Making the high places plain

The entropy machine that is our daughter is only getting more efficient as she gets bigger and stronger.  Nothing that sits on top of anything else will stay there, if Helena Iara can reach it, and the bookshelves and CDs are in constant danger.

Last night, I piled up a mountain of pillows and then put her lion on top.  Not only did she pull the lion down, but then took each pillow and threw it to the ground.  Perhaps it was the lion that inspired this memory, but this time, instead of thinking about entropy and chaos, as I had before, a couple of quotes from the Hebrew prophets came into my head:

“I will go before you and level the exalted places, I will break in pieces the doors of bronze and cut through the bars of iron." [Is 45:2]

"Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain." [Is 40: 4]

I never really liked these verses when I was a kid; I love mountains too much to celebrate their demise, even when I understood that it was a metaphor for social justice, for bringing down the rich and powerful and raising up the poor.

It's interesting, I think, to consider the way that the writers of the Christian gospels used these lines as a proof of their ideas about Jesus being the anointed savior of the Hebrew people.  Matthew cites Isaiah in his narrative of the birth of Jesus... is it merely a coincidence that these actions aren't merely a metaphor for social justice and equality, but also a concrete description of what babies do?  They "level the exalted places" and break anything they can find... maybe not "break in pieces doors of bronze and cut through the bars of iron," but that's more for lack of strength than lack of desire!  (St. Augustine once said that "If babies are innocent, it is merely because they lack the strength to do wrong, not because they lack the will."  I prefer, "If babies cannot level the mountains, it is because they lack the strength, not because they lack the desire.")

In any case, might it be that Matthew is suggesting that a baby's instincts are for justice?  That this seeming negation and destruction really stands for revolution, for throwing off the yoke of Babylon or Rome?  Perhaps.  At least those ideas make it a little easier to clean up after Helena...

[The photos, by the way, come from our vacation.  Most parents will recognize chocolate on a baby's face; mine is filthy after a 40 mile bike ride up and down the mountains in the rain and mud.]

Running

Helena  has everything ready to be walking right now: since she was four months old, she has walked as she holds onto an adults fingers, she stands on her own, she walks four of five steps without a problem... but she still isn't really walking.  Why?  Because she wants to run.  Holding her hands, she won't go slowly, but throws herself forward and sprints her legs with quick steps, running as fast as I can walk and hold her hands.

Now there is an easy lesson in this, one I tried to explain to Helena Iara this morning: you have to walk before you can run.  That idea is such a part of popular wisdom that we can hear it in many different contexts.  Even so...

I wonder if Helena's desire to run doesn't, in fact, express the best thing about her.  Her father doesn't get to brag that "my daughter walked when she was only so many months old," but that doesn't matter so much.  What matters is that she is so enthusiastic that se wants to run, that she loves the feel of movement and laughs as she runs, and that she is always trying to accomplish the impossible.  So instead of the boasts of a proud father, we have a utopian urge, something like the slogan of 1968 in Paris: "Soyons realists, soyons realistes demandons l'impossible": Let's be realists and demand the impossible.

In the end, that attitude makes me much prouder.

Games and Freedom

First over Christmas and then during vacation last week, Helena had a lot of time to play with her cousins, especially Luidi (who just turned five) and Henrique (who is almost 4).  It's been interesting to watch their games, because they seem to show something important about human freedom.

Most of the time, Helena has one or two games she likes to play with her toys.  She likes to put them in her mouth, she likes to play peek-a-boo, and she likes to play ball... but a four or five year old knows a much greater range of games.

Maybe an example will help me to explain: Over Christmas, Luidi brought his cars from the movie Cars over to grandma's house, and Helena wanted to play with them with her mouth, and then by throwing them onto the ground (another favorite game).  Luidi, an immensely patient little boy, sat down next to her on the ground and said, "What we do is this:" and he pushed the car along the tiles and said "zoom, zoom."  Helena looked at him strangely, as if to say, "why aren't you putting the cars in your mouth?"

"The cars can talk, too," Luidi went on, and then acted out a scene between Lightning McQueen and the Tow-truck, Tow-Mater.  Helena found the play acting fascinating, and took the other cars out of her mouth long enough to watch.

Whether we can credit Luidi or just the normal process of development, over the last month and a half, Helena now pushes her little truck across the floor and imitates a kind of conversation between her finger-puppets (especially the monkey, toucan, and giraffe, her favorites) before putting them into her mouth in order to scratch her teething gums.  It seems that Luidi's lesson opened up new possibilities for Helena's world, new ways to interact with the objects in it.

A second event last week, when we stopped by Luidi's parents' house for the little boy's birthday, took the lesson to a new level.  Luidi and a couple of his friends were playing with some interlocking construction pieces, and Helena sat in the middle of them, picking up one thing and then another.  Several of the other little boys took the pieces from around Helena to build their own things, but Luidi stopped them, and put half a dozen pieces around her: "These are Helena's," he told his friends.

Games follow rules, and within the game, we have relatively limited freedom: you can't pick up a soccer ball and carry it.  But an even greater limit on our freedom, I think, is that we allow ourselves to get stuck in one game: an adolescent who can only argue with his parents, and doesn't know another way to relate.  The businessman who knows all the rules of the game in his business (including the rules about when he can get away with breaking the rules), but never steps out of that game to ask if what he is doing is right. The girl who thinks that the rules of fashion are obligatory all the time.  These are social games, rather like Wittgenstein's language games.

Luidi taught two important lessons to Helena: first, that she could choose what game to play with her toys.  And second, that not all games are selfish and competitive: games can also be about helping others and making them happy.  And as Helena learns these lessons, more options are open to her.  She becomes a little more free.

Vacation

Rita, Helena, and I have been on vacation for the last week, so I'm still catching up on work, but at least I can share a couple of photos from the trip to Aparados da Serra, in the mountains a couple of hours south of Florianópolis.

   

           

 

Entropy

Babies are chaos machines.  Of course, that's the nature of the universe, or at least of the second law of thermodynamics, that entropy tends toward a maximum, that order devolves into disorder.

Helena has always loved to make a mess, but now that she is bigger and more mobile, she is more effective at destruction.  Perhaps her favorite activity in the world right now is tearing down towers that Rita and I build from plastic blocks.  It animates her like noting else, bating her breath, inspiring her to do things she doesn't like to do, like crawl; she's always wanted to walk, but crawling just doesn't do it for her.  Even so, right now, as I am writing, Rita has been building towers, and Helena has convinced herself to crawl just to topple them.

I think, though, that this little experiment shows the conflict between the laws of thermodynamics and the process of human history.  While Helena increases entropy in the world, she's actually building order in herself: she's learning new things, building new neural pathways, and growing up.

Physicists suggest that entropy may be the arrow of time, what makes humans perceive time as passing, and not like the other three dimensions, which we feel as spacial, through which we can move and then return.  But the way we understand time growing up is exactly the opposite, as an increase of order.

All of which, I suppose, returns us to what Helena taught me about Hegel this weekend.  The old German philosopher may be right that that history advances through negative, but it is a very strange sort of negation that does it.  Rather like learning how to crawl in order to tear down a tower so that, to quote Joshua before the battle of Jericho, one stone not lie atop another.

Helena Iara has a new game: "No".  She has come to love shaking her head back and forth with such velocity that trying to imitate her hurts the neck of stiffer, older people, and rotating her body in the opposite direction to keep her balance.  Sometimes, this game of "No, no, no" makes sense as a simple negation, like after she tries to do something dangerous, we tell her no, and then she responds with shakes of her head.  Other times, though, the head movements don't fit into times that we would expect a "no," like when she is standing alone, preparing to take a couple of wobbly steps toward Rita, or when she hears music she likes and begins to dance.

Helena's little game of negation inspired me to talk to her about Hegel... not so much because she would understand (who really understands GWF Hegel, after all?  Not I, not many philosophy professors, probably not the man himself!), but because talking with Helena helps me to get my ideas around messy problems.  That's the goal of this blog, after all, not to create a precocious philosopher, but that looking at the world through Helena's eyes might help me to understand.  And Hegel, who made his whole career around negation, seems like he might be helpful to understand the game of No.

Hegel famously said that history advances through a long series of Noes, of the negation of what is.  Judaism didn't so much create monotheism as a new and independent idea, as the postulation of a new, positive truth, but as the negation of the many gods of the Phoenicians and the Egyptians; this is certainly clear in the story of Elijah, in the book of Kings, and the stories of the reconquest of Judea after exile in Egypt.  Christianity, in its turn, may have tried to present love as central to its message, but that was hardly new to Judaism.  The novelty of the new religion lay in the way it rejected the centrality of Law to Hebrew through.  Luther is a No against Rome, Thomas Münster a No against Luther... and so we continue.

But here's where Helena's game of No helped me.  We often think of negation as that of an angry two year-old, a boy who says, "no, no, no, no!" and refuses to do anything.  This is also the no of Barlelby the Scrivener, Melville's character who simple says that he would "rather not do it."  Helena's "no" isn't that simple kind of negation, though.  She's not just digging herself into the dirt and saying "I will not move," but instead playing with the No, dancing with it.

In this way, resistance isn't just a reactionary, even conservative urge.  It's playful, dancing, maybe even productive.  When Hegel says that History advances through the negative, I think her attitude is exactly what he's talking about.

Samba

On Sunday night, Rita and I took Helena Iara to the park, but in January in Brazil, things aren't quite so simple: the Escola de Samba União da Ilha had taken over the little plaza in the center of the Lagoa neighborhood, and was in full scale preparation for carnaval.  Maybe fifty zabumbas (base drums), thirty tamborins (not like a US tambourine, this one has no bells, and it's hit with a stick), dozens of cuicas, cavaquinhos...  A furious and joyous sound.

Looking back over Sunday night, when Helena slept really badly, I think that we probably over-did the noise and stimulation, but Helena loved it.  She sang along with the music (she has about a two note range now, but a decent sense of rhythm), danced by swinging her head back and forth, and played games with anyone she could find.  It's very clear that she loves samba.

Samba is one of those art forms that a lot of people use for thinking life through, and for making manifestos about art.  This morning, as she and I sat in the hammock after breakfast, I sang Helena one of these songs, Desde que o Samba é Samba, by Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso.  The lyric she paid most attention to, and the central one to the philosophy of the song, is

O samba é pai do prazer                             Samba is the father of pleasure

o samba é filho da dor                                Samba is the child of pain

o grande poder transformador                    The great power of transformation

Brazil is famous for alegria or constant joy, but the truth of the matter is much more complicated: the history of the country, especially for those who make the extraordinary art and music that gives Brazil its reputation, is full of tragedy: slavery, war, hunger, social exclusion.  The people are happy not because of who they are or what they have lived, but because they use art to struggle to win joy out of pain.  That's why samba is the child of pain, but the father of pleasure.

Helena Iara has been living something similar over the last several weeks, as she learns to control her mouth and breath and begins to utter sounds that seem more and more like words.  The miracle of language is that, like samba, it can turn pain into pleasure: think of the enjoyment of a movie with a tragic ending, or the elegant feeling of grace at the end of a novel by Henry James.  Virgil may have put it best in the words of Aeneas:

Vos et Scyllaeam rabiem penitusque sonantis


accestis scopulos, vos et Cyclopea saxa


experti: revocate animos, maestumque timorem
mittite: 

forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

"You have braved the fury of Scylla, the deep-ringing boom

of her craggy home, you have faced the rocks of the Cyclops.

Pluck up your courage, let fear and sadness alone --

Perhaps, one day, even this will be good to remember."

As Helena finds more words and word-like sounds, she has cried less, complained less, and enjoyed more things (sitting and reading a book with me, singing...).  Words that turn the challenge of a belly-ache or a baby's tedium into art.  Her babbling songs may not be as beautiful as the words of Virgil or the voice of Caetano Veloso, but that's what they're striving for.