Falling down

As Helena Iara has been learning to stand and walk, I've discovered that she loves to fall.  Not all the time, of course, and she'll cry when her hear hits the floor, but on a nice soft surface, or when she just lands on her butt, she'll look up with a blissful smile.  So this weekend, I told her a story of an encounter I had with a teenager living on the street, about a decade ago when I was working with street kids in Santa Fe.  Since I wrote a radio commentary about the story back then, I'm going to shamelessly plagiarize myself here:

            Last week, one of the homeless kids I work with came into the drop in center elated.  A friend had loaned him a snowboard and taken him up to the Santa Fe Ski Basin, and the experience had left a smile on his face that I didn’t think even surgery could remove.

            “You’re not just dead?”  I asked, remembering my first day on a snowboard, where have a zillion flips over my toe-side edge had left bruises on my palms and sorer muscles than anything else I could remember. 

            His smile grew a touch more thoughtful.  “Sure, I crashed a lot, but I’m good at falling.”

            Several days later, the same kid came in.  Perhaps he had gone to the plastic surgeon, I thought at first, because that permanent smile had been completely effaced.  We talked for a while, played a game of chess, and finally, slowly, the truth began to come out.  The sort of truth that fulfills everyone’s nightmare.

            Several months before, an acquaintance had invited him and his girlfriend to sleep on his floor for the winter.  At the time, it had seemed a kind gesture.  But then, yes, the hero of my story walked in on his girlfriend and their host.  Naked.  In bed.

            My heart contracted.  He moved his knight to put my king in check.

            “I’m so impressed with how you’re handling this,” I said, reaching for any good thing to say, any silver lining to the blackest cloud a young man can have pass in front of the sun.

            “Remember what I told you?” he asked.  “I’m good at falling.”

            If there’s any truth to the old saw about how suffering builds character, it’s in those few words.  And unfortunately, because life has become so easy for most middle and upper class Americans, we have no chance to learn how to fall.  I imagine an average kid thrown into the same circumstances -- he would demand years of therapy, a prescription for Zoloft, and a new puppy.  For a kid who’s been homeless for years, who’s been knifed in the back by his father -- sure, the experience is further evidence that life sucks, but it does not destroy him.

            On the streets, among the orphans, the girls who were sexually abused for years, the gay boys kicked out of the house by their dads, and children from families too poor to support them, there are also some rich kids.  The life of Jack Kerouac seems romantic to them, and they might talk about the joys of the open road, but in truth, they want to learn how to fall.  Most children from American families have no chance to find out what they’re made of, to see if they are worthy of themselves.

            So in the end, there’s a simple lesson and a more complicated application.  We all need to learn how to fall better -- the question is how.

            Maybe I’ll try snowboarding again.

            This is Kurt Shaw for Radio for Change dot com.

 You can see why I'm so excited that Helena is learning to fall.

Identity and Memory

This week, Helena has come to love books.  Now, she's always enjoyed standing in front of the bookshelf and looking at the spines, and more recently, in trying to pull them out and throw them on the floor, but this week she learned how to turn the pages, look at the pictures and relate them to the story... a book as a book, not as a mere object.

In the process, she's concluded that her favorite book is Little Gorilla, the story of a baby gorilla loved by everyone in the jungle, and his anxiety about growing up, because if Little Gorilla isn't little anymore, will everyone still like him?  I think this deeper theme still escapes Helena Iara, but she loves the pictures of all of the different animals, and thinks that the lion is especially great (she has a stuffed lion, whom I bring into the story with a roar).

Yesterday, with each page that she turned, she reached onto the page to touch Little Gorilla, finding his little black form on almost all of the pages (though not when just a hand or foot represents the character metonymically: that's a hard step intellectual, I imagine).  At first, recognizing the gorilla doesn't seem like that big a deal, but the book represents the little baby in lots of positions, doing many things, and eventually Little Gorilla gets big, and looks almost nothing like himself.  Yet Helena always recognized him.

I told her a story of José Luís Borges, Funes el Memorioso, where the protagonist has perfect memory, and can re-create any day in his life in exact detail.  Soon, he concludes that language is insufficient for his world: "It annoyed him that a dog at 3:14PM (seen from the front) would have the same name as a dog at 3:15 (seen in profile)."  In the end, the perfect detail of his memory made abstraction, generalization, synthesis -- all of what we call thinking -- impossible.  Unable to forget, he was unable to remember, or at least remember as we use the word.

 Helena's recognition of Little Gorilla on many different pages, in many different incarnation, is a kind of forgetting of difference, a recognition of what matters and what doesn't, and as such, something that makes thinking possible.

11:30

For the last several days, the Brazilian all-news-all-the-time station has been promoting an interview with Slavoj Zizek, one of my favorite philosophers and someone who shows up pretty often in this blog.  (If you want an interesting thought experiment on how bad the American media is, try to imagine what it would take to put that kind of marketing campaign into an interview with a philosopher on Fox News or CNN)  Unfortunately, GloboNews planned to show the interview at 11:30 at night, well after I prefer to be asleep.

Helena Iara fell asleep earlier than usual, and Rita and I prepared for a good night, but at 11:15, a certain small person decided that she did not want to be asleep.  Nor did she want to play in her crib, in bed, or in the hammock.  She wanted to go downstairs.

Now, one can argue about whether or not her real purpose was to see the interview with Zizek (which turned out to be great) or whether she just wanted to go downstairs and play with her toys.  In fact, the second interpretation is far more probable (OK, almost certain).  But to a philosopher-dad, it was a proud moment.

Toys, Gravity, Kant

This morning after breakfast, Helena Iara sat in her high chair, throwing one toy after another to the ground, excited to hear the sound of the plastic hitting the tile floor, powerful knowing that either Rita or I would reach down and pick the toys up.  "One down, two down, three down," I joked as I picked up yet another plastic block.

"Good thing," Rita replied.  "Think of what would happen if Helena were in outer space, with no gravity at all."  An image of Helena outside a spaceship, throwing her toys left and right and "up" and "down" (categories that don't make much sense without gravity), with nothing ever to stop them, flying off into infinity where Helena could never see them or play with them again.

Emmanuel Kant said something very similar, about how what we think of as a problem to do something, may be exactly what makes doing that thing possible: "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."  The dove longs for an easier passage through the air, resenting the friction of each passing atom of oxygen... without recognizing that it's exactly that air that makes his flight possible.  In the same way, I get tired of the force of gravity which forces me to bend down and pick up yet another toy, without recognizing how much worse it would be otherwise.

Slavoj Zizek defines this process as the goal of psychoanalysis: seeing that what seem to be the "conditions of impossibility" of an action are really "its conditions of possibility," what seems like a barrier to what I want is in fact essential to doing it.

 It seems like a key lesson to fatherhood, a way to look at the sleepless nights and stomach aches and vomit after eating an apple.  Without these things, without the needs a child has of her parents, we would never construct love, family, all of the things that we want from parenting.  It's all air to a dove.

Pizza

Helena, Rita, and I went out for pizza last night, an experience rather different than what most Americans would expect.  While American pizza is generally cheap, considered a form of fast food, over the last ten years, Brazilian pizza has become gourmet, the sort of thing that people dress up to eat, expect unusual flavors like black fungus and arrugula, and drink wine.

From the moment we got to the pizzeria, Helena Iara set out to seduce everyone in the restaurant: she started with the waitresses, looking at them, throwing kisses (a new skill she learned this week), then opening her arms as if to say "come and get me!" before flirtatiously turning to hug Rita.  Next, she wanted to walk around the room, and stopped at each table to look up at each person.  When they smiled at her, she would move on to the next diner, as if to say, "Have you played with me yet?" By the end of the evening, she had "talked" with everyone and inspired people at one table to talk to people at another: an event had happened, and it brought everyone closer together.

A couple of months ago, I wrote a blog about Sara Blaffer Hrdy's hypothesis that babies are the foundation of human culture, because they are so hard to care for, that one person can't do it alone.  The baby needs grandparents and friends and aunts and uncles as well as her mother and father, because unlike most other animals, humans are born too early, too small and fragile to do anything for themselves.  I think that Helena's adventure last night, however, suggests that Hrdy begins with too much of a negative (or maybe physicalist?) frame: "babies are hard to care for, so people have to come together to guarantee the continuity of the species."  In this case, though, Helena brought people together through shared joy, not shared suffering.

Here's where I think Rita's thinking is really innovative: her research in the favelas of Recife and Rio de Janeiro showed that children play exactly this role as the glue of civil society, as the element that brings together families and neighbors into groups and informal organizations.  Children are community organizers, even in a pizza parlor.

Walking with Thumos

It looks like a week of milestones: Helena took her first steady, solo steps today.  Just four or five steps from me to Rita and then Rita to me, never sturdy or secure, but she could repeat them, and she wasn't just using her feet to catch up with her body as she fell forward.  Perhaps the funniest thing, however, with a soccer-mad father in a futebol-mad country, is that as she walked, she also dribbled a ball with her feet, kicking it once or twice as she covered the yard and a half between her parents.  And I don't think this is coincidence: as she put her feet in front of her to kick the ball, she overcame the balance problem that had kept her from walking, the tendency to get her weight in front of her feet and then fall down.  The ball seemed to compensate for that.


The most exciting thing about her steps, through, was not the dribbling.  It was the look of extraordinary pride that she expressed on her face, the quick little screams of joy that stood in for "I did it, I did it!"  For the last hour, well after her achievements, she hasn't stopped smiling and calling out.  It seemed a good time to tell her about Peter Sloterdijk's valorization of thumos (pride, heart, honor) over eros (love, desire) in some of his most recent work.

Much of modern and post-modern philosophy is about desire: Hegel, Freud, Lacan, Zizek... lots of the people I write about in this blog.  Sloterdijk, however, as I told Helena, thinks that this emphasis avoids something that the Greeks considered to be a much less ambiguous value: thumos.  Pride and the love of honor, the desire for the respect of others, motivated the Greeks to do heroic things, and Sloterdijk sees it also behind George Soros or Bill Gates's immense charitable foundations.  But I didn't tell Helena about the supposed political benefits of pride.  I concentrated on the feeling she was expressing.

Thumos lies at the root of "enthusiasm" (to be filled with pride or honor), and it is something that I love to see in Helena.  She isn't ashamed of her pride, as many of us learn to be; when she does something well, it makes her happy, and she wants it to make others happy, as well.  The point isn't to inspire the envy of others (as is often true of too many of our motivations), but just to be excited and proud of herself.

And today, as she stumbled across the floor, dribbling a little ball, she deserved her thumos.  And she makes me enthusiastic along with her.

Mama

Like most great moments, the first time that a baby says "Mama" isn't really a single moment, except in history or memory.  The American revolution doesn't really begin with Beacon Hill or Paul Revere or the Declaration of Independence, but with thousands of little disobediences, refusals to pay taxes, resistance of colonial officers.  Nor can we mark the beginning of a war with the annexation of the Sudetenland or the Anschlüss.  But we choose to mark one of the moments of a process as the "real" beginning.

For me, Helena just said Mama.  Said it, in the way that human beings use language to mean something, to do something.  She was sitting on my lap in the hammock, a little tired, but happy to be outside and looking at the trees.  Then she asked for my fingers so she could stand up on my legs, looked at Rita working in the garden, and called out "Mama."  Then she screwed up her face, looked into the sky, and whined.  It was clear: she wanted Mama to help her go to sleep, because she was tired.  And as I write this, Helena Iara sleeps in the next room as Rita watches over her.

In grammatical terms, Helena used Mama as a vocative, a call to someone, just like I might say, "Hey, David" to my brother before making a comment or asking a question.  I don't think that Helena used the word as a signifier, as a sound that refers to a thing: I doubt that she even considers Rita (or me, or anyone) to be a thing, a substance with properties, let alone understands that words refer to things.  But she used the word.  She used it with purpose, with a plan.  And as Wittgenstein says, "In most (but not all) cases, we can say that the meaning of a word is its use in a language game."

Signification and meaning may come later, but for me, today is July 4 or July 14th, the arbitrary day we choose to call the one that matters.  Today, when she said "Mama", she was speaking.

Watermelon

 
 

Horses, representation, play

Last night, Rita and I took Helena Iara to a country restaurant for dinner with her family, and as one might expect, a baby does not find adult conversation interesting enough to sit quietly at the table.  Fortunately, the restaurant owners know this, and they had build a wooden jungle gym, swings, and a couple of kitschy model horses and oxen harnessed to an old cart and landau.  I took Helena out to the front, and we played on the swings and then walked over to the horse.

As we sat on the landau (I say landau, as a two wheeled cart, but do they need to be covered?  I'm not sure: certainly it wasn't a surrey) behind the horse, a three year old boy was playing on the horse's back, and my mind inevitably (if you have read this blog before, you know that "inevitably" isn't as ironic as it might seem) turned to Plato's idea of representation.  Plato said that what's "really real" is the ideas, and that what we see as "real things" (horses, in this particular case) are nothing but inferior reflections of the idea of a horse.  Art, as a representation of this representation, is even worse, and as such should be prohibited.

Was the horse in front of us really a representation of a horse in a field, though?  Today, most kids encounter a horse as a toy long before the encounter one in real life, and the same is true with most stuffed animals: Helena loves frogs and bears and a moose and a couple of rabbits, and she has never seen any of them in real life.  Children don't really see their toys as representations of something else.  They are for play, not for representation.

The easy postmodern out (one much in fashion when I was in college, so much that I wrote my senior thesis on him) was the philosophy of Jean Baudrillard, who theorized the simulacrum, understood as a "copy of which there is no original."  Epcot Center serves as a wonderful example of a simulacrum.  The difference, of course, is that Epcot claims to represent something (the "real" China across the water) and merely does it badly, and Baudrillard secretly desires for there to be an original in the background, and feels a little sad or nihilistic that there is no idea which the simulacrum can represent.  But a toy... it's different.  That a toy bear or frog represents its model poorly is no criticism: in fact, the toy can be much better for not appearing anything like its supposed reference.

There is pretty good evidence that the whole Platonic (and eventually Western and then almost-universal) obsession with representation emerges with money, which can stand for anything.  Coins (first established in the West by Midas in the 6th or 7th century BC), this strange new thing which can become anything in the process of exchange, open the question of representation, to which Platonic philosophy is only the first of many answers.  But many cultures, and all little kids, don't care about that.  Their word isn't governed by symbols and signs, but by the act of play (I reflect a lot on this on the book I wrote about child soldiers in Colombia).

To Helena, the whole question, raised by Plato and still at issue among analytic philosophers today, just doesn't matter.  She just wants to play on the horse.  And honestly, I think that's a much better philosophical position than almost all of the philosophers of language I've read...

Helena and the Monkeys

One of the wonderful things about the house that Rita and her father built a dozen years ago here in the jungle south of Florianópolis, is that monkeys come to visit from time to time.  They are small monkeys, marmosets really (I think black tufted marmosets, but many distributions maps don't have that species coming that far south), and occupy more or less the ecological niche that squirrels do in the United States. but it's still pretty exciting to be sitting outside reading a book, only to hear the whistling call of a monkey and to see a family playing in the trees.

Day before yesterday, Helena saw the monkeys for the first time.  Seeing a little monkey in the trees isn't really all that easy, and you have to learn a lot about perception before you can pick out the difference between monkey-brown and tree-trunk brown, but once she learned to see them, she'll often see them before we do.  She starts by staring, then shouts, and then claps three or four times in a row.  And strangely enough, the monkeys seem to like Helena Iara as much as she likes them.  They have come back many more times recently than they ever did before.

So of course... Helena and I had to talk about Darwin as we swung on the hammock and looked into the jungle this morning.  I explained a little bit about the theory of evolution, about the finches of the Galápagos and moths in England during the industrial revolution, but mostly I told her about how mad people got, and many continue to be, about Darwin's argument that man is a primate, that Helena's monkey friends are also her very, very distant cousins.

I think the problem is basically this: many people want to think that we are different from the animals in our essence, in something that precedes us, something given by God.  I argued to Helena that it's actually the reverse: if we are different from animals, it isn't because of what someone (God, providence) did to us, but what we do, what we create.  The difference between men and animals comes after, because of what we do, not what we are.

Etiê Apuã

Helena Iara has been speaking a lot of new words recently, if "words" is the right term.  She repeats the same sound again and again, as if they were words, but without a clear meaning or a connection to sounds we can understand.  And her favorite of these repeated sounds is "etiê apuã," together with some variations like eteteiê, abuã, ebwa...  And then, of course, there is the ever-present mamama, which may or may not refer to Rita, though she does seem to us it in the right context from time to time, meaning something like, "Mom, I need you."

It's the repetition of etiê apuã that's been fascinating, though.  She's used the words for the last two weeks, and they seem to be important to her, even if not in the conventional sense of meaning, of connecting a sound to a thing to which it refers.  I'd love to think that apuã is a real word for her, because it means both mountain and head in Guaraní, the native language that used to be spoken in this part of Brazil (and the origin of Iara, Helena's middle name), and given my love of both mountain climbing and intellectualism, what could be a better first word for my daughter?  Unfortunately, though, I don't think there is any way in the world I get to make that argument.  Besides the Guaraní loan words common in Portuguese, Helena has never heard the language spoken.

It's the variations on the words that strike me as perhaps a more honest way to think about etiê apuã.  She'll sometimes drag out the vowels, other times repeat the consonants, other times almost sing the words as if they came from a tonal language.  Sometimes the nasal vowels (ê, ã) are more defined, other times those same sounds seem more flat and English.  She is experimenting and playing with sound, but in a way that reminds me of what John Coltrane did to well-known melodies: she takes them, tears them apart, puts them back together.

The traditional definition of the human being was as a logicon zoon, an animal with reason or language (logos means both in Greek), but Hannah Arent famously turned this idea on its head, showing that many animals use sounds as a way to convey symbols, while some people cannot.  Art, she says, is the aspect that makes us human: no other animal makes art.  Helena's game of theme and variation on etiê apuã makes me think she may be right: before language is meaning, it is art, an attempt to play with sounds in order to create beauty.