Mirrors

A couple of days ago, Helena Iara's mirror neurons were in high dunder.  I would stick out my tongue, and she would imitate me.  The same with arm motions, the curl of a tongue as I made the shhhh sound.  It was great fun for both of us.  So that evening, when I had some time alone with her in the hammock, I started to tell her about those mirror neurons... only to find my lecture wonderfully undermined by irony: instead of looking at me as she normally does, she had begun to look in a mirror, and she couldn't take her eyes off of it.

Now, in most of the history of western philosophy, people use mirrors in order to look at themselves.  There is the myth of Narcissus, of course, and Plotinus' comment that "the soul is a mirror that creates material things reflecting the ideas of the higher reason."  Even Lacan, normally so far out of the philosophical mainstream, declares the Mirror Stage as the moment that a baby is able to recognize herself seeing her reflection.  Helena, however, didn't have much time for philosophical commonplaces: she liked the mirror not because it reflected her own image, but because it showed the back of the hammockin which we were sitting.  She could see both the front and the back of something, and she was thrilled.  Rita tells me that the day before I saw this game of mirrors, Helena was doing the same thing with Rita's image reflected on the computer screen through the PhotoBooth program, looking back and forth from Rita to her image on the screen, trying to make sure that both were really there.

It's nice to think that Rita and I are raising a daughter who is not a narcissist, but I think that something more is going on.  Mirrors do show us our own reflections, but even more significantly, they alter perspective, allowing us to see the world through eyes that are not our own.  When Helena was able to see both the front and the back of the swinging hammock, she got an exciting look at the plurality of the world, its three-dimensionality, and its complexity in the eyes of many different people.  I have mentioned the different concepts of knowledge in the west and among Amazonian tribes, and this game of mirrors seems to represent exactly that difference.  In the west, the mirror is a chance to stand outside ourselves and see ourselves as an object.  In Amazonian thought, in contrast, the point is to incarnate a different perspective, to use the songs of another tribe to feel what they feel, to use ayahuasca to see through the eyes of a jaguar.  Helena Iara, faithful to her second guaraní name, was using the mirror in the second way: to change her perspective on the world.

Alenka Zupancic says that this shift in perspective is central to comedy:

Thanks to the redoubling, we leave behind the imaginary mirror-turn logic for another logic, that of the shift: we get a reality slightly out of place in relation to itself... This shift opens the space for the symbolic Other as immanent to the given situation (as opposed to the Other constituting its framework or outer horizon.). [The Odd One Out]

The pleasure and laughter of comedy comes from this small shift: not to see the world from some God's eye view, but only a little askew, a little different.  And as Helena looked into the mirror, seeing the back of the hammock instead of its front, she smiled.  It was wonderful.

The Fold

A couple of nights ago, Helena Iara was crying inconsolably.  None of the techniques that Rita and I have developed over the last several weeks could calm her, so eventually I just took her into another room and shut the door so that other people in the house didn't have to hear her scream, and perhaps Rita would be able to sleep a bit.  The second strategy certainly didn't work: a couple of minutes later, Rita came in to help, and we put Helena on her back on the bed and started to bicycle her legs, something that sometimes helps her to pass gas or digest.

She continued to cry, if a little less desperately, until suddenly, a backpack lying next to her caught her attention.  The cries stopped instantly, and she simply stared at a fold in the cloth of the backpack, the pain in her belly (and everything else that was bothering her) forgotten in the excitement of discovery.  I don't know if she was excited by the shadows, which she has always liked, or perhaps by the fact that the same material looked so different in different places, but the crying was over.

Now, I could just get excited about the way that her intellect had helped her overcome suffering, and that is pretty cool.  But because she still didn't want to go to sleep, I decided to take advantage of her discovery to talk about, of course, Deleuze (the "of course," is, of course, a joke.  Connections aren't that obvious) and his idea of the fold, the way that doubling something over can turn the two dimensional into the three dimensional.  I stayed in Paris one time with a French architect who had made this concept the center of her work, which always fascinated me, but it didn't seem to interest Helena Iara at all, and she started crying again.  So I decided to talk to her about a part of Delueze's philosophy that I understand a little better: ideas of difference and repetition.

Anyone who has read to a child knows the basics of Deleuze's argument, which I think Alenka Zupancic may synthesize best:

"When a child demands that his parents should textually repeat the story of the previous evening, he expects -- as strange as it might sound -- a surprise.  And he gets it." [The Odd One In, p. 181]

Helena Iara isn't quite old enough to demand the same bedtime story again and again, but she does like this kind of novelty-in-repetition, playing the same little games, wanting to dance before sleeping every night, and enjoying the constant repetition of similar sounds in her "conversations" with Rita.  For her, this repetition does not mean sameness: in fact, there is something new that she gets out of it each time.  [I wonder, by the way, if we might be able to diagnose a calcified mind as one that finds no novelty in repetition, while the growing mind finds difference in repetition).

I shared all of these ideas with Helena, and she seemed to find them more interesting than Deleuze's philosophy of the fold.  I'm more interested by them, too, of course, and I am sure she picked up on that. But the real contradiction, which helped her to fall asleep, is Deleuze's conclusion: having already proved that repetition leads to a certain kind of novelty, he asserts that the only thing that remains the same is difference itself.  We can see a kind of jejune insight here, the "the only constant is change" of consulting company advertising, but if we try to perceive through the eyes of children, I think there is something more interesting going on.  The only constant in repetition (as, in fact, in change), is surprise.  The wonder of finding our minds and our selves changed by what we encounter in the world.  When we lose this, we lose childhood, I think.  And a good bit of our humanity.

Theories of Desire

Babies are desire-machines, who simply want and who don't take no for an answer, so it would make sense to talk about theories of desire with Helena Iara for that reason.  The truth is, though, that last night's conversation, as I tried to keep her occupied a bit so that Rita could have some brief time on her own, was much more solipsistic (one could argue that this entire exercise never goes beyond solipsism, of course, but this seems extreme): I wanted to talk about my own desires about children.

Because here is the truth of the matter: not only did I not ever want to have children, I actively wanted not to have kids.  And yet, having this basic desire negated in the most absolute way (a baby on my lap as we swing on the hammock) has, in fact, made me immensely happy.  So I wanted to think hard about the relationship between desire and satisfaction and happiness, and Helena seemed at least moderately interested in my reflections on Lacan and Buddhism.  At least she kept looking in my eyes, didn't sleep, and didn't cry.

Psychoanalysis has always put desire on the first plane, and with Jacques Lacan, it became the closest the French analyst got to a commandment: "Do not give up on your desire."  Lacan and his followers did not have any illusions that the satisfaction of these desires would make one happy (in fact, philosophers like Slavoj Zizek explicitly reject happiness as a criterion for judgement), nor were they naïve in thinking that any whim that comes into a person's head ("I want a new TV set") rises to this sort of level of ethical imperative.  But desire served as a way to see if a person was being honest with himself, or was selling out on what he truly wanted from life.

Now, on the other hand, Buddhism has the opposite perspective on desire: desire is the origin of suffering, because people suffer when we want something and can't get it.  And since we never really get what we want (and when we get "what we want," we soon find that it isn't what we really wanted, as anyone who ever won the jackpot in the lottery will be quick to show), desiring things makes us miserable.  The only way out, said the Buddha, was to learn to stop desiring, to eradicate wants and wishes from our thoughts.

Babies are much more Lacanian than Buddhist, of course: they want to eat, to be warm, to be changed, and they will not stop crying until they get what they want (fortunately, Helena is great about this: as soon as we figure out her desire and satisfy it, she's a content baby again).  Perhaps my coincidence, Helena was much more attent as I told her about Lacan than as I told her about Buddhism (most likely, she just picked up on my own interested and biases).  But Lacan doesn't really work for the aporia I was trying to work through with Helena Iara: how the absolute negation of my desire could bring me such happiness.

In her brilliant analysis of comedy The Odd One In, Alenka Zupancic notes that both tragedy and comedy depend on the mis-encounter between demand and satisfaction.  Both tragedy and comedy happen when we don't get what we want.  For tragedy, we can think that Hamlet doesn't get revenge, Oedipus gets more than he wanted when the kingdom he desired requires that he kill is father and marry his mother, Antigone can't bury her brother...  In comedy, Cyrano doesn't get Roxanne, and then gets more than he expects; Olivia falls for Cesario, only to find out that "he" is really Viola; Jack Lemmon can only seduce Marilyn Monroe dressed as a girl...  Zupancic proposes to understand the difference between comedy and tragedy as one of point of view: tragedy is this mis-encounter seen from the point of view of desire/before, while comedy is the same mis-encounter, seen from the point of view of satisfaction/after:

"The discrepancy that constitutes the motor of comedy lies not in the fact that satisfaction can never really meet demand, but that demand can never meet (some unexpectedly produced, surplus) satisfaction."

We might be able to describe this better if we think about love: all of us know someone who knows everything he or she wants in a romantic object, so any real person always turns out to be a let-down.  The magic of love is that it satisfies a desire we never had even thought about, never knew we had.

So how to think about this happiness with Helena Iara?  It could easily be a tragedy, the end of so many dreams of travel and instigating revolutions and who knows what other things I thought I needed to be childless for.  That would be seeing from the perspective of desire.  But I think it's much better to look from the point of view of satisfaction, from the feeling of contentment I have with a wonderful little girl on my lap as I rock back and forth on a hammock.  That makes the story a comedy, one that ends in happiness.  Or at least runs with happiness as the moral for a while...