Pay Attention!

One of Helena Iara's favorite songs is the classic samba "O Morro não tem vez" (you can see one of the best interpretations, by Jair Rodrigues and Elis Regina in the mid 1960s, above).  Today, as we returned from the playground close to the apartment we have rented in Los Angeles, she asked me to sing the lyrics again and again so she could memorize them, and then showed off her new words to Rita when we got back.

Yesterday, as I put the song on YouTube for her to hear, she lined up several of her favorite toys on the keyboard of my computer and began to lecture them: "Attention!  Pay attention!"  It might be easy to explain that she is mimicking Rita or me, but I can't remember any time that we have spoken those words in that context (we do often say "pay attention" when her interest wanders during mealtime, but that seems sufficiently different that I'm not sure she learned it that way).  I think I'm more convinced that she is doing something similar to the occasional lectures she gives herself, explaining what she should do before doing exactly the opposite.  She is learning by teaching.

Over the last couple of weeks, we have seen several other similar things: Helena takes her dolls or stuffed animals to the little kitchen my parents bought her for Christmas, and "teaches" them how to cook, for instance.  "Egg," she explains, then "water," and then puts the egg on the burner to boil.  The lessons aren't terribly complex... but then again, we have to remind ourselves that she doesn't actually know how to cook.

But that's where we find the genius of popular education, a social movement that has made such an impact in Latin America over the last thirty or forty years.  Anyone who has ever taught knows the basic insight: we really learn when we have to stand in front of others and teach.  Think about a recent college graduate who has to teach the Civil War to 11th graders: he'll have to learn the history much better than he ever did when he sat in class.  The same is true of peasants or slum dwellers or street kids suddenly set in the place of the authoritative teacher: as one young man told me years ago, "I never knew I knew this stuff until I started to teach others."

So I think Helena Iara has stumbled on one of the great pedagogical insights of the last generation.  Whether it's attention, cooking, or anything else, we often learn best by teaching.  Even if our only pupils are dolls and stuffed animals.

Photos from the La Brea Tar Pits

How many whales?

We are back in Los Angeles, where Rita continues to work on research for her post-doc, so Helena has to deal with lots of new places again.  In the hotel where we are staying, there are whales on the bottom of the bathtub, and when she got ready for her bath last night, she took an unmistakable joy in counting them: "Uma, duas, três, quatro baleias..." and then in English: "One, two three, four whales."  Her counting has gotten quite good of over the last couple of weeks, and she normally makes it to about 14 without a mistake (though seven often gets skipped, for no very clear reason.).

Lots of experts in child development say that children don't really understand numbers until they are much older, so I have spent quite a lot of time with Helena trying to get at how she thinks about counting.  At first, it seemed that she understood numbers not really as numbers, but as a series: just in the same way that she has stacking bowls, where the one marked with a bird must come first, followed by the caterpillar and the bunny, one, two, and three are a series.  That is, after all, what counting is about.

Does she understand, though, that there are four whales, and not just that the word "four" is attached to the last of the whales that she counts in her series?  The classic test with children is to ask them how many things there are, and not to allow them to count one by one: evidently, most kids just say one, two, or "lots."  Helena doesn't seem to accept this test, though (or I don't know how to do it): she always goes back and counts.

Now, Immanuel Kant at one point set off to see if any human knowledge was truly a priori, by which he meant that it was guaranteed to be true without us having to trust our unreliable senses.  He looked to math as an example, and came to claim that math doesn't really require any inputs from the world.  All math, he says, is based on sequence (basically what Helena does as she counts), and sequence is based on time.  Since time is one of the universal, transcendental characteristics of the interaction of all human minds with the world, we can say that mathematical truths are a priori.  (Since space is also one of those transcendental categories, Kant also believes that geometry is a priori, but non-Euclidian thinking might make that a harder argument to accept).

In the end, I think that Helena, even if she is "just" counting a series, is doing math.  But she is also using these series, like any other way of organizing the relationship between her thoughts and the world, as a way to deal with the unknown: a new place, full of new things.  When there are "four" whales instead of "a lot", she can find a big, unknown world just a little easier to understand and deal with.

What does a Teddy Bear see?

Several days ago, Helena set her two stuffed "kitty cats" (she actually says "killy cat," but I think that's just a problem with diction, not a statement about their carnivorous nature) in her art corner and began to draw, paste, and put stickers on a piece of paper, an event not much different than most days she decided she wants to "paint."  However, this time, after each stroke she made with a pen or each sticker she placed on the paper, she turned to the two cats and said, "Viu, gatinho?" (did you see, little kitty?)  She continued to ask the same question until she was sure that they had agreed with her, or until I imitated a cat's voice to say, "Wow, cool."

Children need to be seen: that's no surprise to anyone who has spent time on the edge of a swimming pool as kids shout "look at me, Mom!" and then jump into the water.  I had never realized before, however, that it's not just other human beings that can see and recognize: apparently, toys and dolls can do it, too. (There is, of course, the question of whether small children distinguish between toys, animals, and people, but I'll leave that issue to the developmental psychologists).

Now, the toy that is able to see a baby play is nothing more than the baby herself.  Toys do have souls (as any reader of The Velveteen Rabbit surely knows), but they are invested with these souls only by the children who play with them, and by the connivance of adults who play along..  After "Jackie Paper came no more," Puff the Magic Dragon was forever condemned to the unreality of his cave.  So in fact, the toy recognizing the child is only the child recognizing the child.  So why are the eyes of the kitty cat doll in any way important?  Why not skip the step and just recognize oneself?

Strangely enough, this is one of the biggest all-time questions of theology.  Why would a perfect God want to create human beings to worship Him?  If he's perfect, why not just stay that way?  One answer that appears, first in the Islamic philosopher Ibn Al-Arabi, who lived in Spain in the 12th and 13th century.  Before creating the world, Al-Arabi said, God was indeed perfect, but He was not self-conscious, not aware of himself.  Without an other, space, time... there is no way to know that I am there, no stimulus, no input.  By creating the world, God found a kind of mirror, a way to know that He existed.  Hegel picked up the same idea in the 19th century, pointing to this gap between the observer and the observed as not only the fundamental motor for self-recognition, but also the way that history itself developed.

I had never realized that playing with toys was such heavy philosophy!

(The attached photos, by the way, come from a not-very successful attempt to play with the camera on the computer, and some software that puts in false backgrounds.  Another interesting example of the false or created other as a route to self-consciousness...)

Thinking with Drums

In the countries that adopted the Greek philosophical tradition, what is called thinking generally takes place through words, whether written or spoken.  That's why we get long philosophical books, debates, and pretentious blogs like this one.  In Brazil, many people have argued that the best thinking happens in song.  During our last week in Los Angeles, we went with Helena to see a show by a Yoruba drummer, who argued that in much of Africa, thinking happens through drumming.

You can see the video of Helena drumming above, and some photos in Saturday's blog.  For a baby (and, in truth, for most of us), thinking through drumming or dancing or singing seems to be a much more compelling and seductive way to do philosophy.  In Yoruba culture, moral lessons, new ideas, and traditional values get passed through the drums, which are said to "talk" -- which in fact they do, when you learn how to lesson for the sounds.  Songs always convey moral lessons to the young in America and Brazil, and I suppose in Europe and many other places as well.  And the incorporation of the body into these lessons must make them that much more powerful.

However, I wonder how counter-thinking happens in a culture where drumming is thinking?  How does one subvert, question, undermine authority?  For all of the excitement of thinking in other ways, I don't want to condemn the verbal tradition of the west.  It makes for a great way to think and question the world, tradition, and the very words one uses to think.

I hope that Helena learns to think with drums and words, dance and song and even in the songs of birds. Maybe she'll learn that in her childhood of much travel and border crossings.

Her Mommy

Over the last week, we've see the same scene several times: Helena takes two toys, one big and one small, and then says of the larger, "É a mãe dela." (It's her mother)  She's excited about the idea, and won't staop saying it until we repeat and agree.

When you think about it, "Mother" (or father, uncle, any kinship terms) are a strange kind of noun.  If you and I are talking together, and we say "tree" or "car," we can trust that we are probably referring to the same concrete thing.  But when I say "Mother" and you say "Mother," we are in fact talking about very different people.  The same word "means" different things.

I was tempted to write that Helena is learning that Mother is a term of relationship, and not one of reference, but that assumes that the "original" or real way we use words is that of signifier and signified, a sound that refers to a concrete thing.  I'm not sure that's true, though: babies may understand relationship nouns before they understand absolute nouns.  "Mommy," "Daddy", and many of the other first words in a baby's vocabulary are, in fact, relational.  Perhaps the "her Mommy" is in fact a way to transform relational into absolute, and not the other way around.

One of the most interesting developments in Brazilian anthropology in the last decade has been based on the same idea: for the native people of the Amazon basin, all nouns are relational.  It isn't just that "Mother" points to the relationship between the speaker and a woman, but "jaguar" or "fish" do as well. This idea seems at first impossible, until we see that what "jaguar" means is really "he who can eat anything."  Thus, if a fish could say "jaguar", it would be talking about a fisherman.  If a monkey could say "jaguar", it might refer to a harpy eagle, which hunts monkeys as it flies through the trees.

We see this kind of language in European poetry, or in proverbs like "man is a wolf to man," but we seem to think it is a secondary, metaphorical way to use language.  Both babies and Amazonian indians suggest that it may be the other way around.

Laughter and forgetting

I love climbing mountains.  There is nothing like standing atop the world at 21,000 feet on some peak in the Andes, with crags everywhere around you, the air so thin and cold it hurts to breathe, and the sense of wonderful exhaustion in your legs.  Even so, I have to confess that at base camp after every major climb I have ever done (or more accurately, on which I have succeeded), I have told myself, "I will never, ever do that again."  The pain and suffering are just too close, and I can't imagine that I would voluntarily do it again.

 But two weeks later, I can think of nothing better than getting back in the mountains, testing my limits of suffering once again.  Forgetting comes quickly.

I recently talked with some parents who think that the same thing happens with second children.  A baby elates us, tests us, makes us laugh... and makes us suffer like little else.  There is no summit to the mountain of childrearing, but the relationship of suffering to joy is pretty similar: they get all mixed up.  And as that first year of life gets farther and farther away, we begin to forget the suffering, the sleepless nights, the anger at a baby's incomprehensible cries...  There is probably a socio-biologist somewhere proving the hypothesis that forgetting the pain of a baby's first year is an evolutionary adaptation to guarantee the continuity of the species.  After all, if we remember well, who would have more than one kid?

What, though, are the consequences of this evolutionary adaptation to forgetting?  Might our nostalgia for the 1950s (or today, for the Reagan 1980s) not be something similar?  We remember the joys of our life with a baby, but we learn to forget the misery.  We remember the hope of "Morning in America" but forget dozens of unwarranted invasions of other countries, the ballooning deficit that began in the Reagan administration, the politics of division...  And we forget the racism of the fifties, the repression of women, the rank superficiality. Forgetting makes us nostalgic, and nostalgia turns many people into Republicans.

There's something similar when we hear people talk about their teenagers.  "Oh, they were so great when they were little...", or "that first year is just the best, there no time like it."  There are wonders of the teenage years, joys that we never have with Helena.  Just as 2012 is a time unlike 1982, better in some ways and worse in others.  But with nostalgia blinding us to the past, we also become blind to the present.

So I'm working hard not to forget.  Remembering the good, but also the pain; the laughter, but also the many, many sleepless nights.  Maybe it'll keep me away from the dangers of cynicism when Helena is a teenager... and the horrors of Republicanism as well.

Jokes

Babies do lots of funny things, and when they laugh, it is contagious.  None the less, I hadn't really expected that Helena Iara would be able to tell jokes, not until she came up with two in the last couple of days.

The first joke came as we were getting ready to leave to go to the playground.  Over the last couple of months, since we first came to the US, then went to Los Angeles, and are now back in Santa Fe, she has adopted the habit of taking toys with her wherever we go; it seems to be a way to feel secure in the face of so many moves, so many new places to sleep.  So a couple of days ago, she carried a doll over to me and said, "Take [it with us]."

"No," I said, "why not..."


Helena interrupted me with her stuffed duck, Pato, half as big as she is.  "Take."

"No," I said again, trying to push her to take one of her finger puppets, or maybe the little stuffed dog she calls Bow-Wow.

With a huge smile on her face, the ran over to her play kitchen, and said again, "Take!" She burst out laughing.

OK, it's not the deadpan delivery of classic comedy, but she was trying to be funny, and there was a certain ironic wit in the exchange.  Freud says that humor comes from the unexpected juxtaposition of concepts in the unconscious, and her inversion of what it was possible to take along seemed to work there.  She might not know the English phrase about "taking everything but the kitchen sink" on a trip, but if she did, the joke would have been even better.

She has also produced word-play that seems rather like a pun.  One of her favorite songs begins, "Cai cai, balão, cai cai balão..." (Fall fall balloon, fall fall balloon), which she adapted to be "Cai cai, Papai," (fall fall Daddy), which actually has a better rhyme to it than the original.  And then yesterday, as I was reading in my favorite chair (which has recently become one of the places she most likes to play), she changed it to "Sai sai, Papai," with the same melody and rhyme, but now meaning "leave leave, Daddy."

Does it make sense to call these exchanges jokes?  Or wit?  What is certain is that she has observed what she has done in the past to make us laugh, and now does it consciously, making the humor intentional.  Hegel sees this process of coming to be aware of oneself and one's influence on others and then consciously changing intentions based on that, as the essence of the move from the epic to the tragic to the comic in Greek theater.  Hrdy believes that the ability to seduce adults is almost hard-wired into babies, and that children's attempts to make us laugh (along with their extraordinary needs, which no one person can fulfill), lie at the basis of civilization.

I'm not sure I would go that far.  But as Helena learns to make us laugh, and makes this a part of who she is, I feel like something wonderful and important is happening.

Cars II

Though a lot of children's movies and TV shows are too insipid for words, I have always liked Pixar films, which seem more intelligent and thought-provoking than most movies made for adults: truth is, I like them so much that I even wrote a book about using Monsters Inc, Nemo, and A Bug's Life to teach philosophy to kids.  And even though I didn't think Cars was the best Pixar film, I was excited to watch its sequel with Helena Iara.

Helena liked the film: enough so that she was able to sit still for almost an hour before she began to fidget.  The pure visuals of the movie are great, and they probably attract an almost two year-old as much as they do any other kid.  What struck me, however, was the political critique implicit in the film: though supposedly about race cars, the movie's subtext seems to be about the rise of the populist Right and the Tea Party.

OK, that sounds a bit out of context, so let me make the argument.  The enemies in Cars II are failed automobiles, Pintos and AMC Pacers and Gremlins who can't find parts anymore.  They want to destroy other cars -- and the possibility of a real alternative fuel -- out of pure resentment of the success of others.  They fall in line behind a movement led by a faux-folksy oil tycoon who is really using the movement as a way to make sure that no other fuel undermines his base of wealth and power.

Let's talk about the origins of the Tea Party: they are mostly white and working class, and many of them have lost out in the modern economy.  Their skills of manual labor have been outsourced to India, China, and Latin America, and they haven't been able to take advantage of the new opportunities of globalization.  Resentment against elites is the fundamental motivator behind the Tea Party, and they are manipulated by a faux-folksy Australian (not that different from the accent of the villain on Cars 2!), Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox News, who needs their support for his nefarious business dealings.

As an insight into the origins of the populist right (I bet it would work as a way to understand Le Pen in France and many other Euro-neo-fascists, too), the movie is very sharp.  I can understand why Pat Buchanan and so many others on Fox News got riled up about the movie... especially coming as a sequel to the original Cars, which seemed to emphasize small town values, NASCAR, and other things Republicans love (personally, I think it was about class consciousness, but that's another story).  But here's the problem: there are only two sides, only two alternatives.  The salvation of the world comes from the elites (in the form of the British MI5, no less!), while the marginalized and forgotten can find an advocate only in a manipulative demagogue in it for his own benefit.  We see the American political landscape seen through the lens of well-educated, Hollywood/New York liberals, where the poor have to choose between one of two champions, and they (we, quite frankly, because I can't except myself from this liberal elite) can't understand why the people would possible chose Newt Gingrich and his ilk.

The promise of any politics of liberation is that there aren't just two sides, a choice between two elites that represent the people, but that the people might, in fact, be able to govern themselves.  And there's where the movie falls flat.  And, quite frankly, where America falls flat, too.