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.