The big bad wolf ain't so bad...

For quite some time, Helena has been concerned with the Big Bad Wolf.  At first, she was scared, then more generally interested, and now... well, here's what happened today:

Rita was at a conference on indigenous education in Brazilian universities, so Helena and I made our way to a little playground close to where she was meeting.  After a long time on the swing and a couple of runs up and down the slide and jungle gym, she yelled, half in jest half seriously, "Big Bad Wolf, Big Bad Wolf!  Hide, Daddy!"  We ran under the jungle gym and peeked out the slats between the ladder.  "He's coming, Daddy.  Look how big he is!"

"What's the Wolf doing, Helena?" I asked her.

"Coming closer, closer... He just got on the swing!  He loves to swing, too!"

Without a pause, she ran back into the playground and started to push the sing.  "He doesn't swing well.  But I can push him."  She pushed the empty swing back and forth.

For no clear reason, she ran back under the jungle gym and looked out at the imaginary wolf through the slats.  After a time, "Oh, he hurt himself.  Daddy, let's go help."

By the end of a couple of minutes of nursing, Helena was kissing the imaginary wolf and telling him that he should go back to have lunch with his mommy.

I'm not sure what any of this means, but it does strike me as an important change!

Country Music

Helena Iara has a new favorite song, and it isn't kiddie music:

 

She started hearing the song more than a month ago, when her aunt was driving in the car without the stereo, and started to sing it to her, and now Helena wants to hear and sing it all the time (on the way to the farmers' market this morning, we heard it three times).  She's also proud to know all of the words, no mean feat for a two year old (after singing along this morning, she declared proudly, and almost with surprise, "I know it all!").

Though I don't have any memories of when I was two, I do know that when I was little, I also liked country music; it is a little different in the United States, but many of the chord progressions and the harmonies are similar.  And ethnomusicologists say that country music exists in almost every part of the world these days, identified by a certain twangy-ness in the instruments, rhythms reminiscent of country life, and breaks in a singer's voice.

Those same ethnomusicologists say that what brings country music together as a world phenomenon is nostalgia, a sadness for a lost past (the horse, the smells of the country, the memory of a simpler time).  In English we don't have a word for that complex sentiment, but in Portuguese they do: saudade.  One of the other songs on the disk that has Helena's favorite, "Chalana", has the following verse, which seems to manifest this idea: "Every chord that I play represents a saudade."  Similarly, the song I remember loving when I was little was Roger Whittaker's "Durham Town" also a song about nostalgia and loss.

Here's the question, though: what has a two year old lost?  My father-in-law, with whom Helena listens to country music, lived the first thirty-five years of his life as a peasant, and when he was forced off the land, he always longed to go back to a life of herding cattle and planting manioc.  It makes sense for him to love the saudade in the music.  But Helena? Or me?

Freud or Lacan could give a psychoanalytic explanation of loss in a small child: they lose the intimate connection to the mother, the one-ness of the womb and the first months of infancy.  Maybe.  And as I wrote last week, the peripatetic life that Rita and I lead means that Helena is always losing a friend, a place she has come to love, a toy.  

But I think that something else is going on: though country music may represent loss, its practice is often the opposite.  Here in Brazil, country music concerts are amazing events, including rodeos, dozens of warm-up bands, and hundreds of thousands of people in small cities in farming areas.  Where Rita's family lives, it is the music of dance, the songs that everyone sings together.  These songs fear and lament loss, but as they do, they bring people together in a shared experience.  As Helena sings "Chalana" with her aunt or her grandfather, that's what matters, a process of coming-into-relationship with them, just like I loved singing Roger Whittaker with my dad as we played on the floor of our suburban house in Denver.

Today's Stoics

In the process of looking for a pre-school for Helena, we've had lots of failures: too expensive, the lady who wanted to kiss every one at every time, the dirty school...  This week, though, we ran into a failure that taught me something about philosophy and how it can go wrong.

When I was growing up, I didn't know about the Waldorf School movement: there is one where we live in Santa Fe, but I don't know how common it is in the United States.  On paper, it's pretty awesome, with lots of wooden, back-to-nature toys, children who get to establish the rhythms of their own learning, loads of play; sort of like Montessori on steroids.  On hearing that a new Waldorf School was opening up close to home, we took Helena there to see if it might work.


I could list any number of things I hated about the place (and I don't use hate lightly; my friends know that it is hard for me even to dislike something), but let me concentrate in just one: everywhere the teacher went and every time she talked to a child, she sang.  She may have thought that she was a kind of Snow White, whistling with the birds and intoning the rhythms of the seasons, but the monotone of her voice, the lack of dynamic difference, the sameness of her diction... it gave every action, every emotion, and every event exactly the same bland flavor.  By the end of the visit, I was grinding my teeth with fury every time the woman opened her mouth.

The Stoics, a philosophical movement that was particularly strong during the Roman Empire, valued one virtue above all others: ataraxia, or equanimity.  For them, the most important thing was to cultivate a life and a mentality so that the world could not perturb you, that you could continue to live well regardless of the slings and arrows that outrageous fortune might hurl against you.

Though I would never have called myself a Stoic, I've always rather admired the strength of character I thought I saw in the philosophy.  What I had never understood is how annoying it could be.  Many people who adopt the New Age, "eastern Wisdom", or call themselves "mindful", have the same way about them as the insufferable teacher at the Waldorf School.  They want to appear a rock in the middle of a torrent, a calm in the storm.  The teacher's sing-song -- and perhaps the contrast with the energy of children, who are the least stoic of all beings, and wonderful for exactly that reason -- brought this kind of an attitude to a reductio ad absurdum: it became simply intolerable.

Were Marcus Aurelius and the other great stoics as insupportable to be around?  Maybe... and if so, we're best with their philosophy in the dust bin of history.

Do unto others...

Yesterday, Helena Iara and I went to the playground in the Trindade neighborhood, while Rita gave a presentation at the nearby university.  Helena got to play with a little boy from Angola, another from Holland, and a girl whose mother seemed to be Colombian or Venezuelan: a multicultural place in the middle of Florianópolis.  She also learned to do some new things in the playground, like the fireman's pole and going down the rope ladder.

Later in the afternoon, after Helena was tired enough that she didn't want to climb the ladders any more, she sat down on the stones of the playground and asked me to sit next to her.  When I did, she gathered up some pebbles and poured them over my legs.  "Please don't do that, Helena," I said.

She took more pebbles and poured them over my leg, this time with a naughty smile.

"Helena!"

As she gathered the pebbles for the third time, I prepared strategies for stopping her... but she poured them over herself and laughed, instead, one of those wonderful two year old contagious giggles.  Then she did it again.  "Gather stones, Daddy," she told me.

One of the most famous ethical precepts in the West is Jesus's "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," commonly called the Golden Rule.  In fact, it wasn't a new concept to Jesus (it was pretty common in the early Talmud), and you can see similar ideas in religious traditions the world over.

Most of the time, we understand the Golden Rule as a commandment -- in technical language, as hortatory, a request to do something.  I wonder, though, if it isn't more of an objective description: not a commandment, but just relating how things are.  "We do unto others as we want them to do to us."  Helena wasn't pouring the stones over me because she wanted to be naughty or to do something bad to me: it was an invitation for me to pour stones over her.

In a similar way, I've found that most of the truly bad people I've met in my life (not many... but a leader in the Chilean secret police, a couple of human rights abusers in Colombia, gangsters from time to time) truly expect that other people are going to do bad things to them.  "I'll screw them before they screw me," seems to be their motto.  It's more like "Do onto others as you expect them to do unto you," but a modified Gold Rule is actually a pretty close description of the way even really evil people think.

What's interesting here is that an ethical rule and the description of "how things are" turn out to be exactly the same, which sounds pretty Panglossian (and not a description of the ethical mess of the real world.).  But what's interesting, I think, is where desire starts.  In the evil version of the Golden Rule, we start with my imagination of the desire of the other: I think he wants to screw me over, so I'm going to get him first.  With Jesus's interpretation, a person has to take responsibility for what he wants: Do onto others as you want (not as you think that they would want) them to do to you."

And that makes all the difference.

The Big Bad Wolf

Helena Iara is afraid of the Big Bad Wolf.  Well, sort of.  From time to time, especially when we are playing hide and seek, she will run toward me with a gleeful scream of pretend fear and say "Lobo Mau, Lobo Mau!" and then jump into my arms.  Then she giggles again, cuddles, and runs off to find any sign of the Big Bad Wolf that might give her a chance to do it again.

There are no wolves in Helena's life.  If she really wanted something to fear, she would do much better thinking about the pit vipers we find in the garden from time to time.  How did the wolf come to occupy such a significant place in her imagination and play?

A couple of years ago, Rita and I made a series of short films with pre-schoolers from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.  A surprising number of them featured the Big Bad Wolf, from the amazingly funny "Incredible story of Granny and the Big Bad Wolf", to "The Magic Wand" and even a music video called "Bats".  These kids lived in a place that was authentically frightening, where we heard gunfights in the streets regularly, and occasionally would see either cops or drug soldiers running through the streets, pursued by their enemies.  Yet only one of the kids' stories made reference to guns, and many of them talked about wolves.

I don't recall whether it was Kierkegaard or Heidegger who insisted that if fear means that you are frightened of something, anxiety is when you are scared of nothing.  The clenched heart and cloying sweat of fear are there, but you don't have anything to look at, to say: "This is the cause of my fear."  And though we often think of anxiety as the domain of stressed-out urbanites and patients in psychoanalysis, early childhood must be a very anxious time.  Think of Helena: from time to time, without any real explanation that she can understand, we pick up her clothes and her toys, get in an airplane, and start living somewhere else: in a favela of Recife, the mountains of Santa Fe, the middle of the Amazon jungle.  And right about when she gets comfortable and starts to like the place, we go back.

There is probably an origin of anxiety in evolutionary biology, too: the need to keep on your toes, or simply that when we evolved the biology of fear, it didn't make as much genetic sense to also evolve the capacity to relax.  So anxiety is with us, even when we are little kids.

The Big Bad Wolf, I think (or any imaginary object that scares us) serves as a way to transform anxiety into fear, a way to find a cause for the broad-ranging uncertainty we feel.  As Helena talks about the Wolf, she consoles herself to say, "Here is the danger.  Other places are safe."  Instead of worrying (another manifestation of anxiety!) that she fears something imaginary, I should be happy that she has found a way to remove anxiety from her life, displacing it onto a game like the Wolf.

Back from the Amazon

I've not been able to blog for quite a while: Rita, Helena, and I have been doing research in an indian community way up the Amazon, near the Colombian and Venezuelan border, and the internet connection was so slow that I couldn't even access to blog.  I'll start writing again soon, but for now, I'll just include photos of Helena on the trip.

Hip-Hop baby

For the last three weeks, we've been hosting three young filmmakers from Recife at our house: we've worked with them on numerous projects for the last six or seven years, and now they are starting their own news channel, where they report news from the favela from the perspective of the favela.  (The site launches tomorrow, at www.favelanews.org, if you're interested).  All three of the young artists love rap, and one of them is one of the best breakdancers in Brazil, so Helena found herself in the middle of a crash course in the philosophy, ethics, and æsthetics of hip-hop.

American hip-hop is most famous for its misogyny and violence, but Brazilian hip-hop has stayed more true to the movement's roots: in Brooklyn and the Bronx in the 1960s and 1970s, rap and breakdance served as a way to transform gang conflict into artistic conflict.  Instead of fighting with knives and guns, hip-hop artists fight with dance moved and rhyme.  Over the next dozen years, before rap got co-opted by the music industry, rappers, dancers, and graffiti artists developed a comprehensive philosophy of black self-help, valuing the beauty of the slum, and calling for social justice.

How does this make sense to a little girl?  Not through words like "social justice" or "combatting discrimination."  She liked the dancing and and music, things that fit into her world of fun and beauty.  Quite a few times, Okado, Dita, and Adriano took advantage of a break in their classes to teach her the basic moves of breakdancing, turning our kitchen into an improvised dance floor.  And by the end of the three weeks, Helena had memorized the chorus and several of the verses of Okado's most famous rap, "Morar na Favela não é fácil" ("It ain't easy to live in the 'hood"), which has become a kind of anthem for kids in the favelas of Recife (we filmed this music video of it last year).

There is a lesson to philosophers -- and others who want kids to think and learn -- here.  We put a lot of effort into words: words in books, words in lectures, words memorized and repeated.  But the attraction of hip-hop -- and its secret to inspiring frequently illiterate kids from the urban periphery to learn, to write, to make art -- is that it is fun.  It uses the body in dance.  The ear in music.  Like most great philosophical movements in antiquity (the ones that actually made a broad impact on the world, unlike today's phenomenology or analytic philosophy of language), hip-hop is an integrated way of thinking that includes the body, culture, sound, and being-together.  The Stoics included spiritual practices with their thinking; the Epicurians food and physical exercise.  Buddhism and Christianity, now understood as religions, also started as philosophical-cultural movements.  In all of those cases, philosophy was a way of life, not a way of thought.

And thanks to Okado, Adriano, and Dita, Helena was initiated into one of the more interesting of those movements over the last couple of weeks.

Everything transforms

A couple of weeks ago, Rita, Helena, and I went to visit one of Rita's childhood friends, a family that Helena loves to visit, because the son always brings out his toys.  This visit, she became obsessed with little games that would have been called "Transformers" when I was a kid: these were not exactly the brand name Transformers (cars or other machines that turned into robots when you moved the parts around), but something a little more organic, like rocks that turned into dinosaurs and leaves that became crocodiles.

Helena also loves other stories of transformation: books and songs about caterpillars that become butterflies, stories of peasant girls who become princesses (though, since I'm not always happy about the politics of such stories, I also tell stories of princesses that become peasants).  She also loves doll clothes and the changes that they imply.  All in all, we can say that Helena, like many kids, loves change.

There is something human in this process: children may think that adults are so different from them that in order to "grow up", they will need to pass through a metamorphosis similar to that of a caterpillar.  I wonder, though, if something even deeper isn't going on here: last week Rita was preparing a paper for an anthropology conference in São Paulo in which she compared the role-playing of little kids to the idea of clothing in Amazonian tribes.  In the West, we have the idea that play-acting is like being on the stage: an actor pretends to be something for a time, but then returns to his same being when he doffs the costume and the persona.  Yet in the Amazon, a change in clothes means a change in essence: when I put on the mask of a jaguar, I begin to see the world like a jaguar sees it.  Others treat me as a jaguar.  The clothes of a jaguar make me a jaguar.

Kids seem to see the world in the same way.  They aren't invested in their own personality or identity, in the way that an adult (or especially an adolescent) will say "I'm not the kind of person who..." They are much more willing to transform, to try on other "clothes".  Through many philosophers who write about play (Benjamin, Freud, and Agamben come to mind) talk about the repetition that play involves, I think that this kind of personal experimentation is even more important.  And, quite frankly, much more fun.

Pictures from the patio on a rainy day

 

 

Stickers

Last Christmas, my mom gave Helena some stickers.  Not very exciting ones -- I think they came as a bonus with an Audobon Society mailing or something -- but they had pretty pictures of birds on them.  And ever since, Helena has been obsessed with stickers, and will leave behind all of the rest of her beloved painting and drawing supplies (click here for some reflections on her art) just to post some kind of a silly cat on top of a painting she's been working on for hours.  Last week, when Rita found some stickers for her in a stationary store, I think I began to understand this compulsion a little better.

As Helena has stuck her stickers on any surface she can find, I've also been reading Donald Winnicott, the British children's psychoanalist from the 1950s.  Winnicott is most famous for his theory of the transitional object, a way to think about blankets and pacifiers and other stuff that kids come to abopt between 1 and 4 years old.  According to the theory, these things are not really things -- they have no full existence separated from the child), but they aren't just the kid, either.  They are a transition from the child's earliest ideas about the world (that it is all a part of the baby, and she is omnipotent over it (an idea that Helena still seems to have from time to time, as I wrote last week)) to a more adult division between subject and object, an "I" and a "world."

The transitional object is almost part of the baby, but it also has a bit of autonomy; it isn't entirely under her control.  We may be able to see this better in toys, which seem to be under our control, but then suddenly they aren't: the kite or the ball dashes and bobs where we didn't want it to; the dolls engage in conversation and suddenly one "says" something that the child playing with them had never planned.  Toys are also part-me, part-other.

I think the sticker may play the same role.  On the one hand, Helena controls it: she gets to take it off the pad and then put it somewhere, and she gets credit for the art she makes with a sticker (I remember my mom's reaction to Helena's first "sticker-art," full of oohs and ahhs).  At the same time, she didn't make the sticker, and certainly couldn't draw the birds and frogs and mermaids that she sticks on paper. Stickers are also under imperfect control: accidentally put a corner of the sticker down on paper, and it only comes off by tearing, and won't ever be useful again.  The fold and twist in ways we don't expect. And once stuck onto the paper, you'll never get it off (though, as Helena has learned, if you stick it onto  plastic, sometimes you can recover it).  In the world of art, the sticker plays the role of the transitional object.

I just wish we could find a way to help her work through these ideas of omnipotence in other areas: I think it would save us a lot of crying fits when we say "no."

Can mothers have it all?

This week, Facebook and blogs and even (gasp!) real life conversations have been lit up by an article by Anne Marie Slaughter, who had worked in policy planning at the Obama State Department, about the (im)possibility of mixing motherhood and career.  The piece, an honest portrayal of the difficulties of second and third generation feminist women to "have it all" has clearly touched a vein among my friends who work as lawyers, policy professionals, doctors... truth is, pretty much everyone with whom I went to Harvard or Williams, and who then went on to be a mother and a high powered professional.

Rita and I have not had to face anything like the world Slaughter describes: no 20 hour work days, no leaving the house before the kids wake and coming home after they are asleep, no impossible choices between a sick baby and a professional deadline.  Next month, Rita will go to an anthropology conference in São Paulo, and it will be the first time that Helena Iara will have to spend a night without her mommy in the same house.  None the less, we have seen enough of the challenges of parenting and working to know how much harder it must be for someone working at the United Nations, in government, in a bill-by-the-hour law firm.  Slaughter is right: after fifty years of feminist successes in policy and ideology, children still make it much harder for women to climb the professional ladder.

I don't recall which of my professors declared that philosophy does not have the role of answering questions, but of asking why we ask those questions in the first place, but it's a good place to enter this debate (and is the starting point for William James and Ludwig Wittgenstein, two of my favorite thinkers).  So here's my poor contribution to the debate:

I've been readying Dostoyevsky recently, and finding some humor amidst the gloom by laughing at the silly hierarchies of state bureaucrats, classed just like military officers in 19th Century Russia, with a "Collegiate Registrar" equivalent to a warrant office,  a "Titular Counsellor" like an Army Captain, all the way up to an "Actual Privy Counsellor" who held the same rank as a Field Marshall.  Russians of that age may have taken the quest for honor so far that it becomes ridiculous, but they aren't that much different than we are, with different levels of professorships, pay-grades for government service, and whether or not one becomes a partner.  Men have always dedicated themselves to honor, in one way or another.

Mainstream American feminism has done an extraordinary job of showing why and how women have been oppressed and excluded, but at a price: it has accepted masculine terms for the debate.  When we look at definitions of success for women (or for feminism in general), we ask about how many women sit in corporate boardrooms, what salary women earn, how many women work in policy roles in government.  I wonder, though, if these concerns don't simply accepted traditional masculine (and not universally human) milestones for success.  Even the question "Why can't women have it all?" uses the verb most associated with honor in postmodern capitalism.  As Marx (among many others) noticed, capitalism moves us from a concern with being to one of having.

That move from being to having was critical: no one would ever ask if you can "be it all."  Of course not: you can't be mother and father, God and man, master and servant... the  verb "be" recognizes that certain things exclude each other.  But "have"... It seems like, hypothetically at least, we could possess everything.

Slaughter addresses this question in a way: she says that she and many women like her (and many men, as well), work as hard as they do because it is the way they can change the world; she herself was working in Planning for the State Department, and cites many women in government, academia, and the international human rights system.  Here, for better or worse, I might be able to add something useful: I know lots of people who have both worked at the grass roots and in "the system", and almost all of them say that they are not only happier on the "outside", but that they do more good (a quick caveat to expose my bias here: after working in Washington think tanks and going to Harvard, I made a conscious decision that I didn't want that life; I'm not an objective observer).  People at UNICEF, the Foreign Service, government education departments... To quote one high UNICEF bureaucrat I met last year, "Let's be honest, I could do a lot more elsewhere.  But when I look at myself, I know that I wouldn't earn as much or get as much prestige elsewhere.  So I stay."

The point isn't that mothers shouldn't try to "climb the latter".  Power matters, and who holds it is no small thing.  But I think we need to ask deeper questions about the nature of success, happiness, and even "having;" it allows us to ask the question in a much better way, and maybe even one that will make us happier and more able to change the world.

How old is...

"How old are you, Helena Iara?" I asked her as we came back from running errands a couple of days ago.

"Two years old."

 "Your Aunt Sandra is going to have a birthday in a couple of weeks.   Do you know how old she'll be?"

"Two years old."

"Truth is, she'll be 31."

"Yeah?" (said, by the way, exactly like that)

"And your Mommy, how old is she?"

"Two years old."

This conversation continued through quite a few people that Helena knows, and I soon discovered that I, her grandma and grandpa, her cousins, and everyone else she knows is also "Two years old."  Now, it's quite possible that "Two years old" to Helena just means "has an age" or "has parties for a birthday," or even that the answer is simply rote.  Just for a moment, though, I want to take her seriously: does she think that everyone is only two years old? And if so, why?

Here, then, a first hypothesis: for Helena, there is no real evidence that anything is older than she: in her eyes, everything came into existence simultaneously when she popped out of the womb.  Everything is two years old because she has only been able to see it for that time.  And though this idea might seem silly, it tracks one of the most important epistemological theories in western philosophy, the solipsism of Bishop Berkeley.  We naively think that our perception of the world is an interaction between our senses and the things around us, but Berkeley showed that one can coherently argue that it all goes on only in our own minds.  Though Berkeley largely wrote as a kind of thought experiment, and didn't live out his ideas (he never walked into the street in front of a carriage, thinking that the horses that would trample him were only ideas in his mind), the mere attempt to respond to his crazy idea made future thinkers (especially Kant) develop much more coherent theories of perception and knowledge.

Add the element of time to Berkeley's idea, and you get Helena's "Two years old."  The world exists because I see it; I wasn't here more than two years ago; ergo, the world and all of the things in it are two years old, just like me.

Maybe, though, I can give a second hypothesis: Mommy is two years old because, as a Mommy, she really is only two years old.  Yes, Rita was born more than two years ago, but before Helena was born, she was not a Mommy.  The baby is not the only new birth at delivery: a child creates so many new relations, roles that had not existed before.  If the child is the first in the family, a new Mommy also emerges from that operating room.  A new Daddy, too (it might be argued that my repeated existential crises over the past two years have to do with my inability to accept that at 39, I was born into a new name and new "identity.").  My parents suddenly gained new names of Gramma and Grampa.  As that, they are really only two years old.

This idea isn't solipsism, but closer to the new anthropological theory of perspectivism, which Viveiros de Castro postulates as the epistemology of Amazonian Indians.  The relationship of a capybara to a jaguar is the same as that of a monkey to a harpy eagle: they fear the predator.  So according to many amazonian tribes, when monkeys talk of eagles, they call them jaguars.  When little fish talk of jaguars, they refer to the bigger fish that eat them.  And (in an odd twist), the "jaguars" that humans have are Gods, who demand us as sacrifices.

Put this idea onto the plane of family relations, and Helena may we be right.  Because we entered into new relations when she was born, Rita and I (and my parents, and everyone else important in Helena's life) came into existence (or a new existence) when she was born.  We are, in that way, just two years old.

Does this make me feel any younger?

Sound Effects

Helena absolutely loves playgrounds, but she has never been a great fan of teeter-totters.  She prefers swings and slides and anything she can climb... and I have to admit that I empathize with her on her choices.  Even so, when we went to the playground on the shores of the Lagoa de Peri a couple of days ago, Helena wanted to get on the "up-up!" (as she calls the teeter-totter), and I decided to add a little to the game.  As she went up and down, I made strange noises: hardly the sound effects of a sci-fi movie, but something that tried to imitate airplanes and spaceships and who knows what else.  And for the first time, Helena's laughs on the teeter-totter were something similar to her expressions on joy on swings and slides.  She didn't want to get off, even after hundreds of ups and downs.

 This week, I have also been working on the title sequence for the new internet-based news channel that Rita and I are developing with teenagers from the favelas of Recife.  Though I had figured out some interesting images and visual effects, I simply was not convinced by the way the titles were coming out: they seemed to lack emotion and gusto.  Thinking of Helena and her teeter-totter, I began to work on the sound: not just the music, but the sounds that go on in the background that often pass straight to our subconsciousness.  And suddenly, the images began to make sense -- it's not that they were cooler or more interesting, but they became comprehensible in a new way.  With sound, the viewer sees new things.

Now, I think it's a bit of an exaggeration to say, along with the French cinema theorist Michel Chion, that film truly functions as a new space teaching us how to hear.  None the less, sound does teach us to see: imagine the explosions of a blockbuster movie without the booming sound effects of a theater, or a person walking though a deserted building without the echoing of footsteps.  I have made enough films to know that when you record sound as you film, you don't get it right.  The steps are too loud or too soft, the wind distracting...  In the end, the sound that we record in reality just doesn't sound right on film, so we have to re-create it.  It's not a deception, but a way of learning to see in a new place (in front of a movie screen, a TV, the computer...).

Immanuel Kant based his epistemology, the basic rules for how we know the world, on two premises: first, that we somehow understand space and time before we ever experience it, that it is a part of our mental make up.  And second, he insisted on the "systematic coherence of apperception", a really confusing way of saying that all of our senses have to agree on something for us to feel that it's part of the world.  If we hear a coffee grinder but don't catch the smell of beans and don't see the whirl of the machine, we know that something is wrong.  When the whole shebang of lots of different sensations comes together, we feel more confident about reality.

Film -- or any kind of play, like a teeter-totter -- is often lacking a couple of senses.  It isn't quite real: that's what gives art and play the chance for creativity, humor, and critical distance.  At the same time, it can make everything feel kind of empty.  So boys invent the sounds of laser guns and sword clatter as they play their war games.  We fake the sounds of falling as we climb in a tree or drop rocks off a bridge into a stream.  And we create sound effects on the computer for the movies we invent.

Looking in the eyes

Rita, Helena, and I just got back from two weeks of work in Recife, a city that can be wonderful in many ways... but ethics on the bus cannot be included in that list.  There, commuting is a war, where the drivers of jam-packed busses wrestle their broken-down machines past each other, jerking and accelerating so much that the dozens of strap-hangers can only keep their feet by falling into each other.  Shin-kicking, stepping on feet, elbows... it's all part of the morning in one of the world's most violent cities (the connection between murder rate and bus behavior is not, I think, a random one).

One of the few rules that people obey on the bus is the social obligation to give up a seat for a mother with a baby (sadly, people don't give them up for old or handicapped people).  Over the last several years, however, we have observed a growing exception to this rule: if you don't see the baby, you're not obliged to give up your seat.  As such, on crowded busses, people make a conscious effort to avoid eye contact with any standing mother.

As Rita rode one particularly crowded bus last week, swaying dangerously with Helena in one arm, I counted seven young men who began to "sleep" only after we made it onto the bus, and a couple more people suddenly fascinated by whatever was happening out the window.  Finally, one man let his eyes wander, and Rita's eyes met his.  With a sign and a feigned shrug of "Oh, sorry, I didn't see you," he stood and gave up his seat.

I could write pages on the brutality of public space in Recife (a great part of Rita's PhD dissertation addresses exactly those issues), but here I want to talk about eyes.  What is it about eye contact that inspires responsibility?  Why can we ignore our responsibility to others as long as we can pretend that we don't see them?  And how can we "pretend" this when we, the person to whom we are responsible, and in fact everyone else around, knows that it is a lie?

Tomorrow

We're now in Recife, in the northeast of Brazil, where Rita and I are starting an internet-based news channel where kids from the favela are the reporters and the producers.  The youth hostel where we're staying has a swimming pool, which is Helena's greatest joy in this hot and not-very-safe city (in addition to the open sewers that run through both favelas and middle class neighborhoods, it was for quite a good part of the last decade the most violent city in the world), but last week, it rained several days in a row.  She couldn't get into the pool, though any time the rain gave us a break, she would walk by it and look into it.

Helena has understood the words "later" and "tomorrow" for quite some time; Rita insisted on "tomorrow," especially, as a way to show that when Helena goes to sleep at night, she'll be able to get up and play in another 8-10 hours.  It's only been at the side of the swimming pool, however, that "tomorrow" has become a happy word, that we can see the excited anticipation in Helena's eyes as she says "I go swimming tomorrow."

The use of the future tense itself is cool, with its knowledge of time, but I like even more the way that she has learned to hope.  Even when she was little, she seemed to understand that things could get better, that (as I wrote in that blog, now almost two years ago,

 if she is crying and you lay her down on the changing table, she stops crying long before you take her diaper off.  When she suffers from colic, just passing her from one set of hands to another will often quiet her.  Taking her clothes off before a bath, and she begins to smile.  The future begins to take effect before it arrives, if that makes sense.

Now, that hope can become verbal.  The future, and the happiness that it promises (a chance to go swimming!) comes to colonize, or at least to imbue, the present.

My father always used to enjoy planning for a vacation as much as the trip itself: looking at maps and photos and travel guides became a way that the holiday would give pleasure long before the car left our driveway.  I've since learned that that kind of planning can spoil the spontaneous surprises, the detours and unexpected friendships that may be the best part of travel, but I still like to think that way, I like the way that talking about the future, planning for it, can make the present better.  Helena has already started doing that, and it's great fun to be a part of it.

Fatherhood as failure?

Last week, Eric Puchner published a piece in GQ, in which he went in search of a "cooler version of myself," a kind of dopplegänger, as he put it,

The guy who's actually living that life you'd imagined for yourself before you got married, had a couple of kids, and strapped in to that desk job.

The text is clever and sometimes funny, but what I want to talk about is the basic premise: that having children is a failure.  If men were true to them(our)selves, we would "play in a band, live in California, wake up at ten, and surf before noon."

So here is the basic question: a generation ago -- and perhaps for most of human history -- having children was not only included in dreams of masculine success, it was essential to it.  In the past, one could not be a man without progeny.  Today, it's tough to call yourself a real man if you have kids.

What happened?

First of all, I want to insist that I am as much a victim of this delusion as was the author of the piece in GQ, and many (most?) educated men in my generation.  These last two years with Helena have been wonderful, powerful... and often deeply depressing, not so much because of her as because of the challenge that she implies to my self definition.  So my interest in this problem isn't just academic, because it may give some insight into the dark night of the soul that I have inhabited more than I would have liked since she was born.

The easy Marxist answer is that capitalism is to blame: the basic structural power of consumer capitalism is to tell people "You suck.  You're ugly, unpopular, and unhappy.  But, if you buy Duff Beer, then things will be great!"  The grass is greener on the other side of the fence... or on the other side of the reproduction divide.  By making men unhappy with "conventional" lives, capitalism promotes the purchase of red convertibles, expensive alcohol, and (in my case, at least) kite-surfing gear.

Maybe that's a part of it... but there's also the population issue.  Ever since Malthus wrote her famous essay almost 300 years ago, some people have lived in fear of overwhelming the carrying capacity of the planet.  There are too many of us, we all know (in spite of the fact that the evidence has proven Malthus completely wrong, everyone still believes him), so we shouldn't reproduce.  For ethical absolutists like me, having a kid requires rethinking this story.

I think something else happens in high school, or the general discourse of fear around teen pregnancy.  In our formative years, having children is a disaster.  It's what happens to people who don't take care (in the more charitable interpretation) or who are losers at live (in the subconscious way that the elites think).  It's hard to get over this idea.

Even so, I don't think I understand this change, where children, once the condition of the possibility of happiness (to use Lacan's phrase) have become the conditions of its impossibility.  I'd love ideas, if any readers have them!

I'm being censored in China: how cool!

My parents are traveling through China right now, a whirlwind twenty day trip through the highlights of an amazing country.  And today, in my Dad's travelogue about their stay in Tibet, amid reflections on buddhist debating practice in the Sera Monastery and the amount of gold in the burial stupa for the fifth Dalai Lama (10,000 lbs), he also mentions that:

Kurt, the Chinese internet filters have blocked your blog and your mom (and me) are eager to see your latest postings. Perhaps you could cut and paste them to an email.

Though I sometimes felt that my phone had a strange echo in the Bush administration, this is the first time I've ever been important enough to censor.  Very flattering.  I wonder what these innocuous ramblings about babies might be doing to destabilize the Chinese state? (I remember meeting an old leftist when I was in my early teens, who crowed about finding his name on Nixon's enemies list.  We take some of our importance from who seems to hate us...)

Now, I know that the Chinese censorship filters are mostly mechanical: I doubt that there is a real person behind the decision.  I'm not quite sure, however, what I did to trip off their system.  A couple of months ago, when we were visiting my parents, my Dad and I went to a lecture at the University of Denver about the current intellectual climate in China, and one of the clearest lessons I got from the talk was that in today's China, intellectuals should be technicians.  In the same way that an engineer gets an idea from his bosses and tries to make it happen, academics in China have a directed role, moving ideas around in order to serve the interests of the state.

Though one can blame this on communism, it's actually a long Chinese tradition.  François Julien's work, for instance, shows the way that the imperial bureaucracy did an excellent job of co-opting any independent thinker, simply by paying more for working in the tax office than they could get doing anything else.  But the basic premise of this blog is that thinking (and, by extension, what we teach children) has exactly the opposite role: to challenge, to think about new goals, to become an autonomous person.

Is that why the Chinese censor this insignificant blog?  Probably not.  I probably just used a prohibited word at some point.  But I'd like to think that these little talks with Helena Iara are, in some little way, subversive.

Learning to desire

There can be a legitimate debate about whether or not Helena learns as much critical theory from Pocoyo as I think she does.  There's no doubt, however, that the writers for the series are really smart, and consciously trying to deal with issues that challenge both kids and adults.  For instance, one of Helena's favorite episodes these days tells the story of a day that Sleepy Bird has to run errands, and thus asks Pocoyo and Pato to babysit for Baby Bird.  Valentina the caterpillar shows up as well, simply overwhelming Pocoyo and Pato, especially when they try to convince the kids to sleep.



Pocoyo and Pato only get the kids into bed with a trick: they pretend that they want to use the beds, thus making Valentina and Baby Bird envious... and getting them in the right place.

How do we learn to desire?  Certain basic things are biological: we don't need anyone to teach us hunger or thirst or exhaustion.  But even such a simple desire as wanting to go to bed emerges from a complex pedagogy, and according to both Pocoyo and René Girard, we learn most desire mimetically.  That is to say, we learn it by imitating others.  If someone else wants something, then it must mean that I should want it, too.

Girard made most of his reputation with a critique of memetic desire, showing it to be the root of intra-tribal violence, the scapegoating process, sacrificiality, and almost every religion.  Oh, and capitalism, too, of course.  At the same time, he recognizes its importance:

Even if the mimetic nature of human desire is responsible for most of the violent acts that distress us, we should not conclude that mimetic desire is bad in itself.  If our desires were not mimetic, they would be forever fixed on pre-determined objects; they would be a particular form of instinct.  Human beings could no more change their desire than cows their appetite for grass.  Without mimetic desire there would be neither freedom nor humanity.

Desire feels so natural and that we assume it to be part of us, but the truth is that most of the desires we have are a strange kind of outside-inside, both ours and not-ours.  Raising a child is, in great part, a co-learning how to desire -- not a conscious teaching process, because when Helena learned to desire, she doesn't learn from what we say, but from what we do.  It is imitation, not pedagogy.  So in the process, Rita and I have to learn from ourselves, make our actions and desires coherent with our ideals.

And Helena, like Baby Bird, is gradually learning to go to sleep when she's tired.

Sick

Several days ago, as my flu began to get worse and worse.

Helena: "Daddy sick.  Not good."  Pause.  "Helena will take care."

Things aren't quite so easy, of course, but it's good to know that she wants to help.

Parasites

Over the last week, Helena Iara has been watching a turtledove that has made its nest under the eaves of our house.  Each morning, she wakes up and walks out onto the balcony to say good morning to the bird and see if the chicks have hatched.  We've used the time to talk to her about caring for little creatures, explaining how birds reproduce, and showing her how to wait for something interesting.  So, you can imagine my concern when I walked out onto the porch this morning (well before Helena awoke, thank goodness) to find a dead little bird on the floor.

As I buried the little critter, I looked at it more carefully: the beach was different from that of a turtledove. The feathers weren't anything like the mother.  And it was huge for a neonate.  In fact, the dead baby bird wasn't even the turtledove's child: it was a chupim.  The mother chupim lays its eggs in another bird's nest and then goes away, leaving the host mother to care for her babies... and since the chupim is a huge bird, it generally eats all of the food that the mother brings for her own kids, leaving them to dies of starvation.  The turtledove's expression as she sat on her nest this morning, something I had taken for sadness, was actually something very different, maybe even the pride of a mother who had seen the danger and defended her chicks (as yet unhatched) by pushing the interloper out of the nest (all of that is a projection, of course; who knows what emotions a bird really feels).

In Brazil, a chupão isn't just a bird: it's a metaphor, and incarnation of evil.  In Brazilian popular culture, the greatest possible sin is to be a parasite, to take advantage of others without giving anything back: in a poor society where reciprocating favors and paying off debts was often the difference between starvation and survival, it's an ethic that makes sense.  Rita tells stories of her brother going off into the woods to hunt baby chupins when he was a kid, a boy's idea of defending the weak against a species that is both parasitical upon and stronger than its victims.  Whether in the favela or the countryside, you hear similar stories, and much of the progressive, left wing orientation of contemporary Brazilian life and politics depends on the critique of the chupim (and things like it).

What does all of this have to do with philosophy and a baby girl?  We generally see philosophy as a story of genius: Plato wrote..., Kant thought..., Nietzsche said...  In fact, though, it's hard to know how much of that "individual" genius isn't merely an effective expression of social ideas.  William James's pragmatism, for instance, serves as a splendid critique of European metaphysical overkill, but he himself recognized that he was merely channeling American attitudes, looking for "what works."  The amazing gift of Emmanuel Levinas, one of the great philosophers of the 20th century, was to put centuries of rabbinical Jewish thought in dialogue with phenomenology.  No thinker is just himself: he speaks the metaphors of his culture.

The attack on the chupim, whether by my brother-in-law when he was a boy, or by a mother turtledove defending her chicks, expresses a profound ethics, an idea as important -- and probably with more impact on the lives of poor people in Brazil -- as the reflections of any academic philosopher.  I'm still glad that Helena didn't see the dead baby bird, but when she wakes up, I'm going to tell her the story.