In the night kitchen

Helena Iara loves the story of Mickey, who heard a racket in the night, and screamed, "Quiet down there!"  Many other parents can say the same about their own kids and In the Night Kitchen, but the popularity of the book shouldn't hide from us how deeply strange it is.  From the first moment -- when the child (and not the parents) call for quiet -- to the last page -- "And that's why, thanks to Mickey, we eat cake every morning" -- the text is just weird, at least if you look at it with any critical distance.

I'm not the first to point out that something psychoanalytic is going on here: the secondary literature is full of claims that In the Night Kitchen is oneiric, onanistic, and ontological.  What interests me is actually that frame, the first and the last pages where Mickey first hears a sound he can't understand, and the end, turning the whole tale into a kind of "just-so story" that isn't actually true (we don't "have cake every morning.").  Since Helena's nascent storytelling address the structure of the tale than the content, it's worthwhile to think the same way about the stories she likes.

Here's the way that Mladen Dolar summarizes the Freudo-Lacanian theory of fantasy:

When the infant hears, he should not be able to understand anything; when the adult understands, he should not be traumatized; but both of these extremes are impossible: the non-understanding is being derailed, and the understanding does not put it back on track.  The subject is always stuck between voice and understanding, caught in the temporality of fantasy and desire.  In the simplified retroactive perspective, there is the "object voice" in the beginning, followed by the signifier which is a way of making sense of it, of coming to terms with the voice.  But we can see by this simple little scheme that the signifier is always taken hostage by fantasy, it is "always already" inscribed in its economy, it always emerges as a compromise formation.  There is a temporal vector between the voice (the incomprehensible, the traumatic) and the signifier (the articulation, the rationalization), and what links the two, in this precipitating and retroactive temporality, is fantasy as the juncture of the two….

Maurice Sendak seems to be explaining the same process, but with less complicated words and better pictures: Mickey hears his parents having sex, and doesn't understand it.  His brain scrambles around to understand what he hears, and though subconsciously he knows there is something sexual going on (he is naked for the whole book, after all), it makes more sense to fantasize a world under his own where bakers make cake and a boy can turn bread dough into an airplane.  By the time that he makes it back into his bed, he has developed a whole theory of the world ("and that's why") that also seems to catch a bit about reproduction.

(I wonder if Mickey had heard somewhere that old and almost vulgar euphemism that a pregnant woman "has a bun in the oven"?  Rita and I worked with a group of kids from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to re-tell the story of Little Red Riding Hood, and their version ends with Granny marrying the Big Bad Wolf.  We've always wondered if that didn't emerge because the storyteller has heard that "so-and-so ate so-and-so", a Brazilian way of referring to sex.  So if the Big Bad Wolf already ate Grandma, they might as well get married...).

In the end, the process that creates fantasy may seem like detour on the way to truth, or an actual impediment to understanding.  But I think this walk between "I don't understand" and "ahh...", whether it relates to sex or not, is one of the most beautiful things about childhood.  It's the way we learn, create, and come up with explanations that are much more interesting than the boring truth.

In the jungle

A couple of days ago, Helena Iara and I began to climb the tall hill behind our house, a wonderful little intact jungle in the middle of the neighborhood (in fact, it was only reforested from a coffee and banana plantation in the 1950s, but the Atlantic Rainforest recovers so quickly in Brazil that parts of the jungle seem virgin).  We have hiked the steep trail before, but always when Helena was so little that we had to put all of our effort into not falling off the rocks into the mud.  This time was different: she was stable enough on her feet that she could look at things.

At first, Helena wanted to experiment with gravity: if she threw a rock down the path, how far would it go?  And a leaf?  A stick?  What about a flat rock?  As she began to pull too many leaves from the bushes, however, I tried to explain why plants need their leaves, with a brief digression into photosynthesis and the sun.  Who knows how much Helena understood, but when we explain a "no" to her, she generally goes along with us (an unexplained rule, on the other hand, will inevitably be broken!), and this was no exception: she stopped pulling the leaves from the plant.

The first biology lesson went so well that I took advantage of a rest break to talk about water, and we traced the roots of trees as they went to the trunks of the trees, and then looked at how each tree was different from the others.  From time to time (and much to my pride) she often said "pretty cool," her favorite term of approbation.

Now, I don't have any illusions about Helena remembering anything about ecology from the walk up the mountain.  Much like so many of my talks about philosophy during her first year of life, the content wasn't the point at all.  If there is any lesson I wanted to pass on, it was to pay attention to nature, to look carefully at it.

As we walked down the steep slope, she wasn't content simply to go home.  She needed to stop at every fallen seed or fruit on the ground, and then either pry it open or ask me to break it open with a rock.  Her curiosity has always run rampant: I didn't teach that.  But she had found some new things to pay attention to, to look at carefully.

Pretty cool.

Happy Second Birthday!

 

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose?

We're back in Brazil, and though 36 hours or traveling with a little girl will never be easy, the trip was much better than we had feared... and in the end, completely worth it when I biked down to the beach today with Helena and saw her joy as she ran through the sand and put her toes in the waves.  She's been very happy to be back: not just the sea, but also her swing in the back yard, the flowers, the lemons and passion fruit falling off the trees, the grass under her feet.  She knows, somehow, that she has come back to someplace she loves (not that she doesn't love Santa Fe -- we saw the same thing when we got there four months ago).

Helena and the ocean made me think about what it means to repeat, to come back.  It seems like such a simple thing, the "there and back again" that stands as the subtitle to the Hobbit... but one soon learns that the "back" is not the same as what we left.  Even if it hasn't changed at all, we have changed, so how we relate to it is different.  The beach, for instance: while Helena is now a little more scared of the water than she was when we left (she felt cold water in the creeks of New Mexico and in the ocean off Santa Monica), but she's much more capable of handling herself in it.

Gilles Deleuze wrote a whole book about these issues of repeating and difference, and his conclusions were about the opposite of what anyone expects.  According to him, repeating is always different (as I mentioned above), but different things are always the same: there is the same amount of difference between them, so that's the real repetition.  A brilliant but at the same time extremely silly conclusion (from a philosopher not known for his silliness), one more obvious than it sounds.  To return to the Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins is so different when he comes back from the Lonely Mountain, that the Shire itself will never be the same again: not to him, but also not to anyone else.

Another line from a favorite adolescent fantasy novel also came into my head as I watched Helena play at the edge of the ocean, Ursula LeGuin's description of the ocean of EarthSea: "Only the ever-changing is unchanging."  At 13, I thought the epigram powerful, profound... but I wonder.  Perhaps over eternity, the idea may be true: each wave moves only a little differently from the last one, and in the end, all of the waves turn into the same thing, smoothed out by a kind of transcendent static.  But in human terms (or baby terms), that isn't true at all.  Our beach is not the same as the one we left: a storm came and flattened the berm, making the waves calmer and the sea safer.  Helena will be able to swim there now, but we would never have allowed her to do so four months ago.  The ever-changing does, in fact, change.

So in the end, contrary to the pretentious cliché (Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose), the sea changes, the baby changes, the world changes.  A cynical adult may fail to see these changes, but even as a baby "returns home", she can't help but notice.

(the pictures are still from the US; we haven't had time to take any here yet)

Easter

Christmas is relatively easy to explain to a baby: when mean people came from another country to take away the land of people who had lived there for thousands of years, the people who lived on the land dreamed of someone who would save them from the bad people.  One night, they thought that this great revolutionary leader had been born, so everyone celebrated and gave presents to the baby who was going to free them from the Romans.

Yesterday, as Helena and I rode to the playground, we saw children processing through Santa Fe, carrying a cross toward the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Guadalupe.  "Girls and boys," she said.  "Doing what?"  And if Christmas is easy to explain, Easter is a whole lot harder.  Oppression and Salvation can be explained through "mean people" and "freedom", concepts that a baby understands.  But the idea that this great leader failed in liberating Israel, that he never planned on making a violent revolution like Simon (the Zealot) and Judas (Iscariot, or Sicarius; the Zealots and the Sicarii were the two most violent (almost terroristic) groups in Judea at the time) had wanted, that he was convicted and nailed onto a cross...  I had no hope of explaining any of these things to Helena Iara.  I tried, of course, but I could tell that she didn't understand.

Even harder to explain, for a baby who doesn't know what death means, is that Jesus died and was resurrected, and that the "failure" of his movement actually gave it more power, and turned it into a universal movement for liberation, and not just a limited anti-colonial struggle of Israelites against the Romans.  Let alone the way that the crucifixion of Jesus leads to a critique of the idea of sacrifice and the incarnation of God-as-Holy spirit in the community struggling for justice and freedom.

As we rode the bike through downtown, Helena seemed to have turned me off, but her final words as we approached the park seemed to suggest that she understood at least something of Easter.  "Green," she said.  "Playground.  Play!"

It's spring, and time to play in the green grass with friends.  That's not a bad summary of the point of the whole Christian project.

The mouth!

Last night, as we prepared Helena Iara for bed, I began to read one of her favorite books, Little Kitten.  The book is compelling not because of the plot, but because there is a little kitten puppet that sticks its head through a hole in each page, and Helena loves to see it move; and because Helena is teething, as Rita tried to brush Helena's teeth, I needed all of the distraction possible from the book, so the kitten was dancing all over the place.

At one point, as I tried to hold Helena with one hand and turn the page with the other, I simply wasn't dextrous enough to do it, so I pulled the book and puppet close to my face and turned the page with my mouth.  As anyone who works on bikes (or other machines, I suppose) knows, the mouth is a good third hand from time to time... but it seems Helena didn't know that.  She thought that turning pages with you mouth was the funniest thing she had ever seen.  "More, more," she laughed, almost falling off my lap.  "Do it again!"  For the next ten minutes, as long as I turned pages with my mouth, Helena couldn't stop her guffaws.

In Deleuze and Guatari's famous book on Kafka, the put a lot of attention into the role of the mouth in the Czech novelist's strange stories, focusing especially on the fact that one can either eat or talk, but never both.  Things go in and out of the mouth, but not at the same time (the New Testament makes a similar point when Peter doubts if he should eat food with gentiles; the conclusion is that "what comes out of a mouth sullies a man, not what goes into it.").

The mouth is one of those between-places that kids find so interesting: it's the path between the inside and the outside, the air and the body.  The little kitten in the book is rather similar: it also moves in and out of a hole in the book, being both inside the pages and outside them, marking the book as both a book and a toy, or between both of them.  But then, on top of that, I started to use the mouth as it certainly should not be used: as if it were a hand and not an orifice.  At least in Freudian terms, we begin to understand why it was so funny.

And on top of that, I bet I just looked pretty ridiculous.

A Knight at Night

Last evening, Helena was playing with the armored knight from the Fisher Price Castle I had as a kid.  She had already put the queen and Robin Hood into an airplane (different set of toys, but the pieces fit) when I asked "Is the knight going into the airplane?"

"No," she said.  "Sleep."

"The knight?"

"Night."

All this, by the way, with such a perfect deadpan delivery that she didn't know she was telling a joke until several seconds later.  OK, she may not have known, either, but eventually we all did laugh.