.  When we got back to the United States last week, she found something else to fear: her Pampers.  There is no Sesame Street in Brazil, so she never had the chance to see Elmo and the Cookie Monster and the Count; her first interaction with these monsters (because, cuddly as the muppets are, they are still strange critters) comes in the very intimate space of her underpants.

Over the last couple of days, she has resolved the conflict linguistically.  Instead of saying "medo" (fear) when she sees the muppets on her diapers, she says "medão," or "big fear."  And strangely, "big fear" inspires more laughs than terror.

Has Helena discovered irony?  Maybe.  I think it's more likely that she has found that words influence the things they describe.  The book that made Helena think about fear for the first time, "Little Yellow Riding Hood" by Chico Buarque, ends with the girl able to face the wolf when she discovers that by inverting wolf (lobo) she gets a cake (bolo).  We have a naïve sense that words simple describe the world, but in fact they make it: the idea from the Gospel of John than "in the beginning was the word" may sound strange to modern scientific ears, but it isn't far off.

I remember a debate in Hebrew class, years ago, about the etymology of the noun D-B-R, which means both thing and word.  In the European tradition, we distinguish strongly between words and things, but I think there is something in the Hebrew assimilation of the two seemingly disparate elements.  And I think that Helena is coming to learn that a word is a thing that can be played with, modified, changed, little different that putting clothes on her baby dolls.  And as she clothes her words in new sounds and new adjectives, they start to change the things to which they refer.  Fear isn't as heavy when it is "big fear", and a lobo isn't so dangerous when you realize it's just a backward bolo/cake.

Please?

Helena: I want, I want [that].
Kurt: What's the magic word?
Helena: "Magic."

Pocoyó!

Most video for little kids bores me to tears.  I can't imagine watching Dora or Teletubbies day after day with Helena.  But the Spanish show Pocoyó -- she loves it, and it even makes me think.  Like a Pixar movie for the under-2 set.  Just one example:

The short film is, I think, the best example I have ever seen of the distinction that Jacques Lacan makes between the speaking and spoken subject... and quite frankly, it's much more fun to watch Pocoyó and Pato explain it than reading any number of academic commentators on the subject.

Now, a lot of left wing theory in the 1950s and 1960s was very pessimistic about the possibilities of human agency.  People like Louis Althusser and the young Foucault saw the subject (the actor, the person who does something) in its etymological sense, as one who has been subjected (literally, "thrown under"); one is, after all, the "subject of the king" or of a country.  A good bit of the philosophy of that era focusses on all of the different external forces that structure our subjectivity: the way that language makes us see the world as we do, or how gender and power and monetary differences limit how we dream or what we think we are capable of.  Though useful as a critique of ideology, it's a deeply pessimistic philosophy, and I think may lie at the root of the current fiasco of the European and American Left.

If we think about these ideas in terms of Pocoyó, it's the first couple of minutes of "Wackily ever after", when the narrator tries to control the story (and the actors) by means of his voice: "Ely will do this," "Pato is the crazy villain..."  The voice is making explicit a kind of "should"that all of us feel: we all should strive for success, which means being a lawyer or an i-banker (even if most of them aren't very happy).  Clothes have this power, too: Pocoyó gets the crown, and so will be the prince, while the top hat and cape make Pato the heavy.  Lacan, however, focusses on the aspect of speech: that's why he talked about the spoken subject, the subject created by the voice of the narrator, the other, or power.

But Lacan opens another door: the speaking subject.  Pocoyó and his friends are not about to let the narrator tell a classic (read: boring!) story about princes and princesses and evil monsters.  Ely wants to be a princess, but the kind of princess who lifts weights and rides a scooter (vide Fiona, in Shrek).  Pato doesn't really want to be the villain: he wants to play and to water the flowers.  Pocoyó isn't going to duel his friend Sleepy Bird, so he invites him to dinner.  The play of children, their resistance to the voice of the narrator, takes the story in new directions, makes the kids speaking subjects as well as spoken ones.

No one really controls everything about his or her own agency: our parents and culture and genes and who know what else are strong influences on what we think and do.  But I think that subjectivity -- for Pocoyó, for Helena, for me -- comes at the intersection of the voice of the narrator and the rebellious play of a child.  Surfing back and forth between those two is what makes us... well, us.

The prodigal daughter

Helena has never been a difficult baby.  Rita and I hear stories from other parents that make us wince, of sleepless months and temper tantrums and endless crying, and we can only thank whatever combination of genetics and health care and parenting that has kept us free of such challenges.  But no baby is easy: they all make us suffer in countless small -- and several large -- ways.

I'm not quite sure why I have been thinking of New Testament parables recently, but the Prodigal Son has been on my mind.  Most of us know the story from church, Sunday school, or pop culture: the vagabond son disobeys his father, leaves home, spends all his money on worthless things, and then, finally, comes home.  The father is so happy that he slays the fatted calf and throws a huge party to celebrate; the older son, who has always stayed with his father, obeyed the old man, and helped him, arrives bitter to the party, wondering why the father would do so much for the vagabond, and nothing for the good son.

‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ (Luke 15:31-2)

Most people read the parable through that last phrase: we should forgive and ben happy when we get back something we have lost.  It's not exactly a trite lesson, but I don't think it does much more than express something about how humans deal with loss.

I wonder, though, if there isn't something else going on, a reason that that father loves the prodigal son more than the perfect one.  As anyone who has ever been in love knows, we like people because of their virtues, but we love them because of their faults, their tics, their strange neuroses.  I'm not sure that it's different for children.  Do I love Helena because she's smart and funny and cute?  Sure, that helps.  But I think I really love her because I've had to rock her to sleep when she has a terrible colic at 3AM, because she constantly disobeys and wants to climb the stairs we tell her are dangerous, because if there are olives on the table, she won't eat anything else...  It's the glitches and the errors that make love dawn on us.

Slavoj Zizek makes a whole theological structure out of this idea, suggesting that if we love people for their lacks and sins, it means that God must be lacking, essentially broken.  God is love, after all.  And in fact, I think that the process by which I child comes to love his or her parents is a very strange one, in which she begins loving them because of their omnipotence and the protection they offer her, but (sometime in the teenage years, or later) she has to learn that loving them means understanding and loving their faults.

I don't want Helena to disobey, climb the stairs -- let alone leave home, spend all the money, and do everything else the prodigal son did -- but I know I'll love her even if she does.

Fear

Helena is afraid.  Or more accurately, she tells us she is afraid.  She certainly doesn't fear the things she should, like climbing down the stairs alone or falling into deep water at the lake, but from time to time the movement of shadows under a tree or the sight of a leaf that looks like a spider will inspire her to say, "fear," and shy away.

There is a wonderful passage in the Philosophical Investigations, where Wittgenstein addresses the analytic philosophers of his day (heirs of Hume and other radical empiricists), who insisted that because we cannot feel the pain of other people, we can't know that what they call pain is the same as what I can pain.  "Just try for a moment," Wittgetstein ironizes, "to think that someone is not in pain when they wince in front of you."  Pain is not, in fact, a personal thing contained only in my body; it is social.  We know that other people are in pain and, as Bill Clinton famously said, we actually feel that pain.

I think I understand how a baby comes to understand what "pain" means, seeing how others react when a hammer falls on their feet, and then feeling the same thing.  Fear, though, strikes me as something different, perhaps because it is much less quotidian: Rita and I don't feel fear on a daily basis.  Jaguars and FBI agents don't surround the house to inspire such feelings so that Helena would know the social element of fear.

She started to talk about fear after we read Little Yellow Riding Hood, a fantastic book by the Brazilian poet and musician Chico Buarque, to her.  The story is about a little girl who is afraid all the time, and of everything... but especially of the big bad wolf, though she has never seen the beast, and it probably only exists in the mountains of Germany.  But because she fears the wolf so much, one day she conjures it up, and it really appears... and the reality is, of course, no where near as bad as her fears.

There's an easy Foucauldian lesson here: just as all prohibition actually inspires the desire to break the law, a book that tries to calm fears may actually inspire them.  But I don't think that's what is really going on.  I think the book taught Helena that fear is an important category of human (or childhood) existence, so she has to figure it out.  And since she doesn't have frightened adults around her on a regular basis, she has to do experiments.

Human feelings are confused and diverse.  "Fear" isn't so much a description of any singular sensation, as it is an umbrella under which we put lots of different feelings.  So Helena tries something out: she's confused by the play of shadows, and that messes with something in her belly; she calls it fear.  Rita and I say, "No, there's nothing to be afraid of," so she sets that category aside as a failed experiment.  "Fear," she says when she sees something that looks like a snake, and I say, "Don't worry, that's not a snake."  She reads that as, "you don't need to be afraid right now," but also as "Snakes are something that should cause fear."  And gradually, she learns how people use words to describe complicated emotions.

I just hope it's a while before she needs to understand "anxiety" and those other heavy words!

I and me

Helena Iara learned to say "me a few weeks ago; she's become very clear in saying what is "for me" and "for you," "for Mommy" and "for Daddy."  What she hasn't said, however, is the word "I".  In grammatical terms, she learned the first person accusative before the nominative; in philosophy, she learned to see herself as an object before she could see herself as a subject.

"Know thyself": from the first Socratic dialogues on, that has been the commandment of western philosophy: I must know myself: which means that I occupy both the subjective and the objective position, standing outside of myself to be both the knower and the thing known.  I don't, however, think that babies learn about themselves this way: before being able to know themselves as themselves, they know how others see them, how others act on them.

I've been thinking recently, for instance, in a piece of contemporary child-rearing advice from the United States: when a child does well on a test or another academic endeavor, we shouldn't compliment her as being "smart" but as "working hard" or "being dedicated."  The idea, I think, is that intelligence is innate, but children develop persistence and dedication, so parents should focus on the virtue that can be trained and improved.

The problem is partly that intelligence isn't innate, but largely defined by others; I've worked with kids living on the street, forever defined as retarded in their school records, whose minds challenges me much more than any of my colleagues from grad school at Harvard.  Even more important, however, is others seeing you as smart: once you have that label, people listen to you more, they laugh at your jokes when you're a kid, they push you into intellectual pursuits, they read your words with more care.  And in the process, the smart kid actually becomes smarter; she trains her mind to do well what people consider to be smart.  (There is, by the way, pretty decent evidence that the climbing IQ scores (30 points higher across the scale since 1900) aren't as much about changes in the test, as they are about urbanization and modernity.  Our lives have taught us to think in new ways, ways that are rewarded by the test.  If IQ tests measured ability to predict weather or sense when a mountain lion might attack you, we'd have dropped even more that we gained.)

Those last paragraphs are the practical upshot of the fact that a baby knows herself as others know her: we have to be very careful how we know her.  But there is also a strange philosophical conclusion to this process: even as we become older, we still have to know ourselves through some metaphor of the same process.  I try to look at myself through other eyes, see myself as others see me.  Rita and I see Helena, and define her in that process, but she also sees us.  For instance, I have always considered myself a good cook, but Helena doesn't much like the food I prepare.  She prefers Rita's.  I find myself thinking of myself in different ways, trusting myself less in the kitchen.  At the same time, she finds me much more reliable and trustworthy than I thought I would be with a baby.  I always thought I would drop her, but since she never expressed fear that I would, I also came to trust myself.

In the end, that old Socratic riff robbed from the Delphic oracle may still hold, but we have to recognize that the only real way to know myself, is to become the other who knows me.

The new tone of the blog

For the first year that I wrote this blog, Helena couldn't talk.  Yes, she could opine, respond, look at me with questions and love and anger... but when it came to talking, communications were a one-way street.  And what she really loved was hearing my voice.  Talking about philosophy was a great way to keep that voice going, to keep her interested, hearing English, looking into my eyes.

Truth is, though, that now that Helena is talking and walking, she has made it clear that she'd rather hear stories, sing songs (well, she contributes a word or two, and then expects me and Rita to continue the song, but she makes it clear what she wants), and to play word games of repetition and made up sounds.  It's great fun, and just as intellectually challenging as talking about Lacan or Kristeva... but it doesn't make for great blogging.  It's more a kind of Dada and Surrealism parenting, which, as we all know, may be fun art to produce, but which, unless it is as great as Magritte or Duchamps, can be painful to see.  I haven't wanted to put anyone through a repetition of those conversations.

For the next couple of months, I'm going to try something new: not narrating the content of my conversations with Helena, but trying to relate what I think is going on in her head, to try to use intellectual tools to try to understand her growing perspective on the world.  Clearly, I'll be projecting my ideas on her, based on the small evidence she can provide with her vocabulary.  None the less, it should be an interesting experiment.

Please let me know what you think, so I can make these blogs interesting to more people than just me.

MommyDaddyBaby

Helena has a way to say "family": MamãePapaiBebê, all said together as one word.  Since she is just working on the idea of plurals (her three dolls are "bebês", the only plural she uses), it isn't strange that collective nouns like family express concepts that are still difficult for her... but her word brings up the basic question of how collective nouns are possible at all.

The history of metaphysics spent a lot of time on an even simpler question, that of the noun itself.  If we think about, for instance, the birds that flit outside of Helena's window, she'll she sparrows and canaries, azure crows, bem-te-vis, and loads of songbirds... but also arancuás, which look like chickens and jump from tree to tree like monkeys.  And in the marshes on the way to the beach, she sees ibis and herons wading.  Then frigate birds and gulls high above... and how does she know to call all of these animals "birds"?  An amazing process of categorization is going on here.

Bertrand Russell famously insisted that the only real "proper nouns" were "this" and "that", because even to say that John in the morning is John in the afternoon, is really giving the same name to a person who has changed.  (Borges made a great story out of the idea, Funes el Memorioso)  The point is, that seeing the sameness of things around us isn't as simple as we feel it is: in fact, the mind is involved in a major effort of organizing and categorizing a waterfall of colors and sounds that come through the senses, trying to make them meaningful and comprehensible.

Fortunately, babies don't get lost in that kind of speculative claptrap, and Helena isn't worried about why nouns work.  She just uses them.  However, the next step of generalization, that of collective nouns (family as a group of people, forest as a group of trees), still stands a little beyond her.  MamãePapaiBebê works as a list instead of a collective, something that might work for small groups like out family.  But when Rita was a girl, with seven brothers and sisters, as well and Mom and Dad and a couple of uncles and aunts living in the house, I doubt that she could have described family with a list.  It just gets too long and complicated, like saying "aspen, pine, lodgepole, grass, aspen, bear, deer, pine (and one and on)" instead of saying "forest."

It's interesting to see how watching a baby learn language, clarifies old debates between Hume and Kant, Russell and Wittgenstein, which seemed so academic twenty years ago.  They aren't academic at all; they're exactly what goes on in a baby's mind as she learns to speak.

Adventures in language

Yesterday, I took Helena to the grocery store, and as always, she was the hit of the day, with everyone staring at her, talking to her... (in fact, we may have to work hard so that she doesn't get too arrogant, given how everyone dotes on her in public.)  Then, at the cashiers, we checked out and Helena said "obrigada" to the girl working the line.  The girl was in a bad mood, and didn't pay attention to Helena, so Helena spoke in a louder voice, "Thanks!"  The message, at least the one I understood, was "if you don't understand me in Portuguese, then let me try English!"  Better, after all, to think that someone doesn't understand, than to think that they are being rude.

The point of all of this, I suppose, is that Helena has learned that language is descriptive; it's also a way to ask for what you want.  But at some basic level, language is a social lubricant, a way to make contact with other human beings.  And when they don't recognize that element (something common to rude cashiers and many types of analytic philosophers), Helena wants to try something else.  Even if that means talking English in Brazil.

This morning, another interesting bilingual game.  Helena loves to use the diminutive and the aggrandizing forms of nouns: Mãe (mother) becomes maezinha (little mommy), a rock is a pedrinha, and she sings "macaco, macaquinho, macacão" (monkey, little monkey, big monkey) to herself for hours on end.  As she walked around her room this morning, looking for her stuffed alpaca ("paca, paca?"), she had to step around a number of pillows.  She looked at Rita and me in the way she does when she wants us to do something, and said, "pilinho."

"Pilinho" would be the perfect diminutive form if pillow were a Portuguese word, meaning "little pillow."  It isn't, of course, and Helena probably learned quickly as we laughed.  But it makes me wonder how Helena distinguishes one language from another.  How does she hear the difference?  Know that she should speak one language to me, and another to a person she meets on the street?  Honestly, I'm not sure how she figures it out, but as her language skills get better (and as we travel to the US next month, where she'll have to figure out the whole context anew), I have a lot to learn.

Rodeo

A couple of weeks ago, Rita and I took Helena to a rodeo in the countryside near where Rita grew up, and though I have no profound reflections about the event, it made for some pretty good photos....

Philosophy

Anyone who has read this blog for a while has probably noticed some changes in the last couple of months.  I'm posting less often, and when I do, the comments are less explicitly philosophical, or at least have less to do with elaborating the ideas of individual philosophers.  This change doesn't mean that I'm talking less, or less seriously with Helena Iara, but that as she grows up, interests and relationships change.



When Helena Iara was a little baby, she loved the sound of a voice: intonation, rises and falls, the sound of funny or soothing words.  What mattered most to her was the fact of talk, and the joy of looking into someone's eyes; musing about the history of philosophy helped me to find things to talk about as we rocked in the hammock or walked in the deserts of Santa Fe or the jungles of Florianópolis.  Philosophical reflections were really for me, a way to understand what was going on with her, to have the minimal difference of the other that allows thought to happen.

But as Helena has grown up, she now understands what I have to say, or at least a truly surprising amount of it.  Her interests now drive the conversation, and though those interests aren't any less intellectual or stimulating, they don't emerge from a dialogue with Zizek or Kristeva, but with bow-wows and miows and flowers and the other exciting parts of her world.

 

As Helena and I began these reflections, she taught me by her presence, by what I imagined that she might be thinking.  Now that she can actually tell me what is interesting to her, these lessons are different, less easy to describe in philosophical language... and frankly, more fun to have than to describe.  To paraphrase Marx, "In the past, philosophies have tried to understand babies.  The point, however, is to play with them."

More Mar

Over the last couple of weeks, Helena Iara has developed a series of emotions that seem almost existential. She asks to see a little angel statue that she broke (the wings came off when she dropped it on the floor) and then goes, "ohhhh" and makes a sad face.  "More" has become a common word, but most often referred to experiences, not things (more riding on the bicycle, more time on the beach).  But the most touching existential desire is for the "Mar," a word she says many times a day, and then points to the beach.

Our house here in Brazil is on an island, and it's only a five minute bike ride to get to a spectacular beach, so I suppose that her demands for more mar aren't completely unexpected.  Even so, it's striking to see this love of the sea develop.  As we head downtown in the car, she knows that the bay will appear soon, and she begins to ask for it.  Today on the bike, as we headed down the hill, she asked plaintively, "mar?"

It isn't simply that Helena loves the ocean, nor does she really want to get it.  It's still winter here in Brazil, and though that doesn't make the sea as cold as it might be in February in Boston, only the hard core surfers and kiteboarders are out on the waves.  Helena is even a little afraid of the ocean, and if the waves lap too close to her, she runs back to embrace my legs or ask to get up.

Maybe what fascinates her is what Kant called the sublime, something that is striking and attractive, but also out of control: a roaring river, a pounding waterfall, the break of waves on rocks.  Though we might call it beautiful, the raging sea is something very different from the beauty of a well tended garden or an English brook where one goes punting.  It attracts and frightens... not unlike a dog or the wind in the trees or being thrown into the air, other things that she loves.

We adults like to manage things.  Babies seem to have a rather more healthy love and fear of beautiful things that they can't control.

Milk?

Anyone have an idea of why Helena Iara laughs her head off when I say the word "Milk?"

Language(s)

There are loads of differences between when I grew up and now, and I certainly don't mean to belabor them with tales of walking 10 miles through the snow on the way to school, uphill both ways.  But one thing that does really strike me is how easy it has become to be a cosmopolitan baby (which I mean in the Kantian, not the fashion magazine, sense): to live across borders.  Helena does that literally whenever we fly from Brazil to the US or back, but she also does it every night.

Rita is getting Helena ready for bed as I write, singing this lullaby we ran across on youtube, purely by chance:

Neither Rita nor I have learned the lyrics in Turkish very well, but we can at least do the "Dandini, Dandini" bit enough for Helena to calm down as night approaches.  Helena's other favorite videos are mostly Italian, like Il Katalikammello and Il Gato Puzzilone.

I compare this to a story my mother tells about a trip she took into Cincinnati with her grandmother; both lived in small town Kentucky, and the "big city" was out of the usual.  My great-grandmother saw two Mexican kids on the street speaking Spanish and said, "Wow, those kids are so smart!"

"Why do you say that?" my mother asked.

"Only two or three years old, and already speaking a foreign language."


I don't think that Helena will even grow up with the idea of "mine" as opposed to "foreign."  Her world is different.  How, I'm not entirely sure, but very different.

Photos of spring

Playing

When Helena was six or seven months old, my parents bought a Johnny Jump-Up for her; in fact, the thing is called a Sassy Seat, but the basic idea is the same: a baby sits in a harness hanging from a door frame, and jumps and swings.  To me, it always looked like great fun.

Back then, Helena liked the toy.  Liked it, but wasn't fascinated by it.  She would sit and hang in it from time to time, enjoying swinging back and forth, but there wasn't much jumping.  I put the seat away in the box that said "Made so that babies can strengthen their legs for walking and running, and improve balance and coordination."

Last week, Helena saw the Johnny Jump-Up, now stored away in her room here in Brazil, and then pointed to it.  "You want to play in that?" I asked, to which she nodded enthusiastically.  I set it up, she got in, and jump, jump, jump, with huge smiles on her face.  Now that the toy was part its date, past the time when she needed to "strengthen her legs for waling and running," now the toy made for joyful fun.

Perhaps I'm generalizing from scant evidence (though, after all, what is this blog, if not that?), but I wonder if the story of the Johnny Jump-Up doesn't tell us something really important about play and learning.  Today, in the United States at least, toys have to be for something.  They teach some skill, strengthen muscles, make babies more intelligent... the whole propaganda campaigns of toy companies are now built around the pedagogical capacity of things kids once just did for fun.  And it isn't just the US: I don't know how many school reform books I've read in Latin America about how kids have to "play to learn."

Here's the problem, though: the basic point of play is that it is pointless.  Not that we don't have reasons or goals within the game, nor that it is senseless, but it is play exactly because it is sufficient until itself.  I play because I like it, because it makes me smile; sometimes, I just play because I play.  When there is a goal outside the game, it actually detracts from play: if I play soccer just so I can get a scholarship to college, it's almost like I'm breaking the rules.  The pointless nature of play is one of the major points of genius of Calvin and Hobbes, especially the sport of Calvinball.

None of this is to say that play and games don't have consequences: they do.  They strengthen legs and teach coordination and keep us from dying of heart disease.  Soccer probably helped me get into college at Williams, made me friends at Harvard and in favelas all over Latin America... but these are all by-products.  In philosophical jargon, they ensue, but they cannot be pursued.  The moment these things become the point of play, the goal of the game, then the game is no longer self-sufficient, no longer complete... no longer fun.

When Helena started to play in the Johnny Jump-Up, she loved it because now she was competent in balance and strength, because she knows how to run and jump.  She loved to play in it because she no longer needed it.

There's something in this experience to teach me about my work, too.  When any of us in the non-profit world write a proposal for funding, we have to say what we're going to do and what the results will be.  Not a bad exercise; it makes us think and plan.  But this year, I did a major evaluation of Shine a Light's work over the last decade, and it's fascinating to see that we did most of what we proposed... but of the real impact on kids' lives, on public policy, on the organizations we worked with, we didn't play for any of it.  It ensued as a by-product, a by-product that turned out to me more important than anything we had planned for.

I like to think that education should always be like that.  There are plans, but in the end, the lessons will surprise everyone, even the educator.

"Where's her mommy?"

A couple of days ago, Helena Iara and I were playing in the living room, when she found a tiny rag doll.  It's a very simple thing, just arms and legs and head and eyes, and Rita bought it when we were in Chiapas, Mexico, five or six years ago.  But what matters to the story here is that the baby is part of a pair: there is also a mommy doll, and they are always together (they were first sewn together, but as happens with curious babies, Helena seems to have picked them apart).

So what did Helena do, upon finding the doll?  A worried expression came over her face, and she began to say "Mommy?  Mommy?" but not with the sort of voice she uses to call Rita.  She walked around the room, looking in the toy box, on the sofa, other places where the mommy doll might be.  She only came to smile again when she found the other doll.

Who knows how many ethical systems philosophers have thought up over the thousands of years since Aristotle talked about finding virtue in the middle between two extremes.  Kant and the duty to the moral law, Mill's utility, Levinas and the face...  But I'd put a good bet on the first step of any ethical system being empathy, feeling for a baby who has lost his mommy.  Maybe both the baby and the mommy are just cloth, but it means something.

Boots

"Bota bota," Helena Iara said this morning as she woke up, and then pointed to the door, as she does when she want to leave the room and go out into the world.  A simple event in the life of a little girl, but as I walked through the jungle this morning, climbing the little mountain behind our house, it occurred to me that this little exchange says something very important about language and meaning.

There's an important back-story here: about three months ago, Rita bought Helena a pair of boots.  Helena loved to wear them, but she also loved (and still loves) to say the word "bota," boot.  Soon, she began to use that word to refer to lots of other things: shoes and sandals, soon even feet, the paws of a stuffed lion, or the hairy pods of a cockroach in one of her children's books.  This is a process that linguists call semantic overreach: kids learn a word and begin to apply it to everything that sort of fits the category, until they learn to shave off the extraneous meanings and get to something closer to the way other people use words.  The most common example is that a "doggie" or "bow-wow" can refer to anything with hair, anything with four feet, anything that barks or growls... until Mom and Dad explain that "dog" is a much more limited concept.

Lots of Helena's words work like this.  "Up" (which she says in English) means "lift me up" as well as the direction up, and it also the way she refers to the teeter-totter in the park.  "Mana", a mis-speaking of banana, also means any other fruit she likes, from guavas to mangos (apples, strangely enough, get their own word).  And the most interesting case is "bola" (ball), which started out meaning ball and then moved on to round fruit.  As she learned that oranges and mandarins are not, in fact, balls, she began to push the meaning of "bola" in new directions: round ceramic flower-pots made sense, but then "bola" moved on to mean other things that are fun to do: dolls and cars and even her swing win cries of "bola." Then, "bola" moved on to mean "cake" and "waffle", because the word for those things in Portuguese is "bolo" (o instead of a, but maybe she can't hear the difference), and though she knows that a cake is different from a ball, she likes both of them.  By now, "bola" has become a fascinating semantic tangle, meaning almost anything that Helena likes a lot.

Which brings us back to "bota", and then pointing to the door.  "Bota," we've come to learn, doesn't just mean footwear.  It also means "walking".  Then from walking, she extended "bota" to mean going outside and seeing the world (her favorite activity), and perhaps even the abstract concept of freedom (she'll sometimes say "bota" as she pulls her hand out of mine or Rita as we try to help/control her).  So as she woke this morning and said "bota", she didn't just mean, "put my shoes on," but also "and then let's go out in the garden and look at flowers and run around and don't think that I'll hold your hand the whole time, either!"  Which is, by the way, what she and Rita are doing as I write this blog.

When linguists and philosophers of language distinguish between denotation (the dictionary definition of a word ) and connotation (the associations that spring to mind because of the word), valuing the first, and saying that connotations are derivative and mushy and not at all serious.  But a baby's use of language (if Helena is an example) seems to say exactly the opposite: connotation comes first.  "Boot" means freedom before the word is cut down and shaved into meaning just "footwear that covers the ankles."

So bota bota.  I'm off for a walk.