Oedipus Fisher Price

Rita, Helena Iara, and I are now visiting my parents in Colorado, and Helena simply loves playing with the toys David and I had as children.  The Fisher Price Castle, with its moving stairways, secret passages, and dungeons (with a dragon, no less), may be her favorite, and she loves to move the "little people" (dolls with no arms and legs, for those of you who didn't have them as kids) all around and imagine the relationships they might have.

Last night, she put the queen in bed, and then put a little woodsman -- who might be an archer, horseman, or even Robin Hood -- in bed next to her.  She then found the king and brought him toward the bed, inviting several comments from Rita and me... but Helena quickly clarified the relationship: the little man clad in green was the queen's son.  None the less, she soon moved the king away to a spot atop the castle.

Personally, I love these little toys because they open play into narrative: though it's great when Helena plays with her dolls and stuffed animals by making them dance or slide, telling stories with toys is an even more interesting step.  Up to now, Helena's storytelling has been pretty simple, based around things that she has done, interfamily relations, or the simple joy of putting words together, but the physical relationships of the toys in the Fisher Price Castle seems to allow for longer and more complicated stories.  With the characters in place, she doesn't get lost in her stories very easily.

And with storytelling comes interpretation.  Mine, at least (I doubt that Helena is doing much hermeneutics!).  What would it mean if Robin Hood is, in fact, the Queen's son?  Does that transform the whole story of the Merry Men into an Oedipal drama?  In fact, there is something to this interpretation: after all, Robin Hood offers as a the political justification for his struggle against the Sheriff of Nottingham and Prince John, that he is defending England for Richard the Lionheart (off in Palestine during the crusades).  He is fighting for the definition of England (the mother land) against the law (in Lacanian thought, the law is the Father).

OK, it's a bad argument.  Not very helpful in understanding Helena's play with toys, nor the history of popular rebellions in England.  But the point is, that as babies begin narrative play and to do unexpected things that don't make sense, they make us think.  In some cases, the thoughts are useful, and in others, they don't lead anywhere.  But that, as an professor once told me, is philosophy.

Out of place

Helena loves picnics.  The mere idea of eating outside -- even if it is just some raisins as a break from a tiring time at the playground -- sends her into paroxysms of enthusiasm.  "Picnic!  Picnic!"  Over the last couple of days, even when there is no food to be found, she plays picnic on the porch or at the park, excited to eat far from her high-chair and the family dinner table.

Another of her favorite games is "slide on daddy's chair."  Several years ago, I got a great knock-off of the famous chaise-lounge by Le Corbusier, "Machine for Relaxing #2"(a splendidly silly name for a very comfortable chair), but since Helena discovered it, the piece of furniture is no longer mine.  It has become her slide, and that of all of her toys.  She climbs onto the chair, says "Scared, scared!" in an all-too-real voice (not unlike the way she screams of the top of the huge slide in the park before she rushes down it), and then drops head-first toward the floor, where she catches herself on her hands.

These two games seem completely unconnected, but they have something important in common: an activity out of place.  Eating at the table is just eating... but eating in the park is play.  Sliding in the playground is just fun, but sliding in the house is both make-believe and fun.

Clearly, play is much more than just putting things in new and unexpected contexts, but it is one important kind of play.  The miracle of Bill Watterson's Calvinball, for instance, is that anything can be imported into the game: rackets and nets and flags and balls and pretty much any rule one can imagine.  Calvin and Hobbes is so funny (and Calvin and Hobbes fight so much) because of the creative anarchy of this kind of play: there are no rules about where things should be or what one should do with them.  A tennis racket can be used in tag, and a high-modernist piece of furniture can be used as a slide for a baby.



It's not all that different with adult play.  When I designed this house, I loved using mixing bowls as sinks and ball valves as faucets.  Jacques Derrida always insisted that his philosophical method was a form of play... and what he really did was take ideas out of context, mix them around a bit, and then show that they weren't as clear and simple as everyone had thought.  Useful as poststructuralist philosophy or child's play, but mostly just fun.

Playing with a player

A couple of nights ago, Helena Iara did not want to go to sleep.  It was about nine PM, when she usually starts to calm down and prepare for bed, but she only wanted to play.  "Brincar, Papai, brincar!" she insisted (Play, Daddy, play).  Since Helena sometimes categorizes her books as toys, I proposed that she "play" by reading them with me.  "No, no!" she declared, pointing to a ball and some stuffed animals.  "Brincar com brincador!" (Play with the player!).

 Who is the player?  Helena, one would expect, but that's not what she said.  The toys are the players, the active agents.  Books, unlike balls and stuffed toys, just don't cut it as "brincadores."

I wrote last week about how Helena attributes intentionality to inanimate things as a way to explain the failure of success of cause and effect.  Here, again, we see how children see "things" as "people" -- toys and balls have their own perspective on the world, their own interests and desires.  They are capable of playing.  At first, this seems like a truly alien and even wrong-headed (childish?) idea, but I don't think it's really wrong.  Anyone who has ever played a sport seriously knows that the ball has a mind of its own: this is even true of soccer, where the ball is perfectly round (think of the polemics that emerge at the beginning of a new world cup when players get to use a new ball for the first time), and even more in football or rugby.  In other sports, we see something similar: car drivers and bikers treat their vehicles as living subjects; skiers and surfers know that snow and waves are temperamental, often angry, other times gentle.

Above and beyond that, a child needs a toy in order to play.  In some way, there has to be an other in the picture, even when that other is a little stuffed thing, a rock, a bunch of sticks.  There is something powerful in that other, even when I invent it.

So as much as I tried, Helena would not accept a book as a "player", as a real toy.  Stories didn't have quite the right kind of otherness for the fun she was looking for.

Once upon a time

Yesterday, unexpectedly, Helena began to tell stories.  She can't really keep up a narrative, because she has trouble putting more than two or three words together in a phrase, but she has the structure right.

"Once upon a time," she began, and then paused, waiting for Rita and me to look at her.

"A butterfly..." again, a pause.

"What did the butterfly do, Helena?"

"It flew and played!"  A longer pause.  "And then..."

"And then what, Helena?"

"There was a girl.  They met."  Another pause, "And then..."

"And then what?"

"They played!"

Her first story went on like this for quite some time, and the rest of the day, she played the same verbal games whenever she had a chance, bringing each of her stuffed animals into the story.  And in the end, they all end up playing together or caring for each other, the two verbs which make Helena happiest.

I love stories, and always have, perhaps loving the plot so much that I am willing to overlook serious problems in character and theme and language just because I like a tale (thus my very un-intellectual love of Clive Cussler, Robert Jordan, and Elizabeth Peters, who I'd rather read than James Joyce any day).  It's interesting, though, that if Helena is right, plot isn't the first element of story.  Phatic communication is: the special words that don't really mean anything, but that point to the fact that this is a story.  "Once upon a time," or "And then...", the words Helena used as the skeleton of her story, are more a frame than a content.  They say, "Pay attention, I'm telling a story."

When we read the Bible, we often trip over the "And then it came to pass," as a translation of egeneto in Greek or (darn, I don't remember what it is in Hebrew... too many years away from grad school!).  It sounds staid and boring.  But the truth is, that the biblical authors are just doing Helena's "And then".  They're marking the story, reminding the reader/listener to pay attention.  Clive Cussler's car chases (always in antique cars, of course) or Elizabeth Peters' clever asides in the voice of Amelia Peabody are the same.  They don't so much mean anything as they draw attention.  "Look at me, I'm telling a cool story!"

And what more does a baby want that "Look at me!  Listen!"?

Chamomile for the eel

Helena, like many babies, loves to play at cooking, and she loves to make tea.  Recently, she has been selecting which type of tea she wants to serve us: mostly green tea, mate, and chamomile.  She is also very excited about sea life: sea horses and starfish and sharks and jellyfish.

One time, as she was expressing fear of moray eels (which look about as nasty as any critter can look), she was also serving tea.  For some reason, Rita pointed out that chamomile is very good for calming down before sleep.

"Chamomile for the eel, Chamomile for the eel," Helena insisted.

I can't think of anything philosophically profound to say about her rhyme, but it is so clever I wanted to write it down.

"The juice doesn't want to come out!"

This morning, Helena had her sippy-cup full of juice in her hand, but she hadn't opened it completely, so the juice didn't come out.  After trying various positions, she turned to us and complained, "O suco não quer sair!" (The juice doesn't want to come out [of the cup])

We understood perfectly well what Helena Iara meant, though the phrase, on further examination, is a strange one.  The juice doesn't want?  Does juice have free will, that it can decide to leave the cup or not?

Babies aren't the only ones to attribute desire or will to inanimate objects.  I often hear myself say things like "The car doesn't want to start," or "What a stubborn screw!  It just doesn't want to come out."  It's a way of talking about cause an effect... or more exactly, why a cause doesn't lead to the effect I expect.  If I turn the key and the car doesn't start, there must be a foreign will in the way.

Almost fifteen months ago, I was excited when Helena came to realize the connection between turning the knob on the faucet, and water coming into the sink.  Back in the 18th century, David Hume challenged this easy connection between cause and effect, saying that there was nothing "in the world", certainly nothing visible or palpable, that could be called a cause.  "Between the movement of one billiard ball and that of the second, I see no third term," he famously said.  A good bit philosophy for the rest of the century was dedicated to responding to this problem.

One of my favorite answers, and one that Helena's comment about juice seems to endorse, came from the Scot Thomas Reid.  "Cause is our externalization of what we recognize in ourselves to be an active power," he said, in prose less clear than is usual for him.  What he meant (I think) is that we act, and these acts have results.  The connector between my action and its result seems to come from my intention, what I wanted to do.  Imagine, Reid says, an intelligent being without will or desire: he doubts (and I agree) that this being might never develop the idea of cause and effect.  We see causes and effects in the world, because we perceive them in ourselves.


So Helena is right, if in a metaphorical way: the juice doesn't "want" to leave the cup.  In her innocent way, she's captured why we humans connect cause and effect.

Santa Monica

Our kitchen -- or at least part of it -- has turned into the beach.  Several times a day, or perhaps quite a bit more, Helena declares that she is on her way to Santa Monica, loads up several of her stuffed animals in her toy stroller, puts on her sunglasses, and heads off.

Santa Monica is a fun place: there's a beach, big swings, a place where people walk and play music, and (most important to Helena Iara) an aquarium.  She goes to the aquarium, picks starfish out of their tank (the tank is actually the iron support that holds the loft up), shows the seahorses to her stuffed cats, and trembles in fear of the sharks (she does it quite well, so much so that we sometimes wonder if it is just playacting).

When we were in Los Angeles last month, we did all of these things with Helena: she is both playing and remembering (and, to a certain degree, campaigning: she wants us to see how much she loves the ocean and the things around it!).  But there is something wonderful about this make-believe, a joy that seems even more intense than when she was swinging on the beach.

"Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit," are the words Virgil puts into the mouth of Aeneas as he and his comrades suffer outside the walls of Troy: "Someday, perhaps, even this will be sweet to remember."  And when the sweetness of memory gets mixed with the play of a child, the smile on a baby's mouth is wonderful for everyone.

Take Care of Her

Over the last several weeks, all of Helena Iara's toys have become mothers and daughters.  The little mouse is the daughter of the big mouse, who is in turn the daughter of the little cat, who is daughter of the big cat, who is daughter of Pato the duck...  In each of these cases, size is much more important than race or appearance.  Natural "enemies" like cats and mice can be mothers and daughters to each other.

Over the last couple of days, she has made it very clear why and how this parenting relationship develops: they take care of each other.  Today, as I held her frog puppet and had it sing songs to her, she put first the little moose (called "Mimoosinho") and then the larger mouse ("Mimoosão") between the frog's long arms and said "Care for her" (cuida dela!).  At that point, she made the relationship clear: "This is their mother."

One of the great philosophical debates of all time is what kind of emotions lie at the base of what it means to be human.  According to Heraclitus, "all things come about through strife". (war, conflict... it's hard to translate the greek polemos).  In the Gospel of John, we see that all comes about through "the word" (logos, sometimes better understood as reason, thought that's probably not what John meant).  I wonder if Helena isn't taking up with another school of philosophical thought, where care lies at the foundation of all things.

Heidegger was famous for putting Sorge (care) at the center of Dasein (being-there), but I think Helena is pointing at something different: for Heidegger, this care was associated with worry and anxiety (he was, after all an influence on loads of pessimistic existentialists later in the 20th century).  Heidegger did see care as the idea that things or people are important, that they matter to us (in Spanish, for instance, one of the ways you can say "I care about x" is "x me importa", it matters to me.).  People are different from animals because we feel this kind of care and concern in discerning what is important.  For Helena's stuffed animals, care for the next smallest member of the group is the way they come to be "her" toys.

Donald Winnicott may actually be the best resource here: he talks about the "holding space" that babies and small children need to feel loved and supported.  For him, like for Helena, "caring for" is not an intellectual exercise (like Heidegger's existential worry), but a physical act: a hug.  When each of her toys "cares for" the next, it holds the next smallest baby: the frog embraces the cat, who embraces the little moose.

A little game, but philosophically profound: and I think it says that Rita and I are doing a pretty good job at showing Helena we love her.  So that she can show others (even her imaginary friends) down on the line.

Learning to buy

Over the last couple of weeks, Helena has become... well, "obsessed" is too strong a word, but certainly very concerned, about economics.  Specifically, she wants to understand what allows us to go into a store and take certain things home, while we don't or can't take others.  She seems to have resolved this conundrum with a single word, "pagou." (Paid).

Helena's concern with payment serves as a way to de-normalize something that we do every day.  It seems so normal to buy stuff, but in fact it's a relatively new and strange way to exchange good and services.  For most of human history, barter and other informal forms of exchange were much more common, as were sharing, potlatch, and completely non-commencial forms of distributing goods.  It takes a lot of work for a baby to understand how capitalism works.

It's not just babies, of course: people from traditionally non-capitalist cultures famously have a hard time adapting to the money economy.  I remember very clearly, for instance, the way that the cooking oil market worked in Cazucá, a shantytown above Bogotá where I worked for many years.  Most of the people who lived there were refugees from the war, peasants, indigenous people, and traditional blacks who were used to subsistence agriculture as the basic way to sustain themselves.  They had always grown their own crops, shared a successful hunt or catch of fish with everyone (knowing that others would do the same later), and bartered their produce for things they didn't grow themselves.  Then suddenly, in Bogotá, none of those resources were available.

Cooking oil, then: these refugees bought oil each day, just enough to fry what they wanted to cook that day.  Unfortunately, however, buying in small amounts made bad economic sense: in 10 days, they might spend five dollars on oil, while if they had bought the same amount all at once, they would have spent less than a dollar.  If we think about why these people spent so much of their salary on food, and had so little to save or invest, knowledge of how capitalism works was part of it.  (Another serious problem was that the paramilitary gangs controlled the oil market, and they had a vested interest in people not learning.)

Helena Iara is just learning this stuff as we shop.  Not an easy lesson, but an important one.

Do your shoes control you?

Sometimes it's tempting to turn this blog into a series of commentaries on Pocoyo (don't worry, I won't really do it, but the Spanish cartoon does open so many amazing ideas in little kids' heads...).  Here's one I found particularly interesting:

Like many other things we buy, Pato's shoes seem at first to be magical: they allow him to do things he never could before, they give him and intense kind of joy... and they make him better than his friends.  It's what we want from our athletic shoes, isn't it?

Pato soon finds, though, that the magic in his shoes isn't completely under his control.  In fact, they soon control him much more than he controls them.  Though the metaphor is childish and drawn in primary colors, it is also quite honest: Rita and I were just in Los Angeles, for instance, and found the bus and metro to be much better than anyone thought, and we were amazed at the friendly atmosphere in public transit.  In contrast, most people drove their cars alone, with a grimace on their faces, and then had to pay $10-25 a day to park.  Might these cars be like Pato's shoes?  After all of the financial and emotional investment we put into them, we simply can't take the bus.  The car, to some degree, comes to control us.

Marx says this about the products we consume, words that seem even more interesting today than in the 1950s when he wrote:

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.

Pocoyo shows some of these theological niceties, more exactly how the shoes come to function as a magical power outside of ourself, not too different from a charm in animist religion.  But in general, Pocoyo is quite a bit more fun than Karl Marx... and it has better colors.

The New Yorker

It looks like I'm not the only one doing philosophical analyses of Dr. Seuss.  From the New Yorker:

The Cat in the Hat was a Cold War invention. His value as an analyst of the psychology of his time, the late nineteen-fifties, is readily appreciated: transgression and hypocrisy are the principal themes of his little story. But he also stands in an intimate and paradoxical relation to national-security policy. He was both its creature and its nemesis—the unraveller of the very culture that produced him and that made him a star. This is less surprising than it may seem. He was, after all, a cat.

For more... 

Rhyming Entomology

When we went to the La Brea Tar Pits last week, Rita bought a new book for Helena, a pseudo-Dr. Seuss about insects.  Though the book bears the Cat in the Hat on the spine, the words don't have quite the grace of the great Theodor Geisel... but it's actually not bad, especially considering how hard it it to make rhymes about entomology.  For instance,

If you were as strong
as an ant, you would see
you could lift up ten cats
in tall hats... easily.

Today, teaching science with rhymes seems either infantile or silly, depending on your perspective, but there's a long history of it.  Lucretius's famous De Rerum Natura is, in fact, a huge lyric poem teaching about the wonders of nature... and inculcating its listeners into atomism, a radical intellectual posture during the Roman Empire.  In the baroque, we see similar things: Athanasius Kircher, for instance, was one of the most amazing scientists of the 17th century, and he published most of his findings as poetry.  Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, one of my favorite philosophers, also used poetry to communicate new ideas about physics, archeology, and zoology.  In "First Dream," she mixed all of that in an amazing metaphysical salad that interpreters have been trying to understand for the last three hundred years.

These poems weren't just science education or popularization, not as we currently understand it.  The division between publishing results (for one's scientific peers) and educating the public ("dumbing-down" the results of laymen), is a relatively modern one.  Which makes me think a little: we deeply lament the scientific illiteracy of most people, but at the same time, most scientists refuse to write in a way that people without a PhD can understand.  Science becomes our priesthood, hiding its knowledge behind a screen of formulae and impossible words.  Though I lament the way that conservatives have manipulated the discourse against evolution or global warming to their own ends, the is something very good in the basic skepticism that refuses to accept what scientists say, just because they say it.

So why not require scientists who get grants from the National Science Foundation to write some of their results in Dr. Seussian rhyme?  Or make movies, paintings, or jokes?  The results would probably be pretty awful, but hardly worse than the prose in last month's Journal of the American Chemical Society.