The semiotics of a Baby Bjorn

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.

Making the high places plain

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.]