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!