Thinking with music

This is Helena Iara's favorite video at the moment, one that makes me proud of her.  Not just because it's cute, or good music, but because it's about as philosophical as children's music gets.  Today, I tried to explain to Helena that at the beginning of the modern period, as German and French and English intellectuals used philosophy to think the world, in Spain and Portugal, poetry served the same purpose.  The great philosophers of the Iberian peninsula (and its American colonies) didn't write treatises, but poems and novels: Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Góngora, Sor Juana, Pessoa, Neruda... And in the second half of the 20th century, that turned to music: Victor Jara, Violeta Parra, Tom Jobim, Milton Nascimento, and many more.

And for kids, the philosopher poet was Toquinho.  Here are the lyrics to the last verse of the song above:

And the future is a spaceship


Which we try to drive.


But the future is always hurried and merciless.


There's no right time for it to come,


And without asking or warning us,


It just changes our lives


And then it beckons us


to cry or laugh together

Along this road, it's not our duty


to know or see what's comming to us


No one surely knows where it's heading us to


We're just going on the way


Crossing a beautiful footbridge


Painted in watercolour


which someday will fade after all

In a sheet of paper, I draw an yellow-coloured sun


(which will fade someday)


And with five or six straight lines I easily draw a castle


(which will fade someday)


I just turn a compass around


and with a circle I draw the world


(which will fade someday)

Child labor

Helena Iara wants to help.  We first noticed it the afternoon we were installing the gas line on the new stove, and she wanted to be under the countertop, passing tools to us, or with a hand on the line.  When I led her away, she cried as hard as she has in a long time.  The next day, she wanted to take the laundry off the line, and then the help cut vegetables.  And yesterday, she actually pulled the clean laundry out of the hamper and onto the floor so that she could pass it to us as we hung clothes on the line.  The last was actually pretty fun, and better than kneeling down to grab every scrap from the ground.

Since it's something that Rita and I work on a lot, it seemed to make sense to tell Helena about the history of child labor.  We don't have to accept the most radical of theories of childhood -- like Philipe Ariès, who contends that childhood is really an invention of modernity, and the people before the 18th century saw children as little adults -- to recognize that we see child labor in a very different way today than did a medieval peasant or a the owner of one of the "dark Satanic mills" condemned by Charles Dickens.  First the upper class began to see childhood as a privileged time of learning and play, and that idea gradually became universal: "children's work is learning," as the slogan of one anti-child labor campaign in Latin America put it.

As I explained to Helena on our way to the library today, to say "that idea became universal" makes it seem easy, like some Hegelian hand of History just made it happen.  In the United States, the great change came about not because of the goodness of the elites nor the conscience of intellectuals like Dickens, but because of labor organizers.  The most famous was Mother Jones, the coal mine agitator who organized children from all over the East Coast of the country on a long march at the end of the 19th century, ending in Washington and demanding the abolition of child labor.  If Helena isn't working at five years old, it has a lot to do with good Mother Jones.

On the other hand, working in Latin America has shown the problems with a fundamentalist attitude against children working.  In many indigenous communities, children learn their most important lessons as they work side by side with their parents, who protect them from the hardest labor as they also teach philosophy and physics and weather and farming.  Some of the most able mathematicians I've ever met are child street vendors.  On the other end of the economic scale, some of my most important growing as an adolescent came from jobs coaching soccer to little kids and writing for the local paper, work that would be prohibited as child labor under many laws promoted by UNICEF.

It's a lot to explain to a little girl, but she understood the basic point: she was happy and proud to be able to collaborate with Rita and me in some way (even if, in truth, she mad the work more difficult).  If she continues "working" that way, she'll grow up well.

The gift

For at least a month, Helena Iara has been obsessed with giving things to Rita and me.  She wants to give us her toys, feed us her food, give us her clothes and her books...  Now, lest one think that we have been successful in creating a truly altruistic baby, I have to add that several seconds afterward, she wants those things back, which created some minor complications when she offered us food, at least until we understood what was going on.

Reflecting on this giving of gifts, as Helena and I sat in the hammock today, watching the monkeys play in the trees, I told her a little bit about how different anthropologists have looked at the gift.  She wasn't entirely interested in the differences in the way that Claude Levi-Stauss or Marcel Mauss or Eduardo Viveiros de Castro understand gift giving, but I think that she understood the basic idea: we give gifts to establish and strengthen social relations.  Whether we're talking about the formal gift-giving that happens in diplomatic meetings, the gifts exchanged between tribes when they encounter in the Amazon basin, or birthday gifts for babies, when we give a present, we get back trust.

Every Christmas, you'll see an article in the Times or some newsmagazine, in which a famous economist talks about the failure of the marginal utility of gift-giving.  My mother gives me a sweater; she paid $75 for it, but I would not have paid more than $30, so according to these orthodox (and Scrooge-y) economists, there is a $45 inefficiency in the market.  Their lesson, of course, is that we should all just give each other cash.

Gift-giving, fortunately, is not a capitalist activity, for all of the attempts to make it one.  It's a process of creating trust, building relationships.  I give a friend a birthday gift, he gives one to me, and we become better friends in the process, more mutually engaged, more willing to trust and depend on each other.  

What Helena has done, as I tried to explain to her, is short circuit the process.  She gives me her toy and then wants it back right away.  In the process, she built something like trust (she knows she will get it back) and something more than just "like" love.  We laugh, she smiles, and a family grows from it.

Medea in the car-seat

Helena has never really liked her car seat, but yesterday, she absolutely hated it.  She didn't just cry, but wailed, pretended that she was choking, unable to breathe... anything to get out.  She was willing to hurt herself to get what she wanted.  When she finally calmed down, I told her the story of Medea, and then something about masochism and politics, from Deleuze to Marx.  Here, I'll just plagiarize a radio commentary I recorded eight years ago which captures something of the same ideas...

Imagine a little girl, perhaps eight years old, with blond curly hair and a heavy sweater. Her name is Ana Isabel, she tells me. It’s ten o’clock at night in the Alpujarra, one of the areas of Medellín that the police have abandoned to gangs and prostitutes. About fifty homeless kids have come to a filthy little park, hoping that the grass will make for a softer bed than the street. We might be tempted to pity these young refugees from war, poverty, and violence, but they were proud of their ability to survive in conditions that would quickly kill you or me. 



I don’t know why, but Ana Isabel became furious with me -- perhaps because I didn’t give her candy, like the nun who came with me, perhaps because I reminded her of her father. Her cheeks reddened, she stomped her feet, then, with a final look of rage, she put a little plastic bag to her mouth, inhaled and exhaled. Inside was a glue that gave an instant and fatal high. She stepped closer and closer to me until each explosive breath slammed the bag against my stomach. Her red eyes were full of hatred -- against me, against the world, against herself. 



The next night in Medellín embodies the contrasts that define Colombia. Though most famous for cocaine and violence, Medellín is also home to remarkable avante-garde art and theater. I went to see a minimalist version of the classic Greek drama, Medea. Medea, as you may remember, was princess of Colchis before Jason seduced her and convinced her to steal the Golden Fleece for him. When the play begins, years after the adventure of the Argonauts, Jason has abandoned Medea so that he can marry a Greek princess that will aid his new political aspirations. Jason and his allies have condemned Medea to live in a hut far from Corinth, and soon the king will send her into exile.

 

We remember Medea best for her revenge against Jason. The man has destroyed her, but she has no way to hurt him. In madness and despair, she kills their two children.

 

Thanks to Freud, Oedipus became the dominant metaphor for the 20th Century. I wonder if Medea isn’t our Oedipus -- think of little Ana Isabel: like Medea, she is powerless, forgotten. She has no power, no one respects or loves her -- she can’t even make people look at her, except in pity. And proud people -- whether a Colombian street urchin or a princess of Colchis -- despise pity.

 

So what power do Medea and Ana Isabel have? How can they take revenge on those who have hurt them, those who ignore them, on us, who let little girls live on the street? They can only hurt themselves. Medea murders the children she loves, because Jason loves them too. Ana Isabel destroys her brain with glue, because she sees the pain it brings to my face. I don’t need to point out the connection to the teenage Palestinians who strap bombs to their bodies, or anorexic American girls. Medea is the last refuge of the powerless, the hopeless, and the excluded... and a too terrible metaphor for the lives of many people in the 21st Century.

Perhaps I exaggerate: Helena Iara is no Medea, and no Ana Isabel.  But like many of the powerless, she has learned that one of the few ways to get some modicum of power over the other is to hurt herself.

Photos from Helena's Birthday