Doing philosophy with a baby girl

Laughter and forgetting

2012-02-13T20:13:00.000-08:00

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

2012-02-05T15:22:00.000-08:00

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

2012-02-02T19:15:00.000-08:00

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.

No, Baby, No!

2012-01-30T15:11:00.000-08:00

Helena Iara is not allowed to climb the stairs in our house alone. It's a very steep spiral, and though she has become a very good climber, we want to be sure that she doesn't fall. Several days ago, however, we forgot to close the gate at the bottom of the stair, and Helena saw the error before we did. She ran to the stairs, and then suddenly stopped. "No, baby, no!" she declared, looking at Rita. "Don't climb!" At which point she moved forward and reached for the first rungs of the stair. Fortunately, her words had warned us, and I was able to watch after her as she climbed.

We have noticed something similar in many things Helena Iara does. She first declares what she knows to be the rule, and then goes about breaking it. It can be about eating, yelling, touching the computer... she knows perfectly well what we say that she should do, but that doesn't stop her from doing what she planned in the first place.

Idealist philosophy of history posits that something similar happens with ideas and events. Governments and social groups know what they should do long before they actually begin to do it. Think about the noble principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States: democracy, equality, civil rights... but it took a good two hundred years, a couple of dozen constitutional amendments, a civil war, dozens of supreme court decisions, the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the gay rights movement, and only now are we getting anywhere near a coherence between the ideals of the United States and what is actually practiced. And, of course, in those 200 years, other ideals have changed, and on that front, the US is pretty far behind.

Something similar happens with the discourse of human rights. When the United Nations included the ideas of basic human rights in its charter -- thanks largely to Eleanor Roosevelt -- I don't think any country imagined that an ex-president of a country would be tried for crimes against humanity, as has happened with Pinochet, Serbian leaders, and African plutocrats. Had they considered such a thing, few countries would have voted for such an offense to their sovereignty. But the words were pretty; it would have been hard to justify a no vote at home. So they accepted the charter, not knowing quite what they were getting into.

Growing up is something like that. We accept the rules of our family and society "on paper" first (or more exactly, in Helena's mouth), but only later do we realize that we have to be coherent with those ideals. Babies are hardly hypocrites when they say "don't climb" and then climb. Maybe we should think that countries and social change work in a similar way.

The universal tedium of Richard Scarry

2012-01-26T20:57:00.000-08:00

Helena Iara loves Richard Scarry books. I remember loving the stories of Huckle Cat and Lowly Worm when I was a kid, too... but I have to confess that while Dr. Seuss has aged well -- which is to say, I continue to enjoy his books as I read them to Helena -- Richard Scarry now seems a complete bore. Nothing actually happens, there is little narrative, no rhyme or play with words. In fact, the book she likes so much only relates the events of a normal day, no different from the cooking and playing and driving around that we experience in our lives.

There the tedium. More interesting, I think, is what happens when kids read these sorts of stories, see their lives writ large on the pages of a book. Over the last couple of months, I have been thinking very intently about how people -- especially children -- on the margins of society conceive of knowledge. Last year, we did a major research project in Recife, looking at the causes of, and possible solutions to, violence in the favelas of that city. After four months of interviews, mapping, movie-making, and writing, the book was finally done: a toolkit for foundations and government agencies that want to reduce violence. Adriano had been the first of the four young researchers to arrive at the closing party for the project, and as he read the first pages, a look of amazement filled his eyes. "It's true," he said, almost stunned. Several more lines down the page, with even more wonder, "That's just how it is." As he continued to read, the expressions of surprise only grew.

Words about the favela too often sound like a police report: so many dead, so many arrested. Those news stories might be strictly accurate, but they aren't really true; they leave far too much out. We never see the motivations of kids who join a gang or the ethical struggles of kids who don't; the joy of a party on Saturday night or the pride of a old woman watching her grandkids play in the alley. Our research took the deep experience of living in the favela seriously, seeing it as a possible source of solutions.

Adriano had been a part of every stage of the research, and many of the theories in those pages were originally his, so the surprise didn't come from new ideas or perspectives. No, I think the real shock was that the written word could express the truth, that a description of his community could be honest to what goes on there.

"Knowledge," with the weight and importance that word implies, always seems to come from outside the favela, from teachers and books and the TV. But as Adriano read the book, he suddenly came to see that words could reflect the world, that his experiences were important, enough to justify or even demand action. For the first time, I think, he came to see what knowledge meant, and the power it could have.

Richard Scarry is the complete opposite of the experience of knowledge in the favela. Instead of seeing their lives as exceptions or spectacles, Scary shows the lives of ordinary, middle class children in the US as universal. This is how everyone, event cats and worms, lives. The implicit message to children: "Your life is universal, your particular experience counts as universal knowledge." Children from the favelas feel frightened to generalize the events of their lives into a word as big as "knowledge," but thanks to Richard Scarry, American TV programs, and other manifestations of US middle class culture as universal reference, kids here don't run into that challenge.

Now, we can easily find a solution in an attempt to universalize other experiences: Sesame Street, where a street in a mythical Harlem stands in for the universal, is an excellent example. Maybe we should write a Richard Scarry for the favela... to a certain degree, the work that Rita and I do professionally with films made by marginalized kids strives for that.

However, I think there is a real virtue in the way kids from the favela see the relation of their particular to the universal. Because they aren't convinced that everyone -- even cats and worms -- had their experience, they aren't convinced that they know. For that reason, they are less invested in their epistemological errors, more willing to change, grow, and learn. Socrates insisted that the first step in philosophy was to know that one knows nothing: people from the favela have that one down pat. At that point, perhaps we can all learn together.

And maybe I won't have to suffer through more days reading about the Cat Family going to the grocery store.

The "real" Pocoyo

2012-01-23T14:05:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, before Rita, Helena, and I got together with some friends who live here in Los Angeles, I was trying to remind her who they were. "We saw them lots there in Brazil, Helena, and then stayed in their house last year... and remember Tiago, the little boy? He was born in Spain, where the real Pocoyo is from..."

As soon as the words escaped my mouth, I heard how silly they were. Yes, the Pocoyo cartoons that Helena loves so much are, in fact, made in Spain. She often watches to them on Youtube in Castillian Spanish. But "the real Pocoyo?" I wanted to indicate something "more" than the plastic Pocoyo toy she plays with every day, but could I possibly say that the video of Pocoyo, something that exists only as the 1s and 0s of a computer program, is any more "real" than the plastic and rubber Pocoyo she was playing with?

In the late 1980s, the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard made quite a splash on the academic scene with his idea of the simulacrum, defined as "the copy for which there is no original." He saw this phenomenon everywhere in postmodern culture, from the fake culture of Disney's Epcot to Hollywood movies, but it seems that a plastic doll representing an electronic cartoon, where there was never even a "real" drawing of Pocoyo, stands at the peak of the pyramid of simulacra. When we think of the intentionally decontextualized world in which Pocoyo lives, where the background is pure white most of the time, it becomes even harder to imagine an original of anything having to do with the character.

For all of the nihilism of Baudrillard and his followers, a heavy tone of moralism always accompanied their talk of simulation and simulacra: it was as if they said, "This is how the world is now, but it wasn't always this bad." After all, the basis for most Western philosophy is Plato's theory of the forms, some original "real," of which all of the things we see in our world are nothing but copies. Plato condemned art because it was a copy of the things of the world, and as such, really only a copy of a copy, derivative to the second level.

Pocoyo, however, seems to steal the fire from the moralizing postmodernists. Pocoyo isn't a copy of a real boy, and his world is not a copy of ours. Certainly there are some references to things that we know, but we don't judge Pocoyo by whether it is true to reality or not. It's not about representation at all. It's about fun. About play. And though we may play-act, though children may pretend to be something when they play, we don't principally judge a soccer game or play with dolls by whether it "truly represents the world." We can call it good or bad, beautiful or ugly, but never true or false. Play escapes the logic of the real and of truth. It's something else entirely.

And the "real Pocoyo?" Who cares. What matters is how Helena makes her doll run around, take baths, cook, slide down the couch. It's about play, not about truth.

Sculptures

2012-01-19T08:38:00.000-08:00

We're in Los Angeles right now: Rita got some money from the Brazilian government to study how indigenous children in the Amazon produce and understand music, which gives her the opportunity to do some research with a professor at UCLA. And gives me a chance to go and find fun things to do with Helena Iara in an unknown city.

Yesterday, as Rita was in class, Helena and I walked the UCLA campus: the Bruin walk, the buildings built to look like something out of Milan, and Helena's great love, the tall flight of stair between the two levels of the Quad. For the second time, she made it up the whole way. And then, as we wandered on, we found the campus sculpture garden, full of early and mid-century bronzes by Arp, Maliol, Rodin, and a bunch of artists I had never heard of.

A larger than life nude stands in the center of the garden, a relatively realistic young bather. At the moment, Helena is very excited about showers, so she imitated the motions of washing her hair, but then touched the statue's foot. "She's cold," Helena said. "[Put on] clothes." Next, she addressed herself directly to the statue: "Tired. Sit, sit." There was no response, so Helena returned to touching the feet. "Beautiful," she concluded, and moved on to the next.

The second nude was reclining, which Helena pointed out first. "Lying down." She then found each of the parts of the body, not an easy thing on the barely representative sculpture, but Helena enjoyed the challenge of figuring out what was head and hair and legs and feet. She didn't stay long, though. "Ugly," she declared.

A piece by Arp that looked rather like excreted bronze also won a fast "ugly," but a thin, constructivist statue called "Mother and Child," where I could find neither, got smiles and a review of "beautiful," along with several minutes of touching and circling. She loved a modernist interpretation of a flower, because she found that when she rapped it with her knuckles, it rang with a pure tone. Plus, she could climb around and under it.

Back to the nudes. The next one was just a bust, without arms and head: just the chest and then a flowing base to represent a dress. This one drew Helena's attention directly. "Breast," she said. "Nipple." I looked at Helena questioningly. "Yummy." The she touched the base and said approvingly, "skirt." Finally, though, she gave her evaluation: "Ugly."

"Why?"

"No head."

"Maybe that wasn't what the artist wanted to show." She pondered, and I looked at the title. "It's called Victory," I said, and prepared to tell her about the Winged Victory of Samothrace, upon which the statue was surely based.

"Victory?" Helena interrupted me. "No."

And with that, she walked on to the next sculpture.

I'll take care of you

2012-01-16T19:48:00.000-08:00

One of Helena's favorite Christmas presents was a book by Richard Scarry, whom I also remember loving when I was a kid. Toward the end of the book, the Cat Family is reading nursery rhymes, of which one is the encomium on sexual assault,

"Georgie Porgie, puddin' and pie,

Kissed the girls and made them cry.

When the boys came out to play,

Georgie Porgie ran away."

The portrait shows two girl cats by the side of a big boy cat, both of the girls crying as the boy tries to kiss them.

Yesterday, Helena began to talk to the girl cats: "Não chora, Bebê cuida." (Don't cry, the baby (i.e., I) will care for you). I was very excited to see empathy spring forth at such a young age. Then, today, she began to point her finger at the boy cat: "No, no, no!" Empathy had moved on very quickly to a sense of justice, or at least of prevention.

At the end of the 18th century, moral philosophy saw an important debate between Emmanuel Kant and the Scottish Enlightenment. For the Scots (people like Thomas Reed, but also the young Adam Smith), moral feelings needed be be culled and trained: empathy and a sense of justice might be natural in many people, but they were like small, weak plants in the jungle, and people needed to learn how to give them food and light so they could grow. That way, our "natural" dispositions (in fact, trained dispositions) would direct us to act for the good. Kant, in contrast, declared that any act based on a natural disposition, or in fact on any motivation other than duty, could not be called moral.

Now, when I was a Freshman in college, I loved Kant's moral theory. It was hard, challenging, and logically rigorous, something that would set the moral people apart from the chaff. As I've grown up, I have to say I'm much more convinced by Thomas Reed and his friends: though they may lack the logical and moral rigor of Kant's German thought, their ideas seem to bring more good into the world.

Why does any of this matter? Because Helena is beginning to develop those moral seeds: the care for others who suffer (even if they are crying cats in a book), a sense of empathy for children who have lost their mothers, a rejection of the abuse of power in Georgie Porgie. Kant would insist that there is no virtue in these young sprouts of ethics: if she is to be a good person, Helena must learn to defend the girls against Georgie because it is against the moral law exposed by our reason... not because she feels sorry for them. Honestly, I think Rita, who sits with Helena and the book and talks her through the images, is a much wiser philosopher than Kant here. As she talks about the girls and their tears, she trains Helena's sentiments to be just. And that training, soon to become instinct, is better than any moral law out there.

Sacrifice

2012-01-07T09:44:00.000-08:00

A couple of nights ago, during dinner with some friends, Helena wasn't interested in eating. She wanted to get on the floor, chase the cats, and explore a new house, and not just eat, which is something she could do anywhere. Our collective solution? We fed her doll first, and then passed the doll's food on to Helena. By the end of the meal, she had eaten quite well.

Though most people know about the role that animal sacrifice plays in most religions, I never spent much time thinking about who would really eat the goat or bull that was killed "for god." They burnt to whole thing, right? There's all of that language in the Old Testament about how Yahweh loves the smell of meat sacrificed to him, and Greek myths have the same sort of language. So it was quite a surprise, when I studied classical history, to find out that the meat from a sacrifice was not, in fact, sacrificed. People ate it: different people according to the values of different cultures (the Hebrews gave it to the poor and landless, the priests ate it in many Phoenician cults, the community as a whole in the worship of many Greek gods), but this meet sacrificed to the gods was really used for parties among flesh and blood people.

What doe these stories have to do with each other? Helena had to "give" her food to her doll before she would eat it herself. The Greeks "gave" their meat to the gods before they ate it. Though the parallel isn't exact, it seems to at least merit some thinking-through.

Now, it seems that the logic of sacrifice in antiquity was that the gods, and not people deserved the best food. They were, after all, gods. But when the gods didn't eat the food, well, someone had too, so it might as well be the people. The word "sacrifice" come from the Latin "to make holy," but the real process was rather the inverse: by offering the food to the gods, people de-sacralized, reduced its importance enough that they felt themselves worthy to eat good food like a bull. In the same way that we cook food as a way to take it out of the realm of nature and make it part of culture, sacrificing the animal to the gods paradoxically made it available for human consumption.

Might Helena have been doing something similar? We were at the home of other adults, eating adult food out of adult place-settings. By giving the food to her baby, might she have been "de-adulting" it, bringing it into the world of play and childhood? Then, since the doll couldn't possibly eat the food, it became open to her eating.

Maybe. Or maybe kids just like to play with their food.

Art

2012-01-03T19:44:00.000-08:00

Helena has become an artist. In the last several months, she has come to love painting, drawing, crayons... Anything that can make marks on paper and on herself. I won't say much as an art critic in this post, but I rather like two of her most recent posts.

Before Helena drew the picture on the left, she said "coruja," or owl, and there is something strikingly owl-like in the piece. I drew the left eye to bring out the face, but the rest of it is all hers.

Then, today, when she wanted to show the drawing to her aunt over Skype, I asked her again what it was. "Coruja." She remembers very well what she has drawn.

The second artwork doesn't seem to be representational; at least Helena won't tell me if it is a portrait of anything. But I like the use of color and space. She seems to have a talent for art that I never had.

Picasso famously said that "I spent my entire career trying to learn how to paint like a child." There may be something to it...

The portrait of Helena is by my brother. For more of his work, http://www.wildimagephoto.com/journal/

Big Fear

2011-12-17T10:28:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned a couple of blogs ago, Helena is trying to figure out the feeling of fear. When we got back to the United States last week, she found something else to fear: her Pampers. There is no Sesame Street in Brazil, so she never had the chance to see Elmo and the Cookie Monster and the Count; her first interaction with these monsters (because, cuddly as the muppets are, they are still strange critters) comes in the very intimate space of her underpants.

Over the last couple of days, she has resolved the conflict linguistically. Instead of saying "medo" (fear) when she sees the muppets on her diapers, she says "medão," or "big fear." And strangely, "big fear" inspires more laughs than terror.

Has Helena discovered irony? Maybe. I think it's more likely that she has found that words influence the things they describe. The book that made Helena think about fear for the first time, "Little Yellow Riding Hood" by Chico Buarque, ends with the girl able to face the wolf when she discovers that by inverting wolf (lobo) she gets a cake (bolo). We have a naïve sense that words simple describe the world, but in fact they make it: the idea from the Gospel of John than "in the beginning was the word" may sound strange to modern scientific ears, but it isn't far off.

I remember a debate in Hebrew class, years ago, about the etymology of the noun D-B-R, which means both thing and word. In the European tradition, we distinguish strongly between words and things, but I think there is something in the Hebrew assimilation of the two seemingly disparate elements. And I think that Helena is coming to learn that a word is a thing that can be played with, modified, changed, little different that putting clothes on her baby dolls. And as she clothes her words in new sounds and new adjectives, they start to change the things to which they refer. Fear isn't as heavy when it is "big fear", and a lobo isn't so dangerous when you realize it's just a backward bolo/cake.

Please?

2011-12-12T14:06:00.000-08:00

Helena: I want, I want [that].
Kurt: What's the magic word?
Helena: "Magic."

Pocoyó!

2011-12-09T15:08:00.000-08:00

Most video for little kids bores me to tears. I can't imagine watching Dora or Teletubbies day after day with Helena. But the Spanish show Pocoyó -- she loves it, and it even makes me think. Like a Pixar movie for the under-2 set. Just one example:

The short film is, I think, the best example I have ever seen of the distinction that Jacques Lacan makes between the speaking and spoken subject... and quite frankly, it's much more fun to watch Pocoyó and Pato explain it than reading any number of academic commentators on the subject.

Now, a lot of left wing theory in the 1950s and 1960s was very pessimistic about the possibilities of human agency. People like Louis Althusser and the young Foucault saw the subject (the actor, the person who does something) in its etymological sense, as one who has been subjected (literally, "thrown under"); one is, after all, the "subject of the king" or of a country. A good bit of the philosophy of that era focusses on all of the different external forces that structure our subjectivity: the way that language makes us see the world as we do, or how gender and power and monetary differences limit how we dream or what we think we are capable of. Though useful as a critique of ideology, it's a deeply pessimistic philosophy, and I think may lie at the root of the current fiasco of the European and American Left.

If we think about these ideas in terms of Pocoyó, it's the first couple of minutes of "Wackily ever after", when the narrator tries to control the story (and the actors) by means of his voice: "Ely will do this," "Pato is the crazy villain..." The voice is making explicit a kind of "should"that all of us feel: we all should strive for success, which means being a lawyer or an i-banker (even if most of them aren't very happy). Clothes have this power, too: Pocoyó gets the crown, and so will be the prince, while the top hat and cape make Pato the heavy. Lacan, however, focusses on the aspect of speech: that's why he talked about the spoken subject, the subject created by the voice of the narrator, the other, or power.

But Lacan opens another door: the speaking subject. Pocoyó and his friends are not about to let the narrator tell a classic (read: boring!) story about princes and princesses and evil monsters. Ely wants to be a princess, but the kind of princess who lifts weights and rides a scooter (vide Fiona, in Shrek). Pato doesn't really want to be the villain: he wants to play and to water the flowers. Pocoyó isn't going to duel his friend Sleepy Bird, so he invites him to dinner. The play of children, their resistance to the voice of the narrator, takes the story in new directions, makes the kids speaking subjects as well as spoken ones.

No one really controls everything about his or her own agency: our parents and culture and genes and who know what else are strong influences on what we think and do. But I think that subjectivity -- for Pocoyó, for Helena, for me -- comes at the intersection of the voice of the narrator and the rebellious play of a child. Surfing back and forth between those two is what makes us... well, us.

The prodigal daughter

2011-12-05T03:07:00.000-08:00

Helena has never been a difficult baby. Rita and I hear stories from other parents that make us wince, of sleepless months and temper tantrums and endless crying, and we can only thank whatever combination of genetics and health care and parenting that has kept us free of such challenges. But no baby is easy: they all make us suffer in countless small -- and several large -- ways.

I'm not quite sure why I have been thinking of New Testament parables recently, but the Prodigal Son has been on my mind. Most of us know the story from church, Sunday school, or pop culture: the vagabond son disobeys his father, leaves home, spends all his money on worthless things, and then, finally, comes home. The father is so happy that he slays the fatted calf and throws a huge party to celebrate; the older son, who has always stayed with his father, obeyed the old man, and helped him, arrives bitter to the party, wondering why the father would do so much for the vagabond, and nothing for the good son.

‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ (Luke 15:31-2)

Most people read the parable through that last phrase: we should forgive and ben happy when we get back something we have lost. It's not exactly a trite lesson, but I don't think it does much more than express something about how humans deal with loss.

I wonder, though, if there isn't something else going on, a reason that that father loves the prodigal son more than the perfect one. As anyone who has ever been in love knows, we like people because of their virtues, but we love them because of their faults, their tics, their strange neuroses. I'm not sure that it's different for children. Do I love Helena because she's smart and funny and cute? Sure, that helps. But I think I really love her because I've had to rock her to sleep when she has a terrible colic at 3AM, because she constantly disobeys and wants to climb the stairs we tell her are dangerous, because if there are olives on the table, she won't eat anything else... It's the glitches and the errors that make love dawn on us.

Slavoj Zizek makes a whole theological structure out of this idea, suggesting that if we love people for their lacks and sins, it means that God must be lacking, essentially broken. God is love, after all. And in fact, I think that the process by which I child comes to love his or her parents is a very strange one, in which she begins loving them because of their omnipotence and the protection they offer her, but (sometime in the teenage years, or later) she has to learn that loving them means understanding and loving their faults.

I don't want Helena to disobey, climb the stairs -- let alone leave home, spend all the money, and do everything else the prodigal son did -- but I know I'll love her even if she does.

Fear

2011-12-03T02:48:00.000-08:00

Helena is afraid. Or more accurately, she tells us she is afraid. She certainly doesn't fear the things she should, like climbing down the stairs alone or falling into deep water at the lake, but from time to time the movement of shadows under a tree or the sight of a leaf that looks like a spider will inspire her to say, "fear," and shy away.

There is a wonderful passage in the Philosophical Investigations, where Wittgenstein addresses the analytic philosophers of his day (heirs of Hume and other radical empiricists), who insisted that because we cannot feel the pain of other people, we can't know that what they call pain is the same as what I can pain. "Just try for a moment," Wittgetstein ironizes, "to think that someone is not in pain when they wince in front of you." Pain is not, in fact, a personal thing contained only in my body; it is social. We know that other people are in pain and, as Bill Clinton famously said, we actually feel that pain.

I think I understand how a baby comes to understand what "pain" means, seeing how others react when a hammer falls on their feet, and then feeling the same thing. Fear, though, strikes me as something different, perhaps because it is much less quotidian: Rita and I don't feel fear on a daily basis. Jaguars and FBI agents don't surround the house to inspire such feelings so that Helena would know the social element of fear.

She started to talk about fear after we read Little Yellow Riding Hood, a fantastic book by the Brazilian poet and musician Chico Buarque, to her. The story is about a little girl who is afraid all the time, and of everything... but especially of the big bad wolf, though she has never seen the beast, and it probably only exists in the mountains of Germany. But because she fears the wolf so much, one day she conjures it up, and it really appears... and the reality is, of course, no where near as bad as her fears.

There's an easy Foucauldian lesson here: just as all prohibition actually inspires the desire to break the law, a book that tries to calm fears may actually inspire them. But I don't think that's what is really going on. I think the book taught Helena that fear is an important category of human (or childhood) existence, so she has to figure it out. And since she doesn't have frightened adults around her on a regular basis, she has to do experiments.

Human feelings are confused and diverse. "Fear" isn't so much a description of any singular sensation, as it is an umbrella under which we put lots of different feelings. So Helena tries something out: she's confused by the play of shadows, and that messes with something in her belly; she calls it fear. Rita and I say, "No, there's nothing to be afraid of," so she sets that category aside as a failed experiment. "Fear," she says when she sees something that looks like a snake, and I say, "Don't worry, that's not a snake." She reads that as, "you don't need to be afraid right now," but also as "Snakes are something that should cause fear." And gradually, she learns how people use words to describe complicated emotions.

I just hope it's a while before she needs to understand "anxiety" and those other heavy words!

I and me

2011-11-17T13:39:00.000-08:00

Helena Iara learned to say "me a few weeks ago; she's become very clear in saying what is "for me" and "for you," "for Mommy" and "for Daddy." What she hasn't said, however, is the word "I". In grammatical terms, she learned the first person accusative before the nominative; in philosophy, she learned to see herself as an object before she could see herself as a subject.

"Know thyself": from the first Socratic dialogues on, that has been the commandment of western philosophy: I must know myself: which means that I occupy both the subjective and the objective position, standing outside of myself to be both the knower and the thing known. I don't, however, think that babies learn about themselves this way: before being able to know themselves as themselves, they know how others see them, how others act on them.

I've been thinking recently, for instance, in a piece of contemporary child-rearing advice from the United States: when a child does well on a test or another academic endeavor, we shouldn't compliment her as being "smart" but as "working hard" or "being dedicated." The idea, I think, is that intelligence is innate, but children develop persistence and dedication, so parents should focus on the virtue that can be trained and improved.

The problem is partly that intelligence isn't innate, but largely defined by others; I've worked with kids living on the street, forever defined as retarded in their school records, whose minds challenges me much more than any of my colleagues from grad school at Harvard. Even more important, however, is others seeing you as smart: once you have that label, people listen to you more, they laugh at your jokes when you're a kid, they push you into intellectual pursuits, they read your words with more care. And in the process, the smart kid actually becomes smarter; she trains her mind to do well what people consider to be smart. (There is, by the way, pretty decent evidence that the climbing IQ scores (30 points higher across the scale since 1900) aren't as much about changes in the test, as they are about urbanization and modernity. Our lives have taught us to think in new ways, ways that are rewarded by the test. If IQ tests measured ability to predict weather or sense when a mountain lion might attack you, we'd have dropped even more that we gained.)

Those last paragraphs are the practical upshot of the fact that a baby knows herself as others know her: we have to be very careful how we know her. But there is also a strange philosophical conclusion to this process: even as we become older, we still have to know ourselves through some metaphor of the same process. I try to look at myself through other eyes, see myself as others see me. Rita and I see Helena, and define her in that process, but she also sees us. For instance, I have always considered myself a good cook, but Helena doesn't much like the food I prepare. She prefers Rita's. I find myself thinking of myself in different ways, trusting myself less in the kitchen. At the same time, she finds me much more reliable and trustworthy than I thought I would be with a baby. I always thought I would drop her, but since she never expressed fear that I would, I also came to trust myself.

In the end, that old Socratic riff robbed from the Delphic oracle may still hold, but we have to recognize that the only real way to know myself, is to become the other who knows me.

The new tone of the blog

2011-11-14T13:00:00.000-08:00

For the first year that I wrote this blog, Helena couldn't talk. Yes, she could opine, respond, look at me with questions and love and anger... but when it came to talking, communications were a one-way street. And what she really loved was hearing my voice. Talking about philosophy was a great way to keep that voice going, to keep her interested, hearing English, looking into my eyes.

Truth is, though, that now that Helena is talking and walking, she has made it clear that she'd rather hear stories, sing songs (well, she contributes a word or two, and then expects me and Rita to continue the song, but she makes it clear what she wants), and to play word games of repetition and made up sounds. It's great fun, and just as intellectually challenging as talking about Lacan or Kristeva... but it doesn't make for great blogging. It's more a kind of Dada and Surrealism parenting, which, as we all know, may be fun art to produce, but which, unless it is as great as Magritte or Duchamps, can be painful to see. I haven't wanted to put anyone through a repetition of those conversations.

For the next couple of months, I'm going to try something new: not narrating the content of my conversations with Helena, but trying to relate what I think is going on in her head, to try to use intellectual tools to try to understand her growing perspective on the world. Clearly, I'll be projecting my ideas on her, based on the small evidence she can provide with her vocabulary. None the less, it should be an interesting experiment.

Please let me know what you think, so I can make these blogs interesting to more people than just me.

MommyDaddyBaby

2011-11-12T07:54:00.000-08:00

Helena has a way to say "family": MamãePapaiBebê, all said together as one word. Since she is just working on the idea of plurals (her three dolls are "bebês", the only plural she uses), it isn't strange that collective nouns like family express concepts that are still difficult for her... but her word brings up the basic question of how collective nouns are possible at all.

The history of metaphysics spent a lot of time on an even simpler question, that of the noun itself. If we think about, for instance, the birds that flit outside of Helena's window, she'll she sparrows and canaries, azure crows, bem-te-vis, and loads of songbirds... but also arancuás, which look like chickens and jump from tree to tree like monkeys. And in the marshes on the way to the beach, she sees ibis and herons wading. Then frigate birds and gulls high above... and how does she know to call all of these animals "birds"? An amazing process of categorization is going on here.

Bertrand Russell famously insisted that the only real "proper nouns" were "this" and "that", because even to say that John in the morning is John in the afternoon, is really giving the same name to a person who has changed. (Borges made a great story out of the idea, Funes el Memorioso) The point is, that seeing the sameness of things around us isn't as simple as we feel it is: in fact, the mind is involved in a major effort of organizing and categorizing a waterfall of colors and sounds that come through the senses, trying to make them meaningful and comprehensible.

Fortunately, babies don't get lost in that kind of speculative claptrap, and Helena isn't worried about why nouns work. She just uses them. However, the next step of generalization, that of collective nouns (family as a group of people, forest as a group of trees), still stands a little beyond her. MamãePapaiBebê works as a list instead of a collective, something that might work for small groups like out family. But when Rita was a girl, with seven brothers and sisters, as well and Mom and Dad and a couple of uncles and aunts living in the house, I doubt that she could have described family with a list. It just gets too long and complicated, like saying "aspen, pine, lodgepole, grass, aspen, bear, deer, pine (and one and on)" instead of saying "forest."

It's interesting to see how watching a baby learn language, clarifies old debates between Hume and Kant, Russell and Wittgenstein, which seemed so academic twenty years ago. They aren't academic at all; they're exactly what goes on in a baby's mind as she learns to speak.

Adventures in language

2011-11-10T08:35:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I took Helena to the grocery store, and as always, she was the hit of the day, with everyone staring at her, talking to her... (in fact, we may have to work hard so that she doesn't get too arrogant, given how everyone dotes on her in public.) Then, at the cashiers, we checked out and Helena said "obrigada" to the girl working the line. The girl was in a bad mood, and didn't pay attention to Helena, so Helena spoke in a louder voice, "Thanks!" The message, at least the one I understood, was "if you don't understand me in Portuguese, then let me try English!" Better, after all, to think that someone doesn't understand, than to think that they are being rude.

The point of all of this, I suppose, is that Helena has learned that language is descriptive; it's also a way to ask for what you want. But at some basic level, language is a social lubricant, a way to make contact with other human beings. And when they don't recognize that element (something common to rude cashiers and many types of analytic philosophers), Helena wants to try something else. Even if that means talking English in Brazil.

This morning, another interesting bilingual game. Helena loves to use the diminutive and the aggrandizing forms of nouns: Mãe (mother) becomes maezinha (little mommy), a rock is a pedrinha, and she sings "macaco, macaquinho, macacão" (monkey, little monkey, big monkey) to herself for hours on end. As she walked around her room this morning, looking for her stuffed alpaca ("paca, paca?"), she had to step around a number of pillows. She looked at Rita and me in the way she does when she wants us to do something, and said, "pilinho."

"Pilinho" would be the perfect diminutive form if pillow were a Portuguese word, meaning "little pillow." It isn't, of course, and Helena probably learned quickly as we laughed. But it makes me wonder how Helena distinguishes one language from another. How does she hear the difference? Know that she should speak one language to me, and another to a person she meets on the street? Honestly, I'm not sure how she figures it out, but as her language skills get better (and as we travel to the US next month, where she'll have to figure out the whole context anew), I have a lot to learn.

Rodeo

2011-09-19T10:48:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, Rita and I took Helena to a rodeo in the countryside near where Rita grew up, and though I have no profound reflections about the event, it made for some pretty good photos....

Philosophy

2011-09-10T03:54:00.000-07:00

Anyone who has read this blog for a while has probably noticed some changes in the last couple of months. I'm posting less often, and when I do, the comments are less explicitly philosophical, or at least have less to do with elaborating the ideas of individual philosophers. This change doesn't mean that I'm talking less, or less seriously with Helena Iara, but that as she grows up, interests and relationships change.

When Helena Iara was a little baby, she loved the sound of a voice: intonation, rises and falls, the sound of funny or soothing words. What mattered most to her was the fact of talk, and the joy of looking into someone's eyes; musing about the history of philosophy helped me to find things to talk about as we rocked in the hammock or walked in the deserts of Santa Fe or the jungles of Florianópolis. Philosophical reflections were really for me, a way to understand what was going on with her, to have the minimal difference of the other that allows thought to happen.

But as Helena has grown up, she now understands what I have to say, or at least a truly surprising amount of it. Her interests now drive the conversation, and though those interests aren't any less intellectual or stimulating, they don't emerge from a dialogue with Zizek or Kristeva, but with bow-wows and miows and flowers and the other exciting parts of her world.

As Helena and I began these reflections, she taught me by her presence, by what I imagined that she might be thinking. Now that she can actually tell me what is interesting to her, these lessons are different, less easy to describe in philosophical language... and frankly, more fun to have than to describe. To paraphrase Marx, "In the past, philosophies have tried to understand babies. The point, however, is to play with them."

More Mar

2011-09-04T10:29:00.000-07:00

Over the last couple of weeks, Helena Iara has developed a series of emotions that seem almost existential. She asks to see a little angel statue that she broke (the wings came off when she dropped it on the floor) and then goes, "ohhhh" and makes a sad face. "More" has become a common word, but most often referred to experiences, not things (more riding on the bicycle, more time on the beach). But the most touching existential desire is for the "Mar," a word she says many times a day, and then points to the beach.

Our house here in Brazil is on an island, and it's only a five minute bike ride to get to a spectacular beach, so I suppose that her demands for more mar aren't completely unexpected. Even so, it's striking to see this love of the sea develop. As we head downtown in the car, she knows that the bay will appear soon, and she begins to ask for it. Today on the bike, as we headed down the hill, she asked plaintively, "mar?"

It isn't simply that Helena loves the ocean, nor does she really want to get it. It's still winter here in Brazil, and though that doesn't make the sea as cold as it might be in February in Boston, only the hard core surfers and kiteboarders are out on the waves. Helena is even a little afraid of the ocean, and if the waves lap too close to her, she runs back to embrace my legs or ask to get up.

Maybe what fascinates her is what Kant called the sublime, something that is striking and attractive, but also out of control: a roaring river, a pounding waterfall, the break of waves on rocks. Though we might call it beautiful, the raging sea is something very different from the beauty of a well tended garden or an English brook where one goes punting. It attracts and frightens... not unlike a dog or the wind in the trees or being thrown into the air, other things that she loves.

We adults like to manage things. Babies seem to have a rather more healthy love and fear of beautiful things that they can't control.

Milk?

2011-08-31T16:27:00.000-07:00

Anyone have an idea of why Helena Iara laughs her head off when I say the word "Milk?"

Language(s)

2011-08-30T18:15:00.000-07:00

There are loads of differences between when I grew up and now, and I certainly don't mean to belabor them with tales of walking 10 miles through the snow on the way to school, uphill both ways. But one thing that does really strike me is how easy it has become to be a cosmopolitan baby (which I mean in the Kantian, not the fashion magazine, sense): to live across borders. Helena does that literally whenever we fly from Brazil to the US or back, but she also does it every night.

Rita is getting Helena ready for bed as I write, singing this lullaby we ran across on youtube, purely by chance:

Neither Rita nor I have learned the lyrics in Turkish very well, but we can at least do the "Dandini, Dandini" bit enough for Helena to calm down as night approaches. Helena's other favorite videos are mostly Italian, like Il Katalikammello and Il Gato Puzzilone.

I compare this to a story my mother tells about a trip she took into Cincinnati with her grandmother; both lived in small town Kentucky, and the "big city" was out of the usual. My great-grandmother saw two Mexican kids on the street speaking Spanish and said, "Wow, those kids are so smart!"

"Why do you say that?" my mother asked.

"Only two or three years old, and already speaking a foreign language."

I don't think that Helena will even grow up with the idea of "mine" as opposed to "foreign." Her world is different. How, I'm not entirely sure, but very different.

Photos of spring

2011-08-24T16:28:00.000-07:00

Playing

2011-08-12T18:05:00.000-07:00

When Helena was six or seven months old, my parents bought a Johnny Jump-Up for her; in fact, the thing is called a Sassy Seat, but the basic idea is the same: a baby sits in a harness hanging from a door frame, and jumps and swings. To me, it always looked like great fun.

Back then, Helena liked the toy. Liked it, but wasn't fascinated by it. She would sit and hang in it from time to time, enjoying swinging back and forth, but there wasn't much jumping. I put the seat away in the box that said "Made so that babies can strengthen their legs for walking and running, and improve balance and coordination."

Last week, Helena saw the Johnny Jump-Up, now stored away in her room here in Brazil, and then pointed to it. "You want to play in that?" I asked, to which she nodded enthusiastically. I set it up, she got in, and jump, jump, jump, with huge smiles on her face. Now that the toy was part its date, past the time when she needed to "strengthen her legs for waling and running," now the toy made for joyful fun.

Perhaps I'm generalizing from scant evidence (though, after all, what is this blog, if not that?), but I wonder if the story of the Johnny Jump-Up doesn't tell us something really important about play and learning. Today, in the United States at least, toys have to be for something. They teach some skill, strengthen muscles, make babies more intelligent... the whole propaganda campaigns of toy companies are now built around the pedagogical capacity of things kids once just did for fun. And it isn't just the US: I don't know how many school reform books I've read in Latin America about how kids have to "play to learn."

Here's the problem, though: the basic point of play is that it is pointless. Not that we don't have reasons or goals within the game, nor that it is senseless, but it is play exactly because it is sufficient until itself. I play because I like it, because it makes me smile; sometimes, I just play because I play. When there is a goal outside the game, it actually detracts from play: if I play soccer just so I can get a scholarship to college, it's almost like I'm breaking the rules. The pointless nature of play is one of the major points of genius of Calvin and Hobbes, especially the sport of Calvinball.

None of this is to say that play and games don't have consequences: they do. They strengthen legs and teach coordination and keep us from dying of heart disease. Soccer probably helped me get into college at Williams, made me friends at Harvard and in favelas all over Latin America... but these are all by-products. In philosophical jargon, they ensue, but they cannot be pursued. The moment these things become the point of play, the goal of the game, then the game is no longer self-sufficient, no longer complete... no longer fun.

When Helena started to play in the Johnny Jump-Up, she loved it because now she was competent in balance and strength, because she knows how to run and jump. She loved to play in it because she no longer needed it.

There's something in this experience to teach me about my work, too. When any of us in the non-profit world write a proposal for funding, we have to say what we're going to do and what the results will be. Not a bad exercise; it makes us think and plan. But this year, I did a major evaluation of Shine a Light's work over the last decade, and it's fascinating to see that we did most of what we proposed... but of the real impact on kids' lives, on public policy, on the organizations we worked with, we didn't play for any of it. It ensued as a by-product, a by-product that turned out to me more important than anything we had planned for.

I like to think that education should always be like that. There are plans, but in the end, the lessons will surprise everyone, even the educator.

"Where's her mommy?"

2011-08-05T17:53:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago, Helena Iara and I were playing in the living room, when she found a tiny rag doll. It's a very simple thing, just arms and legs and head and eyes, and Rita bought it when we were in Chiapas, Mexico, five or six years ago. But what matters to the story here is that the baby is part of a pair: there is also a mommy doll, and they are always together (they were first sewn together, but as happens with curious babies, Helena seems to have picked them apart).

So what did Helena do, upon finding the doll? A worried expression came over her face, and she began to say "Mommy? Mommy?" but not with the sort of voice she uses to call Rita. She walked around the room, looking in the toy box, on the sofa, other places where the mommy doll might be. She only came to smile again when she found the other doll.

Who knows how many ethical systems philosophers have thought up over the thousands of years since Aristotle talked about finding virtue in the middle between two extremes. Kant and the duty to the moral law, Mill's utility, Levinas and the face... But I'd put a good bet on the first step of any ethical system being empathy, feeling for a baby who has lost his mommy. Maybe both the baby and the mommy are just cloth, but it means something.

Boots

2011-07-31T06:55:00.000-07:00

"Bota bota," Helena Iara said this morning as she woke up, and then pointed to the door, as she does when she want to leave the room and go out into the world. A simple event in the life of a little girl, but as I walked through the jungle this morning, climbing the little mountain behind our house, it occurred to me that this little exchange says something very important about language and meaning.

There's an important back-story here: about three months ago, Rita bought Helena a pair of boots. Helena loved to wear them, but she also loved (and still loves) to say the word "bota," boot. Soon, she began to use that word to refer to lots of other things: shoes and sandals, soon even feet, the paws of a stuffed lion, or the hairy pods of a cockroach in one of her children's books. This is a process that linguists call semantic overreach: kids learn a word and begin to apply it to everything that sort of fits the category, until they learn to shave off the extraneous meanings and get to something closer to the way other people use words. The most common example is that a "doggie" or "bow-wow" can refer to anything with hair, anything with four feet, anything that barks or growls... until Mom and Dad explain that "dog" is a much more limited concept.

Lots of Helena's words work like this. "Up" (which she says in English) means "lift me up" as well as the direction up, and it also the way she refers to the teeter-totter in the park. "Mana", a mis-speaking of banana, also means any other fruit she likes, from guavas to mangos (apples, strangely enough, get their own word). And the most interesting case is "bola" (ball), which started out meaning ball and then moved on to round fruit. As she learned that oranges and mandarins are not, in fact, balls, she began to push the meaning of "bola" in new directions: round ceramic flower-pots made sense, but then "bola" moved on to mean other things that are fun to do: dolls and cars and even her swing win cries of "bola." Then, "bola" moved on to mean "cake" and "waffle", because the word for those things in Portuguese is "bolo" (o instead of a, but maybe she can't hear the difference), and though she knows that a cake is different from a ball, she likes both of them. By now, "bola" has become a fascinating semantic tangle, meaning almost anything that Helena likes a lot.

Which brings us back to "bota", and then pointing to the door. "Bota," we've come to learn, doesn't just mean footwear. It also means "walking". Then from walking, she extended "bota" to mean going outside and seeing the world (her favorite activity), and perhaps even the abstract concept of freedom (she'll sometimes say "bota" as she pulls her hand out of mine or Rita as we try to help/control her). So as she woke this morning and said "bota", she didn't just mean, "put my shoes on," but also "and then let's go out in the garden and look at flowers and run around and don't think that I'll hold your hand the whole time, either!" Which is, by the way, what she and Rita are doing as I write this blog.

When linguists and philosophers of language distinguish between denotation (the dictionary definition of a word ) and connotation (the associations that spring to mind because of the word), valuing the first, and saying that connotations are derivative and mushy and not at all serious. But a baby's use of language (if Helena is an example) seems to say exactly the opposite: connotation comes first. "Boot" means freedom before the word is cut down and shaved into meaning just "footwear that covers the ankles."

So bota bota. I'm off for a walk.

Why words?

2011-07-27T19:15:00.000-07:00

Today, as Helena and I walked to the beach, she bow-wowed at every dog we saw, meowed at every cat, and even tried a neigh at the horse tied up in the wetlands by the dunes. She makes the same sounds when she sees animals in her picture books: a couple of posts ago, I suggested that she is naming the animals in a kind of onomotopeia, but today as she and I talked, I reconsidered.

One of Helena's favorite videos right now is a Italian song about the sounds animals make: Il croccodrillo como fa?, and she loves another video that just shows animals and the sounds they make... What's interesting, though, is to watch how she gets scared at the sound of certain animals: yes, the crocodile, but also the cicada and the certain birds. And as she and I talked as we walked to the beach today, I realized that (at least in the videos), she never gets scared by the animals whose sounds she knows how to make.

In the history of the West, at least since the Greeks, the role of language is to represent: words refer to things, and we judge their truth based on whether or not they reflect what's there in the world truly. And though it might seem that Helena uses "bow-wow" to refer to a dog, honestly I don't think that's what she is doing. I think there is something much more complicated and interesting going on here.

According to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, while European epistemology (the science of how we know what we know) is based on ideas of reference and signification, Amazonian Indians see truth not as representation, but as a shift in perspective. The shaman doesn't know the jaguar by studying it from outside, but by learning to look through the eyes of the jaguar. One of the techniques that Amazonian shamans use to see through the eyes of the other is sound: one tribe will "steal" the songs of another and then sing them to try to understand the perspective of their enemy (in Araweté, strikingly, the word for "enemy" literally translates as "future music".).

Let's add another element here: understanding is one way to overcome our fear. Just giving a thing a name can help, but the better we understand the motivations, the experience, the perspective of what frightens us, the less we fear it.

I wonder, then, if Helena Iara making the sound of animals that scare her, isn't living out the Guaraní heritage of her middle name. Helena used to be fascinated and terrified by dogs, but since she has learned to say "bow-wow," both naming them and putting their voice in her mouth, the terror has subsided. She makes a sound, incarnates their perspective (even if in a very superficial way), and comes to fear them less.

If she's really doing this, she's pretty darn clever.

Almost...

2011-07-25T15:38:00.000-07:00

This morning, as Helena and I rocked in the hammock, looking out on the jungle, she glanced at the shirt I was wearing, one with the iconographic image of Che Guevara on it, and gave one of her sounds of exited discovery: "O!" Then, as she now seems to do with anything she likes (her mother, her stuffed animals, her baby doll), she leaned down to kiss the photo on the shirt.

The dreams of a left-wing philosopher father: one week she recognizes Foucault on a magazine cover, the next an icon of Che... I had a full blog post imagined in only seconds. When... "Bow, wow!" she said. And then again.

She didn't see Che on my shirt. She saw a cute dog.

The thing about when a baby begins to talk, is that I learn that the thoughts that I had long projected on her... well, she has much more individual things going on in that rapid and active brain. Among them, puppy dogs more than Latin American revolutionaries.

Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny?

2011-07-23T10:33:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a lot about peek-a-boo recently, because any time that Helena and I go for a walk, she places her hands over her eyes until I see what she is doing and say, "where's the baby, where's the baby?" The game can go on for half an hour. But this time, I've been thinking the game more with the ideas of early modern philosophy, than we the Lacanian foolishness I'd been using before. Particularly, through René Descartes.

In the 17th and 18th Century, when science was all the rage -- because, after a couple of rough centuries, people were beginning to do it again -- philosophers put a lot of effort into framing their ideas in scientific terms. How, for instance, to think about the soul? Where is it? How do you examine it scientifically. And René Descartes proposed that the soul was in the pineal gland, in the middle of the brain, behind the eyes.

Now, the last time I wrote about peek-a-boo, I suggested that Helena is really involved in experimenting on the subjectivity of the other, and that covering her eyes is a way to block the game of intersubjective mirroring between people. As she plays the game at one year and three months, I think something else is going on, something more... Cartesian? Can it be that Helena is trying to hide her soul?

That sounds like a joke, but I don't mean it that way. When we think about "ourselves", about where the essence of who we are is located, it's easy to think like Descartes. Humans are visual beings, so it makes sense to situate ourselves where our eyes are. It certainly makes more sense than in the feet or in a kidney... So might it be that Helena does, in fact, think that she is hiding something important when she pulls a cloth, or even just her fingers, over her eyes?

Now, the other thing that Helena does as we walk around is give names to the things in her world. Like many babies, she uses loads of onomotopeias: "bow-wow" for a dog, "meow" for a cat, various chirps for birds and moos for cows. Some of the earliest Greek thinkers suggested that language might have started in exactly this way... you can see traces of the idea in Plato's Phædrus, for instance. Most modern linguists dismiss the idea, but at one point, it had a lot of currency.

So, returning from a walk to the beach the the library yesterday, I shared a hypothesis with Helena, one that certainly won't withstand any serious scrutiny, but which was fun to invent. Biologists love the phrase "Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny," meaning that the development of a being in the womb mimics the evolution of the species as a whole. A fetus looks like a fish and a bird and loads of other things before it comes to look like a human being.

Might something similar happen in the intellectual development of a child? Do we go through all of the philosophical errors of the past as we grow up? Does the history of philosophy mirror the history of Helena's thinking?

Probably not. But if she comes up with some sort of ideas about the phlogiston or the geocentric universe, you can trust I'll be paying attention.

Finding Foucault

2011-07-17T18:03:00.000-07:00

Today, more a story than a philosophical reflection: a couple of days ago at the local community library, Helena and I spent close to an hour looking for books for her. As always, she loves to sort through every book on the shelf, transferring them to the table, paging through each one, and then choosing a couple that she likes. At the end of the time, we moved to the back of the library to play hide and seek among the shelves (not many of them, because the library is only a couple of years old, and the only books are ones donated by people from the neighborhood). After a couple of minutes of "where's the baby?" "Oh, there's the baby!", Helena moved toward a shelf at the back.

"O!" she called out, in the voice she uses for her most exciting discoveries: the monkeys coming by the house in the afternoon, her favorite carved jaguar found under a table, a new hat made by her mom. The "O!" again. I walked over to see her pointing to a magazine on the bottom shelf.

Her index finger touched the forehead of a photo of Michel Foucault.

Yes, a proud, proud moment.

New Photos

2011-07-14T18:25:00.000-07:00

Helena has continued to grow and think over the last couple of months, doing even more exciting things than she was months ago, but Rita and I have been traveling and working so much that I haven't had time to write. And the longer one goes without a blog, the harder it is to get back to it.

So, instead of a real philosophical reflection, I'll restart with a couple of photos from our trip to an anthropology conference in Curitiba this week.

Thinking with music

2011-05-17T15:39:00.000-07:00

This is Helena Iara's favorite video at the moment, one that makes me proud of her. Not just because it's cute, or good music, but because it's about as philosophical as children's music gets. Today, I tried to explain to Helena that at the beginning of the modern period, as German and French and English intellectuals used philosophy to think the world, in Spain and Portugal, poetry served the same purpose. The great philosophers of the Iberian peninsula (and its American colonies) didn't write treatises, but poems and novels: Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Góngora, Sor Juana, Pessoa, Neruda... And in the second half of the 20th century, that turned to music: Victor Jara, Violeta Parra, Tom Jobim, Milton Nascimento, and many more.

And for kids, the philosopher poet was Toquinho. Here are the lyrics to the last verse of the song above:

And the future is a spaceship 

Which we try to drive. 

But the future is always hurried and merciless. 

There's no right time for it to come, 

And without asking or warning us,

 It just changes our lives 

And then it beckons us

 to cry or laugh together

Along this road, it's not our duty

 to know or see what's comming to us 

No one surely knows where it's heading us to 

We're just going on the way

 Crossing a beautiful footbridge 

Painted in watercolour 

which someday will fade after all

In a sheet of paper, I draw an yellow-coloured sun 

(which will fade someday) 

And with five or six straight lines I easily draw a castle

 (which will fade someday) 

I just turn a compass around

 and with a circle I draw the world 

(which will fade someday)

Child labor

2011-05-13T16:11:00.000-07:00

Helena Iara wants to help. We first noticed it the afternoon we were installing the gas line on the new stove, and she wanted to be under the countertop, passing tools to us, or with a hand on the line. When I led her away, she cried as hard as she has in a long time. The next day, she wanted to take the laundry off the line, and then the help cut vegetables. And yesterday, she actually pulled the clean laundry out of the hamper and onto the floor so that she could pass it to us as we hung clothes on the line. The last was actually pretty fun, and better than kneeling down to grab every scrap from the ground.

Since it's something that Rita and I work on a lot, it seemed to make sense to tell Helena about the history of child labor. We don't have to accept the most radical of theories of childhood -- like Philipe Ariès, who contends that childhood is really an invention of modernity, and the people before the 18th century saw children as little adults -- to recognize that we see child labor in a very different way today than did a medieval peasant or a the owner of one of the "dark Satanic mills" condemned by Charles Dickens. First the upper class began to see childhood as a privileged time of learning and play, and that idea gradually became universal: "children's work is learning," as the slogan of one anti-child labor campaign in Latin America put it.

As I explained to Helena on our way to the library today, to say "that idea became universal" makes it seem easy, like some Hegelian hand of History just made it happen. In the United States, the great change came about not because of the goodness of the elites nor the conscience of intellectuals like Dickens, but because of labor organizers. The most famous was Mother Jones, the coal mine agitator who organized children from all over the East Coast of the country on a long march at the end of the 19th century, ending in Washington and demanding the abolition of child labor. If Helena isn't working at five years old, it has a lot to do with good Mother Jones.

On the other hand, working in Latin America has shown the problems with a fundamentalist attitude against children working. In many indigenous communities, children learn their most important lessons as they work side by side with their parents, who protect them from the hardest labor as they also teach philosophy and physics and weather and farming. Some of the most able mathematicians I've ever met are child street vendors. On the other end of the economic scale, some of my most important growing as an adolescent came from jobs coaching soccer to little kids and writing for the local paper, work that would be prohibited as child labor under many laws promoted by UNICEF.

It's a lot to explain to a little girl, but she understood the basic point: she was happy and proud to be able to collaborate with Rita and me in some way (even if, in truth, she mad the work more difficult). If she continues "working" that way, she'll grow up well.

The gift

2011-05-10T19:14:00.000-07:00

For at least a month, Helena Iara has been obsessed with giving things to Rita and me. She wants to give us her toys, feed us her food, give us her clothes and her books... Now, lest one think that we have been successful in creating a truly altruistic baby, I have to add that several seconds afterward, she wants those things back, which created some minor complications when she offered us food, at least until we understood what was going on.

Reflecting on this giving of gifts, as Helena and I sat in the hammock today, watching the monkeys play in the trees, I told her a little bit about how different anthropologists have looked at the gift. She wasn't entirely interested in the differences in the way that Claude Levi-Stauss or Marcel Mauss or Eduardo Viveiros de Castro understand gift giving, but I think that she understood the basic idea: we give gifts to establish and strengthen social relations. Whether we're talking about the formal gift-giving that happens in diplomatic meetings, the gifts exchanged between tribes when they encounter in the Amazon basin, or birthday gifts for babies, when we give a present, we get back trust.

Every Christmas, you'll see an article in the Times or some newsmagazine, in which a famous economist talks about the failure of the marginal utility of gift-giving. My mother gives me a sweater; she paid $75 for it, but I would not have paid more than $30, so according to these orthodox (and Scrooge-y) economists, there is a $45 inefficiency in the market. Their lesson, of course, is that we should all just give each other cash.

Gift-giving, fortunately, is not a capitalist activity, for all of the attempts to make it one. It's a process of creating trust, building relationships. I give a friend a birthday gift, he gives one to me, and we become better friends in the process, more mutually engaged, more willing to trust and depend on each other.

What Helena has done, as I tried to explain to her, is short circuit the process. She gives me her toy and then wants it back right away. In the process, she built something like trust (she knows she will get it back) and something more than just "like" love. We laugh, she smiles, and a family grows from it.

Medea in the car-seat

2011-05-04T09:43:00.000-07:00

Helena has never really liked her car seat, but yesterday, she absolutely hated it. She didn't just cry, but wailed, pretended that she was choking, unable to breathe... anything to get out. She was willing to hurt herself to get what she wanted. When she finally calmed down, I told her the story of Medea, and then something about masochism and politics, from Deleuze to Marx. Here, I'll just plagiarize a radio commentary I recorded eight years ago which captures something of the same ideas...

Imagine a little girl, perhaps eight years old, with blond curly hair and a heavy sweater. Her name is Ana Isabel, she tells me. It’s ten o’clock at night in the Alpujarra, one of the areas of Medellín that the police have abandoned to gangs and prostitutes. About fifty homeless kids have come to a filthy little park, hoping that the grass will make for a softer bed than the street. We might be tempted to pity these young refugees from war, poverty, and violence, but they were proud of their ability to survive in conditions that would quickly kill you or me.

  I don’t know why, but Ana Isabel became furious with me -- perhaps because I didn’t give her candy, like the nun who came with me, perhaps because I reminded her of her father. Her cheeks reddened, she stomped her feet, then, with a final look of rage, she put a little plastic bag to her mouth, inhaled and exhaled. Inside was a glue that gave an instant and fatal high. She stepped closer and closer to me until each explosive breath slammed the bag against my stomach. Her red eyes were full of hatred -- against me, against the world, against herself.

  The next night in Medellín embodies the contrasts that define Colombia. Though most famous for cocaine and violence, Medellín is also home to remarkable avante-garde art and theater. I went to see a minimalist version of the classic Greek drama, Medea. Medea, as you may remember, was princess of Colchis before Jason seduced her and convinced her to steal the Golden Fleece for him. When the play begins, years after the adventure of the Argonauts, Jason has abandoned Medea so that he can marry a Greek princess that will aid his new political aspirations. Jason and his allies have condemned Medea to live in a hut far from Corinth, and soon the king will send her into exile.  

We remember Medea best for her revenge against Jason. The man has destroyed her, but she has no way to hurt him. In madness and despair, she kills their two children.  

Thanks to Freud, Oedipus became the dominant metaphor for the 20th Century. I wonder if Medea isn’t our Oedipus -- think of little Ana Isabel: like Medea, she is powerless, forgotten. She has no power, no one respects or loves her -- she can’t even make people look at her, except in pity. And proud people -- whether a Colombian street urchin or a princess of Colchis -- despise pity.  

So what power do Medea and Ana Isabel have? How can they take revenge on those who have hurt them, those who ignore them, on us, who let little girls live on the street? They can only hurt themselves. Medea murders the children she loves, because Jason loves them too. Ana Isabel destroys her brain with glue, because she sees the pain it brings to my face. I don’t need to point out the connection to the teenage Palestinians who strap bombs to their bodies, or anorexic American girls. Medea is the last refuge of the powerless, the hopeless, and the excluded... and a too terrible metaphor for the lives of many people in the 21st Century.

Perhaps I exaggerate: Helena Iara is no Medea, and no Ana Isabel. But like many of the powerless, she has learned that one of the few ways to get some modicum of power over the other is to hurt herself.

Photos from Helena's Birthday

2011-05-02T16:37:00.000-07:00

And she saw that it was good

2011-04-28T18:32:00.003-07:00

I've been rather slow in posting blogs over the last several days; since Easter, we have been staying with Rita's parents in Braço do Norte, in the interior of the state, where the internet connection isn't as good as it might be. That doesn't mean that Helena has stopped thinking, not I thinking about her thinking...

For the last several mornings, when Helena Iara has come to the breakfast table, she has pointed first at one thing, and then at another, perhaps asking to taste things or just to hold them in her hands. Today, she pointed to Rita's mother's coffee cup, and the coffee had cooled enough that Rita's mom offered her a little bit. Helena tasted it and made a strange face. We all laughed, which made Helena ask for the coffee again. This time she drank a couple of drops, made the same face again, and then looked up. "It's good," she said clearly. "É bom."

Now, my guess is that Helena was repeating what we say any time that she doesn't like food or drink. "It's good," we say, as a way to convince her to try it again. What she has interpreted, however, is that "it's good" means "Helena doesn't like the taste of this," as if the comment were descriptive, and not prescriptive. Because what we really "mean" -- our purpose with the words -- by saying "this is good," is "you may not like it, but try it again." Which is exactly what Helena had done with the coffee. She thought it was awful, but she asked to try again. "It's good."

The most famous "It is good" in the history of the world is probably Yahweh's, who, at the end of each day of creation, looked at the world and saw that it was good. I wonder if we shouldn't use Helena's interpretation of "It's good" to re-think those lines from Genesis. It might, in fact, be Yahweh describing the results of creation. But it might also be prescriptive, or even Helena's idea of "It's not really good, but I'll keep trying."

When we look through a baby's mind, even the simplest words can be wonderful complex and ambiguous.

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all

2011-04-20T18:16:00.000-07:00

Helena is walking well these days. She can stand up on her own for minutes at a time, and walks from one side of the room to the other with very good balance. Until, that is, she realizes what she is doing. Then, like Wily E. Coyote running off the edge of a cliff in his vain pursuit or the Roadrunner, she looks at her feet, looks at Rita or me, and falls to the ground. She can do it only as long as she isn't aware of what she is doing.

Hamlet's famous like that "conscience makes cowards of us all" has become a kind of moral cliché, coming to mean that we would do many more things if our conscience didn't stop us. In fact, though, conscience has not always referred to that little white angel on the shoulder of a character in a cartoon. Conscience is awareness, knowledge. And Helena has found that the moment of self-awareness can be much more fearsome than the thing itself.

Though I don't have much opportunity these days, for many years I loved to rock climb, and as any rock climber can tell you, conscience does make cowards of us all. I remember one climb in the El Dorado Canyon, west of Boulder, which tested my skills. Even as I sweated each move, I made my way up the rock, using a wide crack. Yet the moment I levered myself onto the top of the pitch, clipped into the belay station, and looked down... I knew I'd never be able to climb any higher. Unthinking, I had been able to make the climb. Conscious of what I was doing, I had no chance, and somehow I knew I would fall. I told my brother to lower me down to the ground, and we went home. A week later, my heart was still beating at an accelerated pace.

I wonder to what degree Hegel's ideas about negation and consciousness have to do with this same phenomenon. Hegel saw the world before conscience, as somehow present to itself, but the moment that someone becomes aware of the world -- and aware of herself being aware of the world -- it is no longer a seamless whole. A crack has opened up. And according to Hegel, this is the beginning of history and, if we think deeply enough, of humanity itself. Animals don't reflect on the world, don't open up that gap, but people do. (Perhaps, by the way, this is why we empathize with Wily E. Coyote, and not with the Roadrunner).

So even though I feel sorry for Helena whenever she realizes what she is doing and then falls to the floor, it is also wonderful. Conscience make make cowards of us all, but it also makes us human.

A ball of meaning

2011-04-17T07:25:00.000-07:00

For at least a month and a half, Helena Iara has been using words, but it's only in the last day or two that I'm confident that she understands that words aren't only useful, but also can signify. And the word that has shown this fact is the very simple "ball", which she says (and repeats and repeats) in both Portuguese (bola) and English.

Neurologists and linguists who work with language acquisition talk about "semantic over-reach," lingo which just means that when babies begin to understand how words refer to things, they think the word means a much broader category than it really does. The classic example is a child who learns the word "doggie", and then declares any four-legged animal, from a puppy to a lion, a "doggie". Language learning happens through paring down our knowledge, chiseling away the meanings that don't work so that we get down to the "real" meaning of a word ("real" in scare quotes because it is always a little flexible, turned into a metaphor, and in flux).

For Helena, what that means is that any sphere is a ball. She has a little ball that she loves to kick, but she also likes a full-sized soccer ball and an interesting little empty ball with lots of holes. Oranges and apples are also balls, as are passion fruit... a problem when she declares "ball" and throws them onto the tile floor. The truth is, though, that an orange seems more similar to her little ball than either the empty ball or the soccer ball: she's developed a theory about "ball-ness" and is trying to apply it.

We don't lose this tendency as we grow up; it just changes. In college, for instance, marxist cultural theory was my "ball", something I tried to apply to everything. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory? Jane Austin? Post-modern philosophy? The drinking culture of small, liberal arts colleges? A combination of Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse offered an explanation and solution to everything, generally detailed with excessive pedantry (and a bit of humor) in my monthly column in a college magazine.

Now this isn't a bad thing, even as I make fun of my younger self. Helena's joyful shouts of "bola, ball!" as she sees anything round make her excited about the world, curious and thrilled about learning. The same was true of my own theoretical over-reach, and it continues to be: finding an idea that you love is essential not just to intellectual life, but to life itself.

In the long run, we all learn that an apple isn't a ball, and that if we throw it on the ground, it will be too bruised to eat.

And I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down!

2011-04-15T18:10:00.000-07:00

Helena can now recognize the covers of different books, so we can see more clearly which are her favorites: she picks them up and brings them to us. Unfortunately, two of her favorite books are a retrograde interpretation of the three little pigs (which turns it into a morality tale about laziness, like the fable of the ant and the grasshopper) and a sad tale of a boy her turns into a werewolf and is forced from his home by his friends and family... and the book ends that way, without the redemption of a happy ending.

Now, I could use this blog as a chance to reflect more on the nature of narrative, and suggest that babies don't want the simple beginnings and ends, nor the moral of the story, that we adults want for them. What's more interesting is what Helena likes about the two stories: the wolves. At the beginning of each story (the boy before he becomes a werewolf, the three little pigs setting off for the world), she can't even wait for the narration to end before she tries to turn the page, but then, when the wolves appear on the page, she begins to growl. Loudly. Furiously. And with unmistakable joy.

What is Helena Iara up to? Why these joyful growls? Here's a hypothesis: where we adults have learned to identify heroes and villains, and to identify with the heroes, Helena is putting herself in the shoes of other characters. She doesn't find the pigs sympathetic (I never really did, either), but the wolf is exciting, powerful, and goes after what he wants. Even more important is that the wolf has a cool voice when I read the story, with intonation and accent and (yes) growls. "And I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down!" That's much more fun that a bunch of whiney little pigs.

We might look at lots of children's literature through these eyes: might the kids not like the three bears more than Goldilocks? The big bad wolf more than Little Red Riding Hood? Shrek, in its best moments, seems to capture this intuitive reversal: kids like the powerful excluded monster more than they like the goody-two-shoes.

Moralists might be worried about this idea, but I don't think they need to be. Not to say that I am any kind of saint, but I think I'm a pretty decent person, but the role I always wanted to play, whether playing as a little boy or in theater as a teenager, was the villain. I wanted to explore bad to find out what it was like, to understand bad people... but not to be it. I've seen the same thing making fictional films with child soldiers and street children and other "bad kids": when they have a chance to explore evil in fiction, they need it less in real life.

Plus, it's really fun to howl and growl like a wolf.

Children's books

2011-04-12T16:40:00.000-07:00

This weekend, Rita and I went into a bookstore to buy a book for Helena Iara. As Rita and Helena paged through the kids' section (Rita paged, while Helena removed each book, looked at it, and then placed it on the floor), I ran into a new translation of Paul Ricoeur's famous book on narrative, where he hypothesizes that time is actually constructed from story, not only that we understand history through tales, but that time itself is the result of narrative.

Helena likes some books that have a beginning, climax, and end -- Little Gorilla, for instance, and Fortunata the Giraffe, which Rita ended up buying for her -- but narrative is hardly necessary. One of her favorite books right now is My Circus, which pairs simple drawings with single words on each page: "Clown; Elephant; Tent; Acrobat." If I turn the pages one by one as I read the words, she quickly gets bored, but if she turns the pages, sometimes back to forward, other times forward to back, sometimes skipping pages or flipping back to the beginning, she can sit with the book for fifteen minutes happily.

Clearly, she loves to see the way turning pages impacts her world: as she flips quickly between "Acrobats" and "Jugglers," I have to say the words just as quickly as she turns the pages... and then she flips back to "Children" just to see if I notice. Kids like to exercise some kind of control over their parents, and turning the pages back and forth does that for Helena.

But I think there's something else going on here, too. Helena likes to see new juxtapositions. The list "Drum, Tent, Clown, Magician, Caravan" means one thing, but "Clown, Drum, Children, Acrobat, Elephant," that's a different story all together. Or maybe not a story... and I guess that's my point. There is something exciting about putting things or images or ideas together in an unexpected or even prohibited way. That can mean anything from André Breton's surrealism, where poems are made of the seemingly random transpositions of words, to Dalí's paintings, to the chance placement of a book by Foucault next to the New Testament, making one think of new ways to interpret the epistle to the Romans.

Ricouer is probably right: narrative does create time, or at least the way we understand it (thermodynamics probably has something to do with the physical reality, after all). And I think babies do understand both time and narrative, but that's not the only lens through which they look at the world. There is also a jumping, random juxtaposition, and then the struggle to make sense of those new orders. Narrative can be fun, but so can turning the pages any which way. Things get placed side by side, the brain has to work to make the connection, and that's fun.

Isn't she just a doll?

2011-04-10T05:16:00.000-07:00

On our recent trip to Salvador and Recife, Helena Iara heard one comment time and time again: "Isn't she just a little doll?" ("É como uma bonequinha!") Helena is a cute baby, but what really attracted interest was how blond she is: in the very African cities of Brazil's northeast (and where the harsh sun burns everyone black pretty soon), such a white baby is shocking. I'm not exaggerating when I say she stopped traffic on downtown streets.

I began to tell Helena a little more about the philosophy of Jean Baudrillard, which seemed quite apropos... Baudrillard's basic idea is that in post-modernity, the sense of reference is lost. Instead of a picture signifying some real thing "behind" it, representation develops a new relationship to reality. What, he asks, does the China exhibition at Epcot Center have to do with China? He defines the simulacrum as a "Copy for which there is no original."

As I explained to Helena, it seemed even more perverse the doll -- originally a signifier of a baby, but now a kind of simulacrum -- would now become the reference by which real babies are judged. If a baby is "like a doll", then she is pretty and good. Certain other comments we heard on the street also made it clear that the comparison had to do with wealth: several women declared "She looks like a soap opera baby!" while one street boy innocently spoke the truth that lies behind all of these comments: "She looks almost like a baby of the rich people!" The rich, like a doll, are unreal and perfect, powerful but untouchable.

Fortunately, Rita was listening to my diatribe and stopped me before it got out of hand. She explained to Helena that the real problem wasn't ontological, but practical. When people describe a baby as a doll, they may also treat the girl as a thing. The cheek-pinching, hair-mussing, and invasive stares she got from people she had never seen before and would never see again served as very good evidence of this fact.

In the end, I still contend that issues of the constitution of being in postmodernity are important... but Rita is basically right. The real issue with seeing the other was a doll is that she becomes a thing. Prized and treasured, perhaps, but basically an object. Instead of another subject with whom I interact, people on the street wanted an object with which they could play.

Sound is like touch at a distance

2011-04-07T18:51:00.000-07:00

I have been editing a lot of film recently: we shot hours and hours in the favela of Recife last month, and have to turn it into a good short film in less than a month, so the pressure is on. Editing means a lot of time with headphones stuck in my ears, and me lost to the external world. Several times over the last couple of days, I have heard Rita talking with someone, what sounds like a profound enough conversation that I take off my earphones to see who is visiting... only to find out that it's Helena Iara.

Over the last couple of weeks, Helena Iara has begun to speak. Yes, there are words that show up, from the expected mommy and dada to strange ones like "ímã" (magnet), but what I'm really talking about is the material stuff of speech, its sounds and rhythms. When I'm not listening carefully, or when I am paying attention to something else, it sounds as if Helena is talking adult speech. The tone rises and falls like discourse, the nouns and consonants sound like English or Portuguese, and she has the exact tones of joy and frustration and desire that we associate with speech.

It's cliché to say that 90% of language is non-verbal, but that doesn't make it any less true. Helena is gathering the lessons of non-semantic language, the tones and music and sounds that will eventually come together to be adult speech. And she communicates with these sounds, even if she doesn't understand that sounds are supposed to "mean" something, instead of simply being.

By chance, I was listening to an old Radiolab episode a couple of nights ago, where the neuroscientist Anne Fernald suggested that speech begins not as communication, but as a caress (or a punch, a tickle... not as meaning, but as something much more direct). Across cultures, people talk to babies with almost exactly the same tones of voice, whether soothing or complimenting or disciplining. Voice serves to embrace a child and educate her, not through its content, but through its music. Remembering that the cilia and timpanum and hammer that make up hearing are really feeling the motion of the air, Fernald coins the elegant phrase, "Sound is like touch at a distance."

Before Helena is learning language as meaning, she is learning sound as touch, as a direct way to relate with Rita and with me. Semantics may come later, but for now I'm happy to have touch at a distance.

The evil eye

2011-03-27T18:34:00.000-07:00

With the exception of a brief flirtation with a superstition about the number 16 as a teenage soccer player, I've never really had much time for magical thinking. I'm a pretty hard nosed materialist. So as one might guess, I've always quietly scoffed at the idea of the evil eye, in spite of its pervasiveness here in Brazil. None the less, two weeks with Helena Iara in Recife forced me to do some re-thinking on the issue.

Though there are many forms of the evil eye, the most common one in Brazil often isn't intentionally malicious; in fact, the danger comes from admiration. If someone compliments my clothes or appearance or anything else, it shows the possibility of envy, and that envy has consequences; in fact, in Portuguese, the word "evil" doesn't enter into the dynamic. People fear the "olho gordo" or fat eye, the desire of the other for what I have. It makes sense in a culture that has long been poor, and where social equality (within an economic class, though not from one to another) is an important virtue.

The problem comes when the object of envy is a baby. If someone else admires Helena Iara, or envies Rita and me because she is our daughter, that envy can make her sick. An entire social group of "benzedeiras" or blessers (sort of like good witches) exist in order to help kids get over the illnesses caused by the evil eye. This struck me as sort of silly... until Helena became the victim of the olho gordo, as she did last week, with fever, confusion, and inability to sleep.

Lest you think I'm getting soft in the head, let me explain what I think happened. In Recife, blond children are uncommon, and because they are almost always the children of the rich, they seldom turn up in the favelas and areas of urban decay where we spent most of our time. For that reason, Helena attracted a lot of attention. A lot. She literally stopped traffic from time to time, and people surrounded her as if she were a rock or soap opera star, each one of them with more extravagant compliments. In a city of almost 3 million people, one of the dirtiest and hottest and noisiest places I know, it was just too much. Helena became over-stimulated and got sick.

A benzedeira blessed Helena, and I doubt that it did any harm -- in fact, the kind and soothing words of the woman, and the sweet-smelling fond she swung around Helena probably helped. But what really worked was rest: getting her away from the chaos of the city, from the intense and desiring eyes of thousands of people. She still had to deal with the heat, but she soon was as happy and healty as she had ever been. And I came to have a little more respect for folk beliefs that I used to think were all confused with magic...

On the street

2011-03-22T17:16:00.000-07:00

Sunday night, Rita, Helena, and I were walking through Recife Antigo, the old city built by Dutch colonists in the 16th and 17th centuries, and now a contrast of old beauty and urban decay. The sound of drums echoed through the narrow streets, as maracatus practiced their rhythms, but few people were around, and few streetlights illuminated our way. Crossing an abandoned street, we saw a girl of thirteen or fourteen years -- the kind of girl we might have named a "street kid" before understanding how life on the street really works -- who was kicking a light rubber ball and watching it float slowly to the ground. Helena Iara was fascinated, and pointed to the girl and her game.

Attracted by the finger and Helena's shouts of interest, the girl approached: not with the timidity one might expect of a street girl, nor the begging tones of a poor urchin, but with an excited voice. "Do you want to play?" she asked Helena, and then turned to us, as if asking permission.

Rita set Helena on the cobblestones, and she grabbed the string of the balloon-ball and began to kick it across the ground, limited only by Rita's hand from running and falling. She laughed, screamed, kicked to ball to Thaisa (as the girl introduced herself) and then waited for it to come back. Rita and I joined the laughter, which lifted the sinister air that had filled the streets.

I don't think we played any more than five minutes before we picked up Helena and headed to the bus stop, but I think that those minutes probably taught Helena more philosophy -- the encounter with difference, treating others as equal, as ends instead of means, of the chance to learn and play and not fear -- than any number of talks that she and I might have. A beautiful night of practical philosophy and ethics.

Salvador and Recife

2011-03-20T06:58:00.000-07:00

Helena Iara has had a hard time with the heat, here near the Equator. Sleeping is hard, she rejects putting on clothes with even more vehemence than she does at home, and she even came down with a cold that seems to be associated with going in and out of air conditioning (100 degrees on the street, less than seventy in a bank... it isn't easy even for an adult).

The great thing about Brazil's northeast, however, is its culture, with more dance forms and musical genres and styles of painting and decoration than anyone could imagine. And since Rita and I are making a movie with kids who rap, break-dance, and dance capoeira, she's gotten a lot of exposure to a new world.

Most people who have seen either capoeira or break-dance see them as spectacles, as amazing feats of acrobatics, but for the kids who do them here in Recife, the activity is much more profound. Both serve as ways to transform conflict and to ritualize violence. As one kid told us, breakdancing appeared when gangs were fighting on the streets, and some young artists proposed to turn the battles into an artistic competition, instead of a conflict ending in death. The language of the break-battle remains the same as for war, but you can't touch the other, and victory is decided by competence, not blood. Rita's doctoral dissertation followed this process of transforming violence into art.

The same is true of capoeira, maracatu, and many other artistic forms here in the northeast. And for Helena, a little girl who loves drama and movement and acrobatics, it's been fun.

Photos from Salvador da Bahia

2011-03-17T07:06:00.000-07:00

Rita and I are still in Brazil's northeast, without very a lot of time to write blogs, but I wanted to post some photos of our brief stop in Salvador da Bahia.

The semiotics of a Baby Bjorn

2011-03-08T16:15:00.000-08:00

For the last several days, any time that Rita or I pass by the coat tree as we carry Helena Iara, she reaches out, laughs, pleads, and stares. Her Baby Bjorn infant carrier hangs there, sometimes clearly visible, other times almost hidden behind coats and coats. But with even a glimpse of the black straps, Helena explodes into a cacophony of sounds of desire.

Not an amazing story: babies learn what they want, and the learn to show it. But what's interesting here is that Helena doesn't want the baby carrier. She wants to go for a walk. The Baby Bjorn has become a symbol of her real desire, which is to go out in the street to see dogs, pick flowers, and meet people. It's a complicated sort of symbolism, but a process of signification none the less. Something stands in for something else.

In fact, Helena is less involved in metaphor and more in metonymy, where the symbol participates in the signified, in some small way. If Helena were to associate a frying pan with her afternoon walks, that would be a metaphor, but because we use the baby carrier as a part of the walk, it's metaphor or synecdoche.

It might seem that this distinction matters only to linguists and rhetors -- and that's probably what Helena thoughs as I tried to explain it to her on a walk yesterday -- but it does say something important about the way that humans learn language. Augustine's famous description of learning words involves adults pointing at things and then saying their names, but I think that idea doesn't work for Helena yet. Instead, she learns symbolization in a series of small steps, taking a part of the walk and making it stand in for the whole experience. The next step, I think, will be to see that the symbol need not have anything to do with what it symbolizes. That -- according to child neurologists, at least -- will be years in coming.

Acabou?

2011-03-06T07:19:00.000-08:00

Rita and I have becomes used to hearing "Mama" and "Dada" from Helena, but there's a new word in her vocabulary, one that I had not expected. Linguists who study infants suggest that babies first acquire nouns and proper names, only moving on to verbs much later, but Helena has begun to say the word "acabou," and to use it in a context that makes sense, often repeating it after we say it, but sometimes even producing it on her own.

"Acabou" means "it's over" or "it's all gone" in Portuguese. Strange words for a baby, who is beginning almost everything, to say. Yet it's a relatively common word in Brazil, at least when we speak with babies: Rita mashes cooked banana onto a plate, and Helena eats it eagerly. When she's eaten it all, "Acabou!" We pile pillows up into a mountain, and Helena tears them down one by one, and when she throws the last one from the couch to the floor, Rita will say, "Acabou," to which Helena replies "'cabou", with exactly the same tone of voice.

There's an easy explanation for Helena's use of the word, something we get from Freud. He saw his grandson playing with a spool of thread on the floor, throwing the spool under a table where he could not see it and saying “fort” (gone). Then the child pulled the spool back to him and said “da!” (here). The game could go on for hours and hours.

Freud only came to understand what the boy was doing when the child called the spool “mother.” The mother, Freud’s daughter, had been spending many hours away from home, an event which seemed to traumatize her son. By throwing his mother under the table and “hiding” her (sending her away), and then bringing her back, the boy came to feel that he was controlling the trauma. It hurt him, but he chose it. According to Freud, one could see the same impulse in soldiers who suffered from shell-shock, who re-created the trauma again and again in their minds until they felt as if it wad their choice, and therefore under their control.

Is Helena using words to cover up the trauma of the end? Honestly, I doubt it (and in fact, I think the whole edifice of Freudian theory constructs trauma as much as it describes it, but that's a polemic for another day). Honestly, I think it's more about understanding the way that words work. Ends can be clear things -- we put "the end" at the end of movies and books -- and she has come to understand that there is a sound that connects to these ends (as someday she'll understand that "once upon a time" marks a beginning.). Helena is learning narrative.

Out of control (almost)

2011-03-05T09:03:00.000-08:00

Last week, Rita and I hung a swing for Helena in the backyard. Thanks to the height of the flamboyant tree (that's really its name, give because of the vibrant red flowers), she gets a long pendulum back and forth, and the higher she gets, the louder her shrieks of joy. Not only is it great to watch, but it gives Rita's and my backs a break from carrying an increasingly heavy little girl, or bending down to help her to walk.

Helena's other favorite new activity is running downhill. It can be down the ramp at a restaurant or store, down a trail, or even (with lots of help) down the stairs (we're trying to break her of this last game). Almost like a skier after the lifts have closed, she will point her feet up the hill, demand that I help her walk up, and then turn downhill for the run.

What's the point of these games? Why are they so much fun? In fact, I might ask the same of some of my favorite sports -- skiing, rock climbing, now kitesurfing -- which just expand the sense of speed and movement that Helena enjoys. Looking at her (and thinking of myself), I think the joy comes from just barely being in control, being just on the verge of too much. Swinging isn't a passive activity for a little girl: Helena is actually using her balance to hold herself upright, and not to fall side to side. If her weight shifts, she could go crashing into the orchids that embrace the tree. And she loves the challenge of reaching for clothes on the laundry line, just beyond the reach of the longest swing. Running down hill is even clearer as game between control and chaos, when a little trip could mean a fall (or would, if she didn't have her hands in mine).

Kayaking and kitesurfing are similar: you don't control the water or the waves or the wind. They are a movement that you can understand and use, but not influence. The joy of the sport comes from using these dangerous and unstable (though not unpredictable) elements as toys, exercising what little control I can to make a game.

There's an important metaphor about freedom here, if I can get my mind around it.

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

2011-03-03T16:47:00.000-08:00

Over the last several days, Helena Iara has been making lots of new sounds. Some of them sound like they'll someday become words, while others are more raw, sounds of desire and anger and hurt. Yesterday, as we had lunch, she began to make one of those angry sounds, and Rita and I began to lecture her on table manners... until we realized that she was imitating a lion. It was the same sound she used when she plays with her two stuffed lions, or with her feline finger puppets. Grrrrr....

Watching Helena play with her stuffed animals has been fascinating, because she looks like an infantile version of an Amazonian shaman (at least as they are described by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, the great Brazilian anthropologist), whose power lies in the ability to see through the eyes of other animals. Knowledge, for the shaman, is not to have an objective view of the jaguar, but instead to see the world as the jaguar sees it. For Amazonian people, this kind of perspective shift is both epistemology and ethics -- how we know the world and how we act right -- because we not only learn how the jaguar sees the world, but also how to treat it with dignity, even when we need to hunt it.

This way of seeing the world might seem strange to a European adult, but to children, it makes sense. What is play, make-believe, or just acting out a scene between Barbie and a Teddy Bear? It is an attempt to step into the shoes of that toy, to see the world as that animal or doll might see it. They use their toys as a shaman uses Ayahuasca: to get behind the eyes of the other. Perhaps more significantly, I think that babies play for similar ethical and epistemological reasons: they want to see other perspectives on the world, and they want to get closer to the other.

Why does Helena roar? She wants to see how she feels with that sound in her mouth, if she feels powerful like a lion, big and brave. She wants to see how her parents react. It's a way to learn, a way to try out different personalities that she might like, and a way to get closer to other people. We can condemn commercial toys for lots of reasons, but (as I think the Toy Story trilogy argues well) when a child can play with many of them, they offer the chance of many changes in perspective, a developed point of view that the child can inhabit for a moment.

And in fact, what is this blog, but an intellectualized version of the same kind of game? Helena can't tell me what she really feels or things, no more than a jaguar can explain its perspective to the shaman. So, like a child with a toy, I try to project myself into Helena's perspective, imagine what she is thinking, learning, seeing. I'm wrong most of the time, of course, but the effort changes the way that I see the world. And that's both ethics and epistemology.

Making the high places plain

2011-02-27T04:53:00.000-08:00

The entropy machine that is our daughter is only getting more efficient as she gets bigger and stronger. Nothing that sits on top of anything else will stay there, if Helena Iara can reach it, and the bookshelves and CDs are in constant danger.

Last night, I piled up a mountain of pillows and then put her lion on top. Not only did she pull the lion down, but then took each pillow and threw it to the ground. Perhaps it was the lion that inspired this memory, but this time, instead of thinking about entropy and chaos, as I had before, a couple of quotes from the Hebrew prophets came into my head:

“I will go before you and level the exalted places, I will break in pieces the doors of bronze and cut through the bars of iron." [Is 45:2]

"Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain." [Is 40: 4]

I never really liked these verses when I was a kid; I love mountains too much to celebrate their demise, even when I understood that it was a metaphor for social justice, for bringing down the rich and powerful and raising up the poor.

It's interesting, I think, to consider the way that the writers of the Christian gospels used these lines as a proof of their ideas about Jesus being the anointed savior of the Hebrew people. Matthew cites Isaiah in his narrative of the birth of Jesus... is it merely a coincidence that these actions aren't merely a metaphor for social justice and equality, but also a concrete description of what babies do? They "level the exalted places" and break anything they can find... maybe not "break in pieces doors of bronze and cut through the bars of iron," but that's more for lack of strength than lack of desire! (St. Augustine once said that "If babies are innocent, it is merely because they lack the strength to do wrong, not because they lack the will." I prefer, "If babies cannot level the mountains, it is because they lack the strength, not because they lack the desire.")

In any case, might it be that Matthew is suggesting that a baby's instincts are for justice? That this seeming negation and destruction really stands for revolution, for throwing off the yoke of Babylon or Rome? Perhaps. At least those ideas make it a little easier to clean up after Helena...

[The photos, by the way, come from our vacation. Most parents will recognize chocolate on a baby's face; mine is filthy after a 40 mile bike ride up and down the mountains in the rain and mud.]

Running

2011-02-26T16:52:00.000-08:00

Helena has everything ready to be walking right now: since she was four months old, she has walked as she holds onto an adults fingers, she stands on her own, she walks four of five steps without a problem... but she still isn't really walking. Why? Because she wants to run. Holding her hands, she won't go slowly, but throws herself forward and sprints her legs with quick steps, running as fast as I can walk and hold her hands.

Now there is an easy lesson in this, one I tried to explain to Helena Iara this morning: you have to walk before you can run. That idea is such a part of popular wisdom that we can hear it in many different contexts. Even so...

I wonder if Helena's desire to run doesn't, in fact, express the best thing about her. Her father doesn't get to brag that "my daughter walked when she was only so many months old," but that doesn't matter so much. What matters is that she is so enthusiastic that se wants to run, that she loves the feel of movement and laughs as she runs, and that she is always trying to accomplish the impossible. So instead of the boasts of a proud father, we have a utopian urge, something like the slogan of 1968 in Paris: "Soyons realists, soyons realistes demandons l'impossible": Let's be realists and demand the impossible.

In the end, that attitude makes me much prouder.

Games and Freedom

2011-02-24T15:54:00.000-08:00

First over Christmas and then during vacation last week, Helena had a lot of time to play with her cousins, especially Luidi (who just turned five) and Henrique (who is almost 4). It's been interesting to watch their games, because they seem to show something important about human freedom.

Most of the time, Helena has one or two games she likes to play with her toys. She likes to put them in her mouth, she likes to play peek-a-boo, and she likes to play ball... but a four or five year old knows a much greater range of games.

Maybe an example will help me to explain: Over Christmas, Luidi brought his cars from the movie Cars over to grandma's house, and Helena wanted to play with them with her mouth, and then by throwing them onto the ground (another favorite game). Luidi, an immensely patient little boy, sat down next to her on the ground and said, "What we do is this:" and he pushed the car along the tiles and said "zoom, zoom." Helena looked at him strangely, as if to say, "why aren't you putting the cars in your mouth?"

"The cars can talk, too," Luidi went on, and then acted out a scene between Lightning McQueen and the Tow-truck, Tow-Mater. Helena found the play acting fascinating, and took the other cars out of her mouth long enough to watch.

Whether we can credit Luidi or just the normal process of development, over the last month and a half, Helena now pushes her little truck across the floor and imitates a kind of conversation between her finger-puppets (especially the monkey, toucan, and giraffe, her favorites) before putting them into her mouth in order to scratch her teething gums. It seems that Luidi's lesson opened up new possibilities for Helena's world, new ways to interact with the objects in it.

A second event last week, when we stopped by Luidi's parents' house for the little boy's birthday, took the lesson to a new level. Luidi and a couple of his friends were playing with some interlocking construction pieces, and Helena sat in the middle of them, picking up one thing and then another. Several of the other little boys took the pieces from around Helena to build their own things, but Luidi stopped them, and put half a dozen pieces around her: "These are Helena's," he told his friends.

Games follow rules, and within the game, we have relatively limited freedom: you can't pick up a soccer ball and carry it. But an even greater limit on our freedom, I think, is that we allow ourselves to get stuck in one game: an adolescent who can only argue with his parents, and doesn't know another way to relate. The businessman who knows all the rules of the game in his business (including the rules about when he can get away with breaking the rules), but never steps out of that game to ask if what he is doing is right. The girl who thinks that the rules of fashion are obligatory all the time. These are social games, rather like Wittgenstein's language games.

Luidi taught two important lessons to Helena: first, that she could choose what game to play with her toys. And second, that not all games are selfish and competitive: games can also be about helping others and making them happy. And as Helena learns these lessons, more options are open to her. She becomes a little more free.

Vacation

2011-02-21T07:10:00.000-08:00

Rita, Helena, and I have been on vacation for the last week, so I'm still catching up on work, but at least I can share a couple of photos from the trip to Aparados da Serra, in the mountains a couple of hours south of Florianópolis.

Entropy

2011-02-09T16:23:00.000-08:00

Babies are chaos machines. Of course, that's the nature of the universe, or at least of the second law of thermodynamics, that entropy tends toward a maximum, that order devolves into disorder.

Helena has always loved to make a mess, but now that she is bigger and more mobile, she is more effective at destruction. Perhaps her favorite activity in the world right now is tearing down towers that Rita and I build from plastic blocks. It animates her like noting else, bating her breath, inspiring her to do things she doesn't like to do, like crawl; she's always wanted to walk, but crawling just doesn't do it for her. Even so, right now, as I am writing, Rita has been building towers, and Helena has convinced herself to crawl just to topple them.

I think, though, that this little experiment shows the conflict between the laws of thermodynamics and the process of human history. While Helena increases entropy in the world, she's actually building order in herself: she's learning new things, building new neural pathways, and growing up.

Physicists suggest that entropy may be the arrow of time, what makes humans perceive time as passing, and not like the other three dimensions, which we feel as spacial, through which we can move and then return. But the way we understand time growing up is exactly the opposite, as an increase of order.

All of which, I suppose, returns us to what Helena taught me about Hegel this weekend. The old German philosopher may be right that that history advances through negative, but it is a very strange sort of negation that does it. Rather like learning how to crawl in order to tear down a tower so that, to quote Joshua before the battle of Jericho, one stone not lie atop another.

No

2011-02-06T13:12:00.000-08:00

Helena Iara has a new game: "No". She has come to love shaking her head back and forth with such velocity that trying to imitate her hurts the neck of stiffer, older people, and rotating her body in the opposite direction to keep her balance. Sometimes, this game of "No, no, no" makes sense as a simple negation, like after she tries to do something dangerous, we tell her no, and then she responds with shakes of her head. Other times, though, the head movements don't fit into times that we would expect a "no," like when she is standing alone, preparing to take a couple of wobbly steps toward Rita, or when she hears music she likes and begins to dance.

Helena's little game of negation inspired me to talk to her about Hegel... not so much because she would understand (who really understands GWF Hegel, after all? Not I, not many philosophy professors, probably not the man himself!), but because talking with Helena helps me to get my ideas around messy problems. That's the goal of this blog, after all, not to create a precocious philosopher, but that looking at the world through Helena's eyes might help me to understand. And Hegel, who made his whole career around negation, seems like he might be helpful to understand the game of No.

Hegel famously said that history advances through a long series of Noes, of the negation of what is. Judaism didn't so much create monotheism as a new and independent idea, as the postulation of a new, positive truth, but as the negation of the many gods of the Phoenicians and the Egyptians; this is certainly clear in the story of Elijah, in the book of Kings, and the stories of the reconquest of Judea after exile in Egypt. Christianity, in its turn, may have tried to present love as central to its message, but that was hardly new to Judaism. The novelty of the new religion lay in the way it rejected the centrality of Law to Hebrew through. Luther is a No against Rome, Thomas Münster a No against Luther... and so we continue.

But here's where Helena's game of No helped me. We often think of negation as that of an angry two year-old, a boy who says, "no, no, no, no!" and refuses to do anything. This is also the no of Barlelby the Scrivener, Melville's character who simple says that he would "rather not do it." Helena's "no" isn't that simple kind of negation, though. She's not just digging herself into the dirt and saying "I will not move," but instead playing with the No, dancing with it.

In this way, resistance isn't just a reactionary, even conservative urge. It's playful, dancing, maybe even productive. When Hegel says that History advances through the negative, I think her attitude is exactly what he's talking about.

Samba

2011-02-02T04:05:00.000-08:00

On Sunday night, Rita and I took Helena Iara to the park, but in January in Brazil, things aren't quite so simple: the Escola de Samba União da Ilha had taken over the little plaza in the center of the Lagoa neighborhood, and was in full scale preparation for carnaval. Maybe fifty zabumbas (base drums), thirty tamborins (not like a US tambourine, this one has no bells, and it's hit with a stick), dozens of cuicas, cavaquinhos... A furious and joyous sound.

Looking back over Sunday night, when Helena slept really badly, I think that we probably over-did the noise and stimulation, but Helena loved it. She sang along with the music (she has about a two note range now, but a decent sense of rhythm), danced by swinging her head back and forth, and played games with anyone she could find. It's very clear that she loves samba.

Samba is one of those art forms that a lot of people use for thinking life through, and for making manifestos about art. This morning, as she and I sat in the hammock after breakfast, I sang Helena one of these songs, Desde que o Samba é Samba, by Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso. The lyric she paid most attention to, and the central one to the philosophy of the song, is

O samba é pai do prazer Samba is the father of pleasure

o samba é filho da dor Samba is the child of pain

o grande poder transformador The great power of transformation

Brazil is famous for alegria or constant joy, but the truth of the matter is much more complicated: the history of the country, especially for those who make the extraordinary art and music that gives Brazil its reputation, is full of tragedy: slavery, war, hunger, social exclusion. The people are happy not because of who they are or what they have lived, but because they use art to struggle to win joy out of pain. That's why samba is the child of pain, but the father of pleasure.

Helena Iara has been living something similar over the last several weeks, as she learns to control her mouth and breath and begins to utter sounds that seem more and more like words. The miracle of language is that, like samba, it can turn pain into pleasure: think of the enjoyment of a movie with a tragic ending, or the elegant feeling of grace at the end of a novel by Henry James. Virgil may have put it best in the words of Aeneas:

Vos et Scyllaeam rabiem penitusque sonantis

 accestis scopulos, vos et Cyclopea saxa 

experti: revocate animos, maestumque timorem mittite:

forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

"You have braved the fury of Scylla, the deep-ringing boom

of her craggy home, you have faced the rocks of the Cyclops.

Pluck up your courage, let fear and sadness alone --

Perhaps, one day, even this will be good to remember."

As Helena finds more words and word-like sounds, she has cried less, complained less, and enjoyed more things (sitting and reading a book with me, singing...). Words that turn the challenge of a belly-ache or a baby's tedium into art. Her babbling songs may not be as beautiful as the words of Virgil or the voice of Caetano Veloso, but that's what they're striving for.

Falling down

2011-01-31T04:12:00.000-08:00

As Helena Iara has been learning to stand and walk, I've discovered that she loves to fall. Not all the time, of course, and she'll cry when her hear hits the floor, but on a nice soft surface, or when she just lands on her butt, she'll look up with a blissful smile. So this weekend, I told her a story of an encounter I had with a teenager living on the street, about a decade ago when I was working with street kids in Santa Fe. Since I wrote a radio commentary about the story back then, I'm going to shamelessly plagiarize myself here:

Last week, one of the homeless kids I work with came into the drop in center elated. A friend had loaned him a snowboard and taken him up to the Santa Fe Ski Basin, and the experience had left a smile on his face that I didn’t think even surgery could remove.

“You’re not just dead?” I asked, remembering my first day on a snowboard, where have a zillion flips over my toe-side edge had left bruises on my palms and sorer muscles than anything else I could remember.

His smile grew a touch more thoughtful. “Sure, I crashed a lot, but I’m good at falling.”

Several days later, the same kid came in. Perhaps he had gone to the plastic surgeon, I thought at first, because that permanent smile had been completely effaced. We talked for a while, played a game of chess, and finally, slowly, the truth began to come out. The sort of truth that fulfills everyone’s nightmare.

Several months before, an acquaintance had invited him and his girlfriend to sleep on his floor for the winter. At the time, it had seemed a kind gesture. But then, yes, the hero of my story walked in on his girlfriend and their host. Naked. In bed.

My heart contracted. He moved his knight to put my king in check.

“I’m so impressed with how you’re handling this,” I said, reaching for any good thing to say, any silver lining to the blackest cloud a young man can have pass in front of the sun.

“Remember what I told you?” he asked. “I’m good at falling.”

If there’s any truth to the old saw about how suffering builds character, it’s in those few words. And unfortunately, because life has become so easy for most middle and upper class Americans, we have no chance to learn how to fall. I imagine an average kid thrown into the same circumstances -- he would demand years of therapy, a prescription for Zoloft, and a new puppy. For a kid who’s been homeless for years, who’s been knifed in the back by his father -- sure, the experience is further evidence that life sucks, but it does not destroy him.

On the streets, among the orphans, the girls who were sexually abused for years, the gay boys kicked out of the house by their dads, and children from families too poor to support them, there are also some rich kids. The life of Jack Kerouac seems romantic to them, and they might talk about the joys of the open road, but in truth, they want to learn how to fall. Most children from American families have no chance to find out what they’re made of, to see if they are worthy of themselves.

So in the end, there’s a simple lesson and a more complicated application. We all need to learn how to fall better -- the question is how.

Maybe I’ll try snowboarding again.

This is Kurt Shaw for Radio for Change dot com.

You can see why I'm so excited that Helena is learning to fall.

Identity and Memory

2011-01-29T08:40:00.000-08:00

This week, Helena has come to love books. Now, she's always enjoyed standing in front of the bookshelf and looking at the spines, and more recently, in trying to pull them out and throw them on the floor, but this week she learned how to turn the pages, look at the pictures and relate them to the story... a book as a book, not as a mere object.

In the process, she's concluded that her favorite book is Little Gorilla, the story of a baby gorilla loved by everyone in the jungle, and his anxiety about growing up, because if Little Gorilla isn't little anymore, will everyone still like him? I think this deeper theme still escapes Helena Iara, but she loves the pictures of all of the different animals, and thinks that the lion is especially great (she has a stuffed lion, whom I bring into the story with a roar).

Yesterday, with each page that she turned, she reached onto the page to touch Little Gorilla, finding his little black form on almost all of the pages (though not when just a hand or foot represents the character metonymically: that's a hard step intellectual, I imagine). At first, recognizing the gorilla doesn't seem like that big a deal, but the book represents the little baby in lots of positions, doing many things, and eventually Little Gorilla gets big, and looks almost nothing like himself. Yet Helena always recognized him.

I told her a story of José Luís Borges, Funes el Memorioso, where the protagonist has perfect memory, and can re-create any day in his life in exact detail. Soon, he concludes that language is insufficient for his world: "It annoyed him that a dog at 3:14PM (seen from the front) would have the same name as a dog at 3:15 (seen in profile)." In the end, the perfect detail of his memory made abstraction, generalization, synthesis -- all of what we call thinking -- impossible. Unable to forget, he was unable to remember, or at least remember as we use the word.

Helena's recognition of Little Gorilla on many different pages, in many different incarnation, is a kind of forgetting of difference, a recognition of what matters and what doesn't, and as such, something that makes thinking possible.

11:30

2011-01-25T12:59:00.000-08:00

For the last several days, the Brazilian all-news-all-the-time station has been promoting an interview with Slavoj Zizek, one of my favorite philosophers and someone who shows up pretty often in this blog. (If you want an interesting thought experiment on how bad the American media is, try to imagine what it would take to put that kind of marketing campaign into an interview with a philosopher on Fox News or CNN) Unfortunately, GloboNews planned to show the interview at 11:30 at night, well after I prefer to be asleep.

Helena Iara fell asleep earlier than usual, and Rita and I prepared for a good night, but at 11:15, a certain small person decided that she did not want to be asleep. Nor did she want to play in her crib, in bed, or in the hammock. She wanted to go downstairs.

Now, one can argue about whether or not her real purpose was to see the interview with Zizek (which turned out to be great) or whether she just wanted to go downstairs and play with her toys. In fact, the second interpretation is far more probable (OK, almost certain). But to a philosopher-dad, it was a proud moment.

Toys, Gravity, Kant

2011-01-23T05:04:00.000-08:00

This morning after breakfast, Helena Iara sat in her high chair, throwing one toy after another to the ground, excited to hear the sound of the plastic hitting the tile floor, powerful knowing that either Rita or I would reach down and pick the toys up. "One down, two down, three down," I joked as I picked up yet another plastic block.

"Good thing," Rita replied. "Think of what would happen if Helena were in outer space, with no gravity at all." An image of Helena outside a spaceship, throwing her toys left and right and "up" and "down" (categories that don't make much sense without gravity), with nothing ever to stop them, flying off into infinity where Helena could never see them or play with them again.

Emmanuel Kant said something very similar, about how what we think of as a problem to do something, may be exactly what makes doing that thing possible: "The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space." The dove longs for an easier passage through the air, resenting the friction of each passing atom of oxygen... without recognizing that it's exactly that air that makes his flight possible. In the same way, I get tired of the force of gravity which forces me to bend down and pick up yet another toy, without recognizing how much worse it would be otherwise.

Slavoj Zizek defines this process as the goal of psychoanalysis: seeing that what seem to be the "conditions of impossibility" of an action are really "its conditions of possibility," what seems like a barrier to what I want is in fact essential to doing it.

It seems like a key lesson to fatherhood, a way to look at the sleepless nights and stomach aches and vomit after eating an apple. Without these things, without the needs a child has of her parents, we would never construct love, family, all of the things that we want from parenting. It's all air to a dove.

Pizza

2011-01-22T04:03:00.000-08:00

Helena, Rita, and I went out for pizza last night, an experience rather different than what most Americans would expect. While American pizza is generally cheap, considered a form of fast food, over the last ten years, Brazilian pizza has become gourmet, the sort of thing that people dress up to eat, expect unusual flavors like black fungus and arrugula, and drink wine.

From the moment we got to the pizzeria, Helena Iara set out to seduce everyone in the restaurant: she started with the waitresses, looking at them, throwing kisses (a new skill she learned this week), then opening her arms as if to say "come and get me!" before flirtatiously turning to hug Rita. Next, she wanted to walk around the room, and stopped at each table to look up at each person. When they smiled at her, she would move on to the next diner, as if to say, "Have you played with me yet?" By the end of the evening, she had "talked" with everyone and inspired people at one table to talk to people at another: an event had happened, and it brought everyone closer together.

A couple of months ago, I wrote a blog about Sara Blaffer Hrdy's hypothesis that babies are the foundation of human culture, because they are so hard to care for, that one person can't do it alone. The baby needs grandparents and friends and aunts and uncles as well as her mother and father, because unlike most other animals, humans are born too early, too small and fragile to do anything for themselves. I think that Helena's adventure last night, however, suggests that Hrdy begins with too much of a negative (or maybe physicalist?) frame: "babies are hard to care for, so people have to come together to guarantee the continuity of the species." In this case, though, Helena brought people together through shared joy, not shared suffering.

Here's where I think Rita's thinking is really innovative: her research in the favelas of Recife and Rio de Janeiro showed that children play exactly this role as the glue of civil society, as the element that brings together families and neighbors into groups and informal organizations. Children are community organizers, even in a pizza parlor.

Walking with Thumos

2011-01-19T17:40:00.000-08:00

It looks like a week of milestones: Helena took her first steady, solo steps today. Just four or five steps from me to Rita and then Rita to me, never sturdy or secure, but she could repeat them, and she wasn't just using her feet to catch up with her body as she fell forward. Perhaps the funniest thing, however, with a soccer-mad father in a futebol-mad country, is that as she walked, she also dribbled a ball with her feet, kicking it once or twice as she covered the yard and a half between her parents. And I don't think this is coincidence: as she put her feet in front of her to kick the ball, she overcame the balance problem that had kept her from walking, the tendency to get her weight in front of her feet and then fall down. The ball seemed to compensate for that.

The most exciting thing about her steps, through, was not the dribbling. It was the look of extraordinary pride that she expressed on her face, the quick little screams of joy that stood in for "I did it, I did it!" For the last hour, well after her achievements, she hasn't stopped smiling and calling out. It seemed a good time to tell her about Peter Sloterdijk's valorization of thumos (pride, heart, honor) over eros (love, desire) in some of his most recent work.

Much of modern and post-modern philosophy is about desire: Hegel, Freud, Lacan, Zizek... lots of the people I write about in this blog. Sloterdijk, however, as I told Helena, thinks that this emphasis avoids something that the Greeks considered to be a much less ambiguous value: thumos. Pride and the love of honor, the desire for the respect of others, motivated the Greeks to do heroic things, and Sloterdijk sees it also behind George Soros or Bill Gates's immense charitable foundations. But I didn't tell Helena about the supposed political benefits of pride. I concentrated on the feeling she was expressing.

Thumos lies at the root of "enthusiasm" (to be filled with pride or honor), and it is something that I love to see in Helena. She isn't ashamed of her pride, as many of us learn to be; when she does something well, it makes her happy, and she wants it to make others happy, as well. The point isn't to inspire the envy of others (as is often true of too many of our motivations), but just to be excited and proud of herself.

And today, as she stumbled across the floor, dribbling a little ball, she deserved her thumos. And she makes me enthusiastic along with her.

Mama

2011-01-16T08:12:00.000-08:00

Like most great moments, the first time that a baby says "Mama" isn't really a single moment, except in history or memory. The American revolution doesn't really begin with Beacon Hill or Paul Revere or the Declaration of Independence, but with thousands of little disobediences, refusals to pay taxes, resistance of colonial officers. Nor can we mark the beginning of a war with the annexation of the Sudetenland or the Anschlüss. But we choose to mark one of the moments of a process as the "real" beginning.

For me, Helena just said Mama. Said it, in the way that human beings use language to mean something, to do something. She was sitting on my lap in the hammock, a little tired, but happy to be outside and looking at the trees. Then she asked for my fingers so she could stand up on my legs, looked at Rita working in the garden, and called out "Mama." Then she screwed up her face, looked into the sky, and whined. It was clear: she wanted Mama to help her go to sleep, because she was tired. And as I write this, Helena Iara sleeps in the next room as Rita watches over her.

In grammatical terms, Helena used Mama as a vocative, a call to someone, just like I might say, "Hey, David" to my brother before making a comment or asking a question. I don't think that Helena used the word as a signifier, as a sound that refers to a thing: I doubt that she even considers Rita (or me, or anyone) to be a thing, a substance with properties, let alone understands that words refer to things. But she used the word. She used it with purpose, with a plan. And as Wittgenstein says, "In most (but not all) cases, we can say that the meaning of a word is its use in a language game."

Signification and meaning may come later, but for me, today is July 4 or July 14th, the arbitrary day we choose to call the one that matters. Today, when she said "Mama", she was speaking.

Watermelon

2011-01-10T11:12:00.000-08:00

Horses, representation, play

2011-01-08T12:46:00.000-08:00

Last night, Rita and I took Helena Iara to a country restaurant for dinner with her family, and as one might expect, a baby does not find adult conversation interesting enough to sit quietly at the table. Fortunately, the restaurant owners know this, and they had build a wooden jungle gym, swings, and a couple of kitschy model horses and oxen harnessed to an old cart and landau. I took Helena out to the front, and we played on the swings and then walked over to the horse.

As we sat on the landau (I say landau, as a two wheeled cart, but do they need to be covered? I'm not sure: certainly it wasn't a surrey) behind the horse, a three year old boy was playing on the horse's back, and my mind inevitably (if you have read this blog before, you know that "inevitably" isn't as ironic as it might seem) turned to Plato's idea of representation. Plato said that what's "really real" is the ideas, and that what we see as "real things" (horses, in this particular case) are nothing but inferior reflections of the idea of a horse. Art, as a representation of this representation, is even worse, and as such should be prohibited.

Was the horse in front of us really a representation of a horse in a field, though? Today, most kids encounter a horse as a toy long before the encounter one in real life, and the same is true with most stuffed animals: Helena loves frogs and bears and a moose and a couple of rabbits, and she has never seen any of them in real life. Children don't really see their toys as representations of something else. They are for play, not for representation.

The easy postmodern out (one much in fashion when I was in college, so much that I wrote my senior thesis on him) was the philosophy of Jean Baudrillard, who theorized the simulacrum, understood as a "copy of which there is no original." Epcot Center serves as a wonderful example of a simulacrum. The difference, of course, is that Epcot claims to represent something (the "real" China across the water) and merely does it badly, and Baudrillard secretly desires for there to be an original in the background, and feels a little sad or nihilistic that there is no idea which the simulacrum can represent. But a toy... it's different. That a toy bear or frog represents its model poorly is no criticism: in fact, the toy can be much better for not appearing anything like its supposed reference.

There is pretty good evidence that the whole Platonic (and eventually Western and then almost-universal) obsession with representation emerges with money, which can stand for anything. Coins (first established in the West by Midas in the 6th or 7th century BC), this strange new thing which can become anything in the process of exchange, open the question of representation, to which Platonic philosophy is only the first of many answers. But many cultures, and all little kids, don't care about that. Their word isn't governed by symbols and signs, but by the act of play (I reflect a lot on this on the book I wrote about child soldiers in Colombia).

To Helena, the whole question, raised by Plato and still at issue among analytic philosophers today, just doesn't matter. She just wants to play on the horse. And honestly, I think that's a much better philosophical position than almost all of the philosophers of language I've read...

Helena and the Monkeys

2011-01-06T15:33:00.000-08:00

One of the wonderful things about the house that Rita and her father built a dozen years ago here in the jungle south of Florianópolis, is that monkeys come to visit from time to time. They are small monkeys, marmosets really (I think black tufted marmosets, but many distributions maps don't have that species coming that far south), and occupy more or less the ecological niche that squirrels do in the United States. but it's still pretty exciting to be sitting outside reading a book, only to hear the whistling call of a monkey and to see a family playing in the trees.

Day before yesterday, Helena saw the monkeys for the first time. Seeing a little monkey in the trees isn't really all that easy, and you have to learn a lot about perception before you can pick out the difference between monkey-brown and tree-trunk brown, but once she learned to see them, she'll often see them before we do. She starts by staring, then shouts, and then claps three or four times in a row. And strangely enough, the monkeys seem to like Helena Iara as much as she likes them. They have come back many more times recently than they ever did before.

So of course... Helena and I had to talk about Darwin as we swung on the hammock and looked into the jungle this morning. I explained a little bit about the theory of evolution, about the finches of the Galápagos and moths in England during the industrial revolution, but mostly I told her about how mad people got, and many continue to be, about Darwin's argument that man is a primate, that Helena's monkey friends are also her very, very distant cousins.

I think the problem is basically this: many people want to think that we are different from the animals in our essence, in something that precedes us, something given by God. I argued to Helena that it's actually the reverse: if we are different from animals, it isn't because of what someone (God, providence) did to us, but what we do, what we create. The difference between men and animals comes after, because of what we do, not what we are.

Etiê Apuã

2011-01-02T06:47:00.000-08:00

Helena Iara has been speaking a lot of new words recently, if "words" is the right term. She repeats the same sound again and again, as if they were words, but without a clear meaning or a connection to sounds we can understand. And her favorite of these repeated sounds is "etiê apuã," together with some variations like eteteiê, abuã, ebwa... And then, of course, there is the ever-present mamama, which may or may not refer to Rita, though she does seem to us it in the right context from time to time, meaning something like, "Mom, I need you."

It's the repetition of etiê apuã that's been fascinating, though. She's used the words for the last two weeks, and they seem to be important to her, even if not in the conventional sense of meaning, of connecting a sound to a thing to which it refers. I'd love to think that apuã is a real word for her, because it means both mountain and head in Guaraní, the native language that used to be spoken in this part of Brazil (and the origin of Iara, Helena's middle name), and given my love of both mountain climbing and intellectualism, what could be a better first word for my daughter? Unfortunately, though, I don't think there is any way in the world I get to make that argument. Besides the Guaraní loan words common in Portuguese, Helena has never heard the language spoken.

It's the variations on the words that strike me as perhaps a more honest way to think about etiê apuã. She'll sometimes drag out the vowels, other times repeat the consonants, other times almost sing the words as if they came from a tonal language. Sometimes the nasal vowels (ê, ã) are more defined, other times those same sounds seem more flat and English. She is experimenting and playing with sound, but in a way that reminds me of what John Coltrane did to well-known melodies: she takes them, tears them apart, puts them back together.

The traditional definition of the human being was as a logicon zoon, an animal with reason or language (logos means both in Greek), but Hannah Arent famously turned this idea on its head, showing that many animals use sounds as a way to convey symbols, while some people cannot. Art, she says, is the aspect that makes us human: no other animal makes art. Helena's game of theme and variation on etiê apuã makes me think she may be right: before language is meaning, it is art, an attempt to play with sounds in order to create beauty.

Sharing Joy

2010-12-27T14:14:00.000-08:00

Several days ago, Helena Iara and I sat on the floor playing with some of her toys. I took a small lion and pushed the button on its back, which inspired a low, electronic roar. Helena beamed with joy, then looked at me with the most wonderful, innocent of gazes, a gesture that said "cdid you see that?" better than any words can do.

With that look, Helena taught me something that I've never read in a tome of philosophy or theology: the wonder of sharing wonder, and what that means about childish joy and adult anomie.

As children and teenagers, we learn to hide our joy. I'm not sure quite why, though I shared some ideas with Helena Iara: might we think that if others see our wonder, they'll gain that power over us? Or that we need to seem blasé and sophisticated, which are the opposite of wonder? That the definition of adult is the loss of wonder? Perhaps is is mostly about modesty: when we show so clearly what we love and what gives us joy, we become naked in front of the other, a kind of intimacy we learn to share with only a few people. Certainly, if I think of my adolescence, one of the ways I could define it is as the process by which I learned to hide wonder from others... and sometimes, even from myself.

Helena, however, wants to share her joy and wonder. Whether it is the feel of sand under her toes, the elation of water that splashes on her face, or a music video on YouTube, she not only expresses her joy, but also looks at Rita and me to insist that we admire it as much as she does. And as we look at the world through her eyes, we come to the same kind of joy.

Almost twenty years ago, I climbed a 20,000 foot peak in Ecuador with several Swiss and Spaniards whom I had never met before. When we came back from the summit, after (literally) pulling each other up the immense mountain, I wrote to my parents saying that I had seldom felt so close to other people in my life, that nothing builds intimacy like shared suffering, the rope that connects climbers and makes us responsible for the lives of out climbing partners. Yet even so, I never saw any of those climbers again. Perhaps the intimacy was too frightening, we had become too exposed.

Something does build intimacy even more than shared suffering, though: shared joy. Not only that bond that Rita and I develop with Helena Iara, but the one we share with my parents, with Rita's parents and brothers and sisters... with anyone that will open herself to the wonder of a little baby. It's a wonderful thing, but also a frightening one, so I suppose I understand why teenagers work so hard to cut themselves off from it. But perhaps it's also the reason that many people have children: because it gives us a small chance to return to something like that wonderful innocence.

Creation from Water

2010-12-24T03:51:00.000-08:00

Christmas in the south of Brazil means high summer, the sort of blasted, humid days I remember from August in central Pennsylvania when I was growing up. It's the perfect kind of weather for a little girl who loves to play in the water, and Helena has spent wonderful afternoons over the last several days sitting in a a kiddie pool in the back yard. She splashes and splashes until her hands and feet become prunes. It seemed like a wonderful to talk about the history of water in philosophy.

The day Helena was born, she stared at me with utmost attention, and I felt like I had to say something. I tried to tell her the history of greek philosophy, just because I knew that I'd be able to keep riffing on that theme for a long time, and I told her about Thales of Miletus, who tried to find the first principle of everything in water. Yesterday, I started a little bit south of Greece, with the first words of the Torah: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." It was one of the first texts we had to translate in Hebrew classes, and I still remember the strange vocabulary of "without form and void" or "hovered over the face of the waters." The point, though, is that Moses (or whoever really wrote those words" associated water with creation.

The obvious connection with a baby is that a fetus is also created in water, and many mythical and psychoanalytic ideas about childhood start exactly there. As Helena Iara splashed almost all of the water from the little tub in which she was sitting, however, I began to think of something else: for her (as for many babies, I imagine), water is the first experience of making a concrete impact on the world. I throw my hands into the water and it splashes up to wet my face, my mom, the floor. My actions have consequences. Splashing water is an act of creation, one of the first that a baby experiences.

Water isn't like wood; it doesn't stay carved: however much you splash it, it returns to something like its original state. Simón Bolívar tried to express the futility of his life with the phrase, "Él que hace revolución arra el mar," he who makes revolution makes furrows in the sea." It might not seem the best metaphor for creation. But in fact, when Helena splashes, she does change the world. The surface of the water will not hold her furrows, but there is less of it in the kiddie pool than when she started. I am wet, Rita is wet... and everyone is happy. That's a pretty decent metaphor for the experience of most people with creation: it may not last, it may fade away, but for a moment, it makes us happy.

Happy Babies

2010-12-19T08:00:00.000-08:00

For anyone who spends time around babies (or at least most babies; clearly, there are loads of exceptions), one of the most striking and wonderful things is their happiness, the contagious innocence of their smiles and giggles. For someone like me who likes to think philosophically, this joy is wonderful, but it is also a philosophical problem: why? Why are babies so happy so much of the time, while adults... well, simply, aren't.

There are lots of answers to such a simple question, of course, and I've tried out a bunch of them at different moments in this blog. But as Helena Iara and I swung in the hammock yesterday, and she grinned at the swinging motion, at the huge lizard gliding across the yard, at the wind in the trees and the sound of my voice, I remembered some of my father's words from when I was a teenager: "The more different things you can enjoy in life, the better chance you have to be happy."

(Contrast with one of my favorite lines from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: "You know," said Arthur, "it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxication in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young."
"Why, what did she tell you?"
"I don't know, I didn't listen."

Sometimes, it's worthwhile to pay attention to one's parents.)

Dad's lecture... well, not so much a lecture, with the disciplinary tone that entails, but really a kind suggestion, came at the height of adolescent pretension, the moment when we show that we're better than other kids because of what we hate. Country music, parachute pants, pet rocks, hot dogs, heavy metal... honestly, I don't remember what it was that brought on the conversation, but something I knew that I should not like, if I were to appear the sophisticated grown-up I wanted to be. An American teenager puts a lot of time into learning how to dislike things, so that he can feel as if he is superior, cool, different, the same...

In truth, what what likes is more about identity, about constructing who I think I am and how I want others to see me, than it is about pleasure. That's why the question, "What kind of music do you like?" is such a fraught one. It's not really a question about aesthetics, but about whether you're going to be cool enough to be my friend.

Babies, as I told Helena, don't fall into those traps. They can enjoy the play of light on the leaves without anyone laughing at them for being simple. They can express their love for their mommies transparently without being accused of being "Mama's boy." They haven't yet learned that enjoyment is a complex system of social controls. They just enjoy.

Mimetic Desire

2010-12-18T04:43:00.000-08:00

Helena hasn't spent much time with other babies. Yesterday, however, Rita hosted a baby party for several of the women who had been in her maternity class, so Helena spent the afternoon with four other babies, all of them about her age. It was a fascinating encounter, perhaps meriting an essay on the anthropology of babies, but I want to talk about just one event.

Helena sat on the living room floor, surrounded by toys and pillows. Pedro, a handsome little boy about a week younger than she, was playing with a toy truck we brought this week on our long trip from the US. Helena found her favorite rattle and began to shake it, attracting Pedro's gaze. He dropped the truck and crawled as fast as he possibly could toward Helena, reached for the rattle, and ripped it from her hand. Helena didn't even cry, she was so surprised, but Pedro's father took the rattle, explained the need to be kind, and gave it back to Helena. For the next five minutes, the scene repeated itself, even as Pedro's father gave Pedro another rattle, distracted him with other toys, and tried everything he could imagine.

As I sat on the hammock, rocking with Helena some hour later, I told her about two French philosophers who have thought long and hard about this dynamic, though not necessarily with babies. One of Jacques Lacan's most famous aphorisms, for instance, is that "Man's desire is the desire of the other," which can be read in many ways, among them that I want what the other wants. (Probably, the most accurate interpretation is that what I desire from you is not you yourself, but your desire for me, but I didn't talk about that with Helena.)

More to the point, though, is the literary theory of mimetic desire, developed most carefully by René Girard as he looked at romantic triangles in novels. Two men love one woman: this is the stuff of Balzac, Tolstoy, Jane Austen, and who knows how many other great novelists. For Girard, however, the basic question here is not, in fact, the object of desire (Anna Karenina, the femme fatale of film noir), but the relationship between the two men. I desire the thing (the woman, the car, the whatever) not because of what lies essential in it, but because I see that another person desires it. Girard extended this argument to our relationship with fiction (Don Quijote desires what Amadis de Gaul wanted, etc), but the basic point is there: our desires have more to do with imitating the desire of the other than with anything that comes from the object of desire.

And there, I explained to Helena, is Pedro and his desire for the rattle. The rattle is cool, of course. It makes a nice sound, you can chew on it, you can bang it on the floor. But what really mattered to Pedro is that Helena had it in her hand, that she was enjoying it. Mimetic desire starts when we're little.

Happy Sleep

2010-12-14T17:03:00.000-08:00

This post isn't really about the philosophy I've talked with Helena Iara. In fact, it's much more about me (One could argue, with good evidence, that one could say this about every post on this blog, but I'll leave issues of projection for another day).

I've always seen myself, and probably correctly, as a happy person, and I've long wanted to attribute this fact to a certain reflexivity, perhaps even a philosophical orientation, in my character. When things get tough, I can think through them, analyze them, criticize myself, and come out happy again.

Unfortunately, over the last year, philosophy hasn't saved me from the occasional black moods, emotions that have always seemed very foreign to who I am. As is obvious from these posts, I have often been very happy with Helena and with Rita, but from time to time, a kind of sadness and irritability has passed over me, something I feel powerless to stop and change.

Over these months, I have spent time and effort trying to understand this emotional blackness, testing hypothesis after hypothesis in a kind of spiritual scientific method, but without any success. I think, however, that I may have come to some kind of a conclusion. It all has to do with sleep.

I had always attributed my better than average happiness to my better-than-average capacity to reflect and philosophize, so one can understand that I would be a bit disappointed to find that the real cause could be something much more jejune: the fact that I sleep 9 hours most nights. Or more accurately, slept. You can't keep that up with a baby in the house. Sleeping less, I have found myself exhausted, unable to keep up the happiness that I always found so easy.

I suppose it shouldn't be a surprise that happiness is organic, a form of energy not that much different from the ability to run a marathon or climb a 20,000 foot mountain. I couldn't do either of those without sleep either. But ever since Aristotle declared that the purpose of philosophy was to seek felicity, thinkers have claimed that their way of seeing their world, their techniques of reflecting on themselves -- all of philosophy, in fact -- would serve as the royal road to happiness.

Helena slept almost 18 hours today, and she can't stop smiling. Maybe we really just need more sleep.

New Michelangelo fresco found in the Vatican

2010-12-10T08:34:00.000-08:00

I know I don't have time to play with Photoshop right now, but this one was just too much fun not to do. The original is below:

Christmas

2010-12-09T17:25:00.000-08:00

OK, it isn't really Christmas yet. We've got a good three weeks to go. But since Rita and I leave for Brazil on Sunday, my parents came to Santa Fe this week to celebrate an early Christmas with us and Helena Iara. It was splendid, with everything one could possibly want from a holiday: great food, presents, laughs with friends and family...

But since Christmas came early, I felt like I had to explain a little bit of the holiday to Helena. I told her of a people who had been oppressed and abused by everyone, by the Egyptians and the Persians and the Babelonians and the Romans, and who dreamed of a savior, someone who would free them from oppression and slavery. They imagined some great warrior, some heir of the fabulous David, who would throw the Romans into the sea with swords and fire... and they got a little baby. Tiny, weak, and happy. One who would soon have to flee into Egypt in fear of those some Romans.

Some savior! But, as I explained to Helena Iara, I think that was the point. A savior saves us, and we don't have to do anything. A baby, on the other hand, acts by turning us into actors, makes us into agents. We want to help, care, be kind, love the little baby. And that was, after all, the goal of Jesus's ministry, later, too. To help people to love each other, to do justice not only on the political level (he was pretty weak as a revolutionary leader), but especially on the personal one. To do justice, to love one another, and to walk humbly with your God, as the prophet put it.

And babies, I have learned over the last several months, do that pretty well!

Prohibition and desire

2010-12-05T11:40:00.000-08:00

Helena Iara isn't even a year old, but she already understands a the logic of desire: when things are prohibited, we want them more. For instance, imagine that she is sitting in her baby seat, set on top of the table as Rita and I have lunch. We will offer her toy after toy, which she will play with for a moment, and then throw aside. A toy left barely within reach deserves a little more attention, if only because it is a challenge. But... a piece of paper? A hot teakettle? The Tabasco sauce? Anything that we do not want her to touch (and we don't even have to say it explicitly), that's what she wants.

A lot of intellectuals these days connect this idea with Michel Foucault, and he certainly did formalize the ideas in his political philosophy, but Foucault himself attributed the seed of the idea to Deleuze. And as I explained to Helena Iara a couple of days ago, the idea goes back at least as far as Paul of Tarsus, with his famous, "Were it not for the law, I would not have known sin," and the rest of the epistle to the Romans. Paul certainly didn't invent the idea, either: any mother paying close attention to the behavior of a baby will see the same thing.

But as a philosophy professor of mine once said, "The dirty little secret of philosophy is that most of the great idea have already been thought. We try to complicate them up so that we look smart and original, but carpenters and grandmas had them long before we did. Even so, it's worth while to repeat them, though."

And in the end, as I repeated the connection between prohibition and desire to Helena Iara, I knew I was not being original. But it helped me not to get irritated as she reached, yet again, for the sharp spines on the crown of thorns plant in front of the window.

Peek-a-boo Two

2010-12-02T18:12:00.000-08:00

When I wrote last week's blog, I forgot the great philosopher of the Peek-a-Book, Bishop Berkeley, so Helena and I had a quick talk about him this week. He seems to make the same mistake that contemporary psychologists do about babies, thinking that what the kid is struggling with is merely object permanence, with the idea that things can exist outside of our perception of them.

Berkeley took philosophical idealism to its extreme, saying that in fact, the world itself did not exist. All that was "really there" is the subject who perceives, and God who sends the perceptions directly into his soul. The world "as it is", other subjects... all are merely my own projections, confusions of my relationship with God. There is a certain mystical logic to this, at least as Western Mystics have always said that God is all that really matters, but both babies and most of the original thinkers of Judeo-Christianity didn't make that mistake. After all, Jesus says, "As you do to the lest of these my brothers, you do to me." It isn't as Berkeley suggests that others are a projection of the subject's relationship with God, but that God is an extension of the justice we do to others, especially the poor and vulnerable.

I think babies understand the basic premise, and parents do, too. God is, to a certain degree, a byproduct of the love we bear for one another.

Peek-a-Boo!

2010-11-27T08:09:00.000-08:00

Over the last couple of weeks, Helena has come to love the game of peek-a-boo in its various forms: I cover my eyes with my hands, and then open them up to "peek-a-boo"; Rita hides behind a wall and then appears; I slide below the crib, makes sounds, and then lift my head up with a loud "beep!" These games guarantee a laugh from Helena, and also gave an excuse for a brief talk on philosophy.

Most psychologists interpret babies' love for the game of peek-a-boo with their understanding of object permanence: when a child comes to understand that an object is there whether I look at it or not, the appearance and disappearance of objects becomes an intellectually challenging game. "Where is the thing? I can't see it, but it makes sounds, so it must be there... There it is!" The confirmation of this knowledge brings the laugh.

As I told Helena, though, I think there is a basic epistemological error in this way of reading peek-a-boo. It makes sense for when the baby's eyes are hidden, but babies love it even more when the adult hides his or her own eyes. It is the adult who can't see, not the child, so object permanence isn't really at issue... unless, of course, we think that children are as stupid as the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, described in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as "A beast so mind-bogglingly stupid it thinks that if you can't see it, it can't see you." Since I don't think babies are that mind-bogglingly stupid, we have to come up with another reason for why they love peek-a-boo.

My sense is that babies love to see their parents cover their eyes, pretend not to know where the baby is, and then open them to a "There you are!" because they are learning to recognize the perspective and subjectivity of the other. The game plays with the slow realization that other people are not merely there to serve or impede the baby's desires, but have their own perspective on the world. Babies come to see that others are also subjects with desires and perspectives... and limitations. Dad is not a God-like figure, because he can't see when his eyes are covered; like the baby, he only know the world by the holes in his face that let sensations in.

Sara Hrdy gives the example of the “False-Belief Test”: sitting with a mother and a small child, Hrdy would ask the mother to cover her eyes. Then, she would hide a cookie that had been in plain sight before the mother had closed her eyes, and ask the child, “Where does you mother think the cookie is?” In general, middle-class American children younger than four years old said that their mothers believed that the cookie was hidden under the table. Older children, on the other hand, generally recognized that the mother would continue to think the cookie was on the table – a false belief – because she had not seen the cookie move. Attributing a false belief of the other, the recognition that his or her point of view is incomplete, shows that I accept that the other has a mind with different beliefs and perceptions than my own... and in that way, exactly like my own perspective, which is also limited and often wrong.

Hrdy is talking about older kids, but playing peek-a-boo with Helena Iara suggests that this process happens much earlier. In fact, I'd like to suggest that it's a central part of what it means to become human: for the Tupi-Guaraní Indians, for instance, this ability to recognize that the other has a perspective (and the desire to learn from that perspective) are the center of what it means to be a person. And no less thinker than Emmanuel Kant insists that the essence of ethics is recognizing that the other is an "end-in-himself", a subject with a separate perspective on the world.

Peek-a-boo as an ethical exercise: who would have imagined that a baby's game would be so essential?

Happy Thanksgiving

2010-11-26T11:38:00.001-08:00

"Hey, you!"

2010-11-22T18:55:00.000-08:00

Thanks to her paternal grandparents, Helena has several new toys that talk to her. One is a little ball with buttons and lights and a little internal motor that allows it to roll by itself, while the other is a "baby's learning laptop." Both of them talk and flask more than I might like, but they aren't all that irritating... except for one fact. If you don't play with them for a while, they yell at you. The laptop asks, "Are you home?"which isn't actually that bad, but the ball sings "So much fun to learn and see, why don't you come and play with me?" Though only an inanimate object, it demands that you pay attention to it.

As we had dinner with Joey and Sarah, Helena's American godparents, last Friday, Joey heard this story and declared, "Only six months old, and she's already being interpellated!"

Helena is probably one of the few babies around whom one can have a sensible conversation about French structuralist Marxism (though who knows; it may be that lots of babies love the subject. I don't want to do the research to find out), but it still does require a little bit of explanation. In his classic example of this process, the French philosopher Louis Althusser mentions a police officer who yells “Hey, you!” on the street. When I turn to look at the officer, I recognize myself in his words and recognize his authority over me. In the simple action of turning and looking, power molds my subjectivity and legitimates the authority of the police officer. But if I just continue walking, pretending I didn’t hear, I look like a surly adolescent, which also, perversely, affirms the power of the police officer. Interpellation, then, both constitutes the subject and establishes the context of power in which both the “oppressed” and “oppressor” operate.

According to Althusser, this "Hey, you!" is the way we come to see ourselves as an I, as a subject (for him, like for Foucault and many other French theorists, the subject/agent is always confused with the subjected subject, the "king's subject".) One is subjected to a person or process as much as one is the subject of an action. However, in almost all of the theory around the issue, it is a police officer, a person in authority, who calls your name. In Helena's case, as Joey pointed out, it was actually an object (not an inanimate object, unfortunately, because it is capable of moving itself) that engages in the process of interpellation, which can call out to the baby "Hey, you!"

What does all of this mean for Helena as she grows up? Not much, I hope... she also has many other flesh and blood people (authorities and not) around her. But what about for kids who grow up immersed in technology that demands their attention? With video games and robots and who knows what more? Will they develop the strange dynamics of resistance, fear, and obedience that we have with police officers, except with machines? A frightening prospect.

Realized Eschatology

2010-11-17T19:33:00.000-08:00

Over the last couple of weeks, Helena Iara has come to love the anticipation of things as much as the things themselves: sometimes even more. For instance, she (like many babies) loves zrrrbts, the release of air against her stomach or another big space of skin, but now she smiles and laughs even more as I breathe in, breathe out, come close, pull away... play the game of "zrrrbt coming!" In the same way, she has long loved to hear a fake sneeze, finds it hilarious, but now she giggles even more in the "ah, ah, ah, ah..." that comes before the "choo" of the expelled sneeze.

So today, she and I talked about the idea of realized eschatology in early Christian thought, something we find in both Paul and John (no, not the Beatles, the Apostles...), expressed perhaps most clearly in the phrase "The Kingdom of God is among you." (Luke 17:21) The idea is that the Kingdom of God (generally understood in that time as a kind of worldly utopia of justice and peace, not, as in post-Constantine Christianity, as heaven after death), is a promise of a just future, but also something present in the community that is struggling for that justice. If you have ever been inspired by a civil rights march or a rousing folk song by Pete Seeger, you probably understand what I mean: people come together to struggle for justice in the future, but as they come together, they have the sense of solidarity and joy that they hope such a future will bring everyone.

Paul talks about politics and religion, but for Helena Iara, the same is true of a funny sneeze: the future begins to colonize the present, and we get the joy of the anticipated result long before the thing itself. As I told Helena, it reminds me of the way my father always thought about vacations: he would sit over books and guides and photos for months before we left home, not so much because he wanted to make the trip error-free, but because he loved the anticipation of the trip as much as the trip itself.

I think Helena's joy may explain why Buddhism never really tempted me with its condemnation of desire. Buddha said, quite correctly, that suffering comes from desire, because we almost never get what we want, and when we do, it turns out to be something different that we thought it would be. As such, to be happy, we must overcome desire. I think, though, he missed the joy of realized eschatology, the giggle we see on Helena's face as she waits for the fake sneeze to come. Desire and struggle isn't just something for the future: it's the way the joy we want from the future can touch the present.

Wind

2010-11-15T17:43:00.000-08:00

As Helena and I walked to buy vegetables a couple of days ago (well, I suppose as I walked and carried her, and she entertained herself by watching the world go by and kicking her legs), a strong wind came down from the northeast. Helena hasn't faced much wind in her life, and she didn't like it. Or perhaps more accurately, she complained and was fascinated at the same time, wanting to understand what it was that was beating against her face and making her cold.

It seemed like a good time to give an etymology of wind, an idea that plays a much bigger role in the history of religion and philosophy than most people realize. In Hebrew, the word for wind is ru'ah; in Greek, pneuma, and in Latin, spiritus; in all three languages, the word also means two other things. First, rather like the English phrase "he got his wind back," or "she ran faster after she got her second wind," all of those words also mean "breath." But more significantly, all of them have also been translated as "spirit", that essential word in the history of western religion.

I explained to Helena Iara that spirit, like wind, is something you can't see, at least not directly. You can only see its effects and consequences. Helena loves to watch the trees blow in the wind, for instance, or to watch a stormcloud roll over the house. In the same way, many ancient peoples believed that you can't see spirit, but that doesn't make it any less present; its effects are obvious. And spirits/winds can be both good and bad, blowing the clouds away to show the sun, bringing clouds and rain to water the crops, but also the cold wind of winter that bites our faces, and the drafts that almost every traditional people believes is the origin of colds and the flu. Good and evil winds, good and evil spirits.

Spirituality, on the other hand, seems impoverished and new age in contrast to the raw power of wind. Maybe it's because we're too German, where spirit is Geist, a cognate of ghost: it seems like what is left over when the body is gone, a soul that floats up to heaven. But like most religious concepts, spirit starts out as something very material, like the sun (Apollo, Ra) that burns and makes the plants grow. You feel it in your face, use it, curse it, struggle against it...

And as we walked back from the market, the wind at our backs, Helena seemed much more content.

The semiotics and social agency of eating

2010-11-06T11:43:00.000-07:00

People without babies (OK, me, before we had Helena) often mistake the real challenges of caring for an infant. I had always imagined that "sleeping like a baby" had some basis in truth, for instance but teaching Helena Iara to sleep has been one of the most difficult challenges we have faced. And food... we all need food, right? People like to eat. The problem with most Americans is that we eat too much, after all. In fact, however, teaching Helena Iara to eat has also been a challenge.

The problem with food, as I explained to Helena a couple of days ago, seems to be more about semiotics than about taste. Semiotics? you ask (and certainly Helena would have asked, could she speak). The science of symbols? What does that have to do with food? Well, I explained to her, she had seen a spoon before, because we use it to give her medicine. She doesn't like medicine, whether because it tastes bad or because it's associated with when her belly hurts, so the spoon has become a symbol associated with something she doesn't like. It doesn't matter what the spoon has in it: it carries more than just food, it carries meaning. Give Helena orange juice in a spoon, and she'll spit it out. Give it to her in an adult's cup, and she'll plead for more.

And that's the point of semiotics: symbols and signs matter. They don't just refer to things, but they bleed into those things, imbuing the signified with the taste of the signifier, the thing with the sound and associations of the word. The Danes named the beautiful island they found in the north Atlantic "Iceland", and the terrible, glaciated place "Greenland", largely so that other countries would think that the sign described the place, and leave them alone on their wonderful geyser and hot spring paradise. Much of marketing is based on the same premise: associate the right words and signs with a thing, and people will come to like even something as nasty as Coca Cola or Cognac.

But there's another issue behind the spoon, too. Adults hold the spoon, and we give it to babies. They aren't the actors of the action, not the protagonists of the story. Since helping children to see themselves as protagonists, as actors on the world stage, is what most of Rita and my work and mature writing has been about, I suppose it makes sense that I would talk with Helena about that problem, too. She wants to feel like she is the agent, that she is the one doing the eating (and the choosing, the chewing, everything). Almost all adults have come to wonder at and fear that one simple, infantile phrase, "I can do it myself," and Helena has already reached it at six months, long before she is able to speak.

Smashed banana and applesauce are the foods that start most babies on the road to eating, but Helena hates them, they literally make her vomit. The foods come on a spoon that also carries meanings she doesn't like, and she doesn't control the process. But hand her a piece of a ripe pear, and she'll gum away at it contentedly. The same with a peeled half of an orange. And yesterday, Rita pierced the grains on a corn on the cob, and Helena eagerly sucked out the marrow. It was a messy process, but a wonderful one, and she smiled and laughed and ate with real gusto.

In fact, Helena loves to eat. It's just that she want so eat the right symbols along with her food, and she wants to do it herself.

Cause and Effect

2010-11-04T10:50:00.002-07:00

Helena loves the bathroom sink. I've mentioned that in other blog posts, but she loves it so much it bears repeating. And in the last several days, to her surprise and joy, she has learned to turn the water on: she stands before the mirror, by the sink, and throws herself toward the mirror, as if to embrace her own image. As her belly hits the handle on the faucet, the water flows on. She looks toward the spigot, straightens up, and smiles as broadly as a girl can smile.

Though several times Helena has also been able to turn the water on with her hand, it seems that she thinks that the cause of the water flow is her lunge to touch her own image, a fact that inspired a conversation about magical thinking and the philosophy of David Hume. As much as we might like to dismiss magic in current rationalist discourse, we can actually see it as an important precursor for modern science, because magic is basically an attempt to understand cause and effect. I got sick, and I don't know why. On the other hand, when I get a bruise, I know why: it's because I got in a fight and my enemy hit me. Under the same logic, then, if I am hurt by illness, it must be because my enemy did it. Magic serves as the connection to explain how my enemy was able to affect me at a distance.

Helena isn't thinking magically, but she is trying to connect cause and effect: Whenever I lunge at the mirror, the water turns on, so she thinks the lunge is the cause of the water. To a certain degree, it is, but only when mediated by her belly striking the handle, the essential element she may not yet have grasped. The point is that she is researching her world, and trying to find ways to test her hypotheses. When she tries the same thing with another bathroom mirror, and the water doesn't turn on because the handle for the sink is somewhere else, she'll have to develop new hypotheses.

By seeing people's failure to connect causes and effects (or their recognition that they had the wrong cause for the observed effect), the Scottish philosopher David Hume developed a skepticism about the intrinsic connection between cause and effect. We may assume that the lunge at the mirror causes the water to flow (or that the rotation of a key causes the car to start), but we never know if we are actually right. It may be that we just haven't found the case where it doesn't work, or the intermediary step that is truly essential (turning the handle). This skepticism did great things for philosophy and science, forcing Kant to develop his categories of apperception and bringing the scientific method of trial and error closer to its modern form.

At least that's why I explained to Helena Iara. She wasn't that interested. She just wanted to turn the water on again.

The Dinner Party

2010-10-29T17:12:00.000-07:00

A symposium sounds so serious, the kind of thing that one tries to avoid on a university campus, knowing that it will probably be staid old men talking about something you know nothing about. The word comes down to us from one of Plato's best dialogues, called "The Symposium" in most translations, but which really means "the drinking party" (sym being "together" and posion being "to drink"). Similarly, the central rite of Christianity, the eucharist, is also originally a drinking party, where Jesus and his disciples came together to drink wine, tell stories, and think together. Eating, drinking, and thinking have long gone together.

(photo by David Shaw)

You can see, then, why I have been so excited about the day that Helena would begin to eat solid foods. I had no expectations that she would suddenly burst forth with reflections on Diotema and Alcibiades (two of the guests at Socrates's symposium), but there is something wonderful about eating together, about sharing food and a table.

One can imagine my sadness when she not only made a face at the apples that Rita had carefully prepared, but then threw them up, together with all of her milk that morning. And a houseguest -- Barbara, the wife of my mentor in politics, Scott Armstrong -- had to catch the vomit in her hands. Not exactly the conviviality for which I had been waiting.

In fact, Helena likes the social practice of eating. She likes to sit with us, take a spoon in her hand, coo in response to the dinner conversation, and even ask Rita to bring the lip of a water or orange juice cup to her mouth. Perhaps it is a little like speaking, where she mastered the social conventions of talking and listening long before there is any content to her words, she has learned the social game of eating, the dinner party part, long before she has learned the joy of chewing and ingesting food.

We'll see how she takes to eating over the next couple of weeks. For now, I'm content that she's good company at our daily symposia at the dinner table.

Questions and Answers

2010-10-24T14:56:00.000-07:00

My brother came to Santa Fe this week to meet Helena Iara, so she and I didn't have as much time alone as we often do to talk about philosophy. This lapse in our conversations allows me to go back to a chat we had almost two months ago, before leaving Brazil, one that says a lot about why I would possibly want to talk philosophy with a girl who almost certainly can't understand most of what I have to say.

We were sitting on the hammock on the front veranda, enjoying one of the first warm days of the Spring in the south of Brazil. She would say "é" with the intonation of a question, I would respond with "ó" or "é", now more like a statement, and she would respond with another question or what sounded like an answer, and we went on for half an hour like this, just swing back and forth on the hammock as we swung back and forth in the conversation.

Questions and answers, I explained to Helena, are one of the basic issues of hermeneutics (the science of interpretation of texts), especially in the form adapted by Hans-Georg Gadamer. Gadamer said that the real challenge of any attempt to interpret a book is to find the question to which the book is the answer. What issues mattered to the author? Why did he or she address them in that way? Looking for the question is a way to try to get into the head of the writer (or just someone with whom you are talking), to see the world from his perspective for a second. In the language of hermeneutics, the challenge is to find the horizon of the other, what is the limit of what he or she can see? The job of the reader is to try to make his own horizon overlap that of the other, so that there is some kind of an encounter of perspectives on the world. An exchange of questions and answers: not as in "you ask the questions and I answer," but "I am trying to find out what questions really matter to you."

To a certain degree, Helena and my exchange on the hammock was exactly this kind of negotiation of horizons. I try to figure out what matters to her, what questions she is asking: it is about the tree moving behind me? About the light warm wind? About the shadow of the house moving slowly across the front lawn? What matters to this baby?

I can't possibly see the world from her perspective. She has a kind of innocent wonder to which no adult can return, and the raw nature of her perceptions, un-encumbered by the experience that older people have, would be impossible to recover. But these conversations help me to encounter her horizon, to see what she is capable of seeing, what questions matter to her.

The same is true of this whole blog. How can my philosophical concerns (my horizon) encounter the limitless curiosity of a baby girl? From time to time, the encounter is productive. Other times, it's a dialogue of deaf people. But that's like almost any encounter, isn't it?

Labels, cast-offs, and the sacred

2010-10-16T08:44:00.000-07:00

Helena Iara loves the labels on her stuffed toys. She often spends more time studying the labels than she actually does playing with Pinkme the Hippopotamus or her various soft and cuddly frogs. Now, though we could fear this as a sign of consumerism, I think there is something else going on. So as we were walking to the park this week, I began to talk to her to try to think about why.

The anthropologist Mary Douglass did a fascinating study of the philosophical origins of the purity laws of the Hebrew Torah, and concluded (in good structuralist fashion, but probably correctly), that the Mosaic law is based largely on definition and categorization, and what doesn't fit in the categories, is an "abomination", impure. For instance, one defines fish as things that live in the ocean and swim, but mollusks and shrimp live in the ocean, but they don't swim. Outside of the category, they are impure and not kosher. Similarly, animals are defined by the way they walk and the structure of their hooves, so pig and camels, with feet divided in a different way, cannot be eaten.

More telling to the idea of the label, is the way that Douglass interprets the ritual of circumcision. Douglass says that the Hebrews considered the foreskin to be something "left over", an excess on the body. It was neither of the body, nor not of the body: it didn't fit into the categories. Thus, it had to be cut off. Since Helena doesn't have the anatomical experience to understand these categories, I doubt she understood what I was talking about... but then again, I'm not sure how much of any of these talks she understands, even as she's approaching six months old.

Several decades after Douglass wrote Purity and Danger, the Bulgarian philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva took up her argument, situating it within wider religious ideas of the ancient world. In Latin, for instance, the word sacer can mean both "abomination" and "sacred", both what is cast off, and what is most valued. To a certain degree, this idea makes sense, for though shellfish don't fit in easy categories and definitions, gods don't either. Bringing the idea of the abomination and the sacred under a single category of misfits, Kristeva talked about the abject, or literally, what is thrown down.

You (and Helena) are almost certainly wondering what any of this has to do with Helena's fascination for the labels on her stuffed animals, but in fact the connection is easier than it appears. Like the Hebrew idea of the foreskin, the label is something that sticks out, something that doesn't really belong. It messes up the smooth flow of Pinkme the Hippo's rump. It isn't part of his body, but it isn't part of the rest of the world, either. For that reason, it fascinates Helena: not one thing or the other, it defies simple categorization.

I went on to argue to Helena that designer labels serve as our postmodern sacred, and the huge "Dulce and Gabbana" or "Nike" that we wear on our chests stand as a symbol of our fidelity and piety to the great gods of our day, consumption and money. Maybe or maybe not. Regardless, labels, the sacred, and the cast off all draw a baby's attention.

Hunger

2010-10-11T20:44:00.000-07:00

“Desire is filthy, barefoot, and homeless; it always sleeps in the dirt, in the open air, in doorways and in the street.”

- Diotema, in Plato’s Symposium

Helena has a new favorite song, at least in the morning, when she is elated to be alive. It's a kind of funk carioca, an adaptation of funk developed in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, but this one for kids. And, oddly enough, it's about hunger. You can listen to it here (even if you don't understand the words, the rhythm is catchy enough that you'll understand why Helena likes to dance to it.)

Homelessness and hunger play an important role in a lot of early philosophy, not just Diotema's quote above, which sees the philosopher in a kind of desperate poverty as he desires knowledge and wisdom, but also Socrates himself, who might have been considered homeless (and, quite frankly, crazy) by a lot of professional social workers today. Diogenes the Cynic (not to be confused with the way we understand cynicism today, Cynicism was actually a very sincere movement, trying to take seriously the idea that the philosopher needed only the love of wisdom, and no possession more, to be happy) even lived in a barrel on the streets of Athens, where he famously insulted Alexander the Great for placing more value on possessions and conquest than on the values taught by his mentor, Aristotle.

I was explaining this to Helena Iara yesterday as we took an afternoon walk to the park, where homeless people in Santa Fe tend to hang out (since the Bush-inspired Great Recession, the number of homeless men and women has skyrocketed in Santa Fe, though (fortunately) the number of kids has not), when we ran across a virulent argument among an Indian woman and a hispanic man, both of whom seemed, from the dress, to lack homes to which they might return. At first, it appeared that it was merely an angry dispute, full of curses and offense, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing. I wanted to walk past them quickly.

As we listened, however (unavoidable, because of the volume of the argument), we heard something else: "What, you don't want me to stand up for myself?"

"I meant you should..."

"I should have a backbone, and that means standing up to you, too."

We didn't hear much more. Standing around to listen would have been rude. Even so, that brief exchange, for all of the vulgarity I deleted, showed that philosophy is alive on the street. It's a conversation about dignity, courage, and meaning, however crouched in words that most academic philosophers might not use on a daily basis.

When I left Harvard, largely because I despaired at the lack of intellectual curiosity there, I was excited to see that ideas really mattered to kids living on the street. When you're fifteen and sleeping under a bridge, you want to know what's the meaning of life to give you a reason to go on another day. That, I explained to Helena, is why Diotema is talking about hunger, and why a funk song for children might be more than just fun.

Walking in beauty

2010-10-07T19:23:00.000-07:00

We have been in New Mexico for almost a month now, and Helena is getting used to the place: the dry, thin air, the cold mornings, the big open vistas. But as we walked to the Railyard Park today, so that she could meet other kids and play in the playground, I realized that though I have talked to her a lot about Tupi-Guarani philosophy, we've never talked about the native people of her second home. It was a beautiful morning and we were walking in the shade of the cottonwoods, so it seemed to make sense to talk about the Navajo virtue of "walking in beauty."

The Navajo word hosho doesn't really mean just beauty, I explained to Helena Iara. It means goodness, happiness, and most of all, balance. For the navajo, things are beautiful and good when they are in equilibrium, an idea shared by many cultures, but one that it particularly important for people who live by herding sheep in the desert, where a small tip of the delicate natural balance can mean death for a family.

I've never actually studied Navajo philosophy: I worked with a homeless Navajo girl when I first came to Santa Fe, and Rita and I have been out on the Big Rez a couple of times, but like most whites, my contact with the Navajo comes mostly through Sgt. Jim Chee and the Legendary Lieutenant, Joe Leaphorn: yes, the novels of Tony Hillerman. In fact, though, as I explained to Helena Iara, that makes all the sense in the world given the value that the Navajos place on hosho. As Agatha Christie once explained in reference to the detective novel, murder disturbs the balance of the world, and the role of the detective is to restore equilibrium by explaining why it happened and by seeing to the punishment of the guilty. It makes sense that Jim Chee is both a detective and a shaman: both seek to restore a balance that has been lost to illness, crime, or evil.

By the time we had gotten to this idea, Helena Iara and I had reached the playground, so rotation (of the merry-go-round) seemed much more important than the violation and restoration of balance (in Portuguese, by the way, balançar (to balance) also means to swing. It is one of Helena's favorite verbs, especially given how much she loves to swing and rock). But finally, as we walked home, I explained the problems of this philosophy of beauty as equilibrium.

The problem is this: both the detective novel and the philosophy of balance suppose that things started balanced, right, beautiful... and that some evil action messed everything up. Our role as humans is to restore the lost balance: a fundamentally reactionary mission. We can see this idea in contemporary right wing America, for instance, for whom everything was perfect in the 1950s before the hippies and the commies and the New Left came to screw with America.

In fact, of course, America in the 1950s is not a Paradise Lost, now were things happy and wonderful before the murder that the detective must solve. Neither history nor justice works as a return to the past, but as a learning that reaches for the future. Unfortunately, though, as I got to this point in the talk, we made the final turn home and Helena fell asleep in the snuggly, so I didn't get to wax pedantic on the dialectics of history. Hegel will come another day.

Sleep and dreams

2010-10-02T09:22:00.000-07:00

Before having a daughter, I bought into the myth of "sleeping like a baby," but it seems that ll babies have trouble getting to sleep, or at least that's what other parents tell me when I complain (or just mention?) how difficult it is to get Helena Iara to bed. The world around her is so interesting that she prefers being able to pay attention to everything around her, even when she knows she is tired and grumpy.

For quote a few months, Helena only slept with rocked aggressively in arms or swung in a bassinet (hung by a rope from the ceiling was particularly effective), but recently, Rita has done a wonderful job of helping Helena to sleep without so much external support. I haven't been as successful, but I have helped her (helped?) by talking a little about the philosophy of sleep.

Though it appears that Helena fully embraces Nietzsche's dictum that "man is not made for sleep," I tried to explain to her that though one should not live for sleep, one can affirm life and still recognize that it is important to rest, so that one can learn and enjoy and drink deeply from the cup... or the breast. That argument didn't seem to convince her much, but she hasn't really shown much enthusiasm for Nietzsche. I suppose that's not surprising: Nietzsche has always been a favorite of teenagers, not so much of little babies.

So I moved on to dream metaphors in the Spanish Baroque, especially Calderón de la Barca's idea that La Vida es Sueño, most often translated as "Life is a Dream", but which can also be understood as "Life is sleep." Like some kinds of Buddhism, Calderón insisted that the phenomenal world around us is nothing more than an illusion, with no more consequence than a dream (which is not, of course, to say that dreams don't have consequences. They do... just of a different kind that the material cause and effect we find more common).

I'm not sure whether my argument was successful or boring (or perhaps both), but unexpectedly, Helena slept.