Out of place

Helena loves picnics.  The mere idea of eating outside -- even if it is just some raisins as a break from a tiring time at the playground -- sends her into paroxysms of enthusiasm.  "Picnic!  Picnic!"  Over the last couple of days, even when there is no food to be found, she plays picnic on the porch or at the park, excited to eat far from her high-chair and the family dinner table.

Another of her favorite games is "slide on daddy's chair."  Several years ago, I got a great knock-off of the famous chaise-lounge by Le Corbusier, "Machine for Relaxing #2"(a splendidly silly name for a very comfortable chair), but since Helena discovered it, the piece of furniture is no longer mine.  It has become her slide, and that of all of her toys.  She climbs onto the chair, says "Scared, scared!" in an all-too-real voice (not unlike the way she screams of the top of the huge slide in the park before she rushes down it), and then drops head-first toward the floor, where she catches herself on her hands.

These two games seem completely unconnected, but they have something important in common: an activity out of place.  Eating at the table is just eating... but eating in the park is play.  Sliding in the playground is just fun, but sliding in the house is both make-believe and fun.

Clearly, play is much more than just putting things in new and unexpected contexts, but it is one important kind of play.  The miracle of Bill Watterson's Calvinball, for instance, is that anything can be imported into the game: rackets and nets and flags and balls and pretty much any rule one can imagine.  Calvin and Hobbes is so funny (and Calvin and Hobbes fight so much) because of the creative anarchy of this kind of play: there are no rules about where things should be or what one should do with them.  A tennis racket can be used in tag, and a high-modernist piece of furniture can be used as a slide for a baby.



It's not all that different with adult play.  When I designed this house, I loved using mixing bowls as sinks and ball valves as faucets.  Jacques Derrida always insisted that his philosophical method was a form of play... and what he really did was take ideas out of context, mix them around a bit, and then show that they weren't as clear and simple as everyone had thought.  Useful as poststructuralist philosophy or child's play, but mostly just fun.

Playing

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.

A pair of pathetic peripatetics

Last week, as Rita's sister Sandra was looking after Helena Iara, she lifted our baby's hands above her head as she stood up, and the little girl began to walk.  With a lot of help, of course, but even so, it is quite striking to watch a baby as small as she is stepping along the ground, shouting with joy at each step.  The day afterward, Rita and I took some pictures of these steps:

I have always found it fascinating that one of the most influential schools of classical philosophy called itself the "Walkers": the Peripatetics, founded by Aristotle in the 4th Century BC.  Many of the philosophical schools started with rather strange names, including the stoics (because they met under the stoá, or common porches) or the cynics (who took the kuon, or dog, as their symbol as a way to symbolize their affront to authority.  Some people say that the Peripatetics took their name because Aristotle liked to walk as he lectured, others because their members were to wander the world to teach others.  Regardless, it is strange that the most establishment and staid of the schools would choose a name having to do with movement.

I didn't start off talking with Helena about Aristotle, though.  I told her a joke from Calvin and Hobbes: "What if someone calls us a pair of pathetic paripatetics?" Calvin asks his friend.  After the pause (one of the most important innovations Bill Watterson brought to the cmic strip was the idea of dead time), Hobbes responds, "I've never heard of anyone taking the time to rhyme weird insults."  "But shouldn't we have a ready retort?"

The joke is even more clever than it seems, given that "pathos" (the root of pathetic), which meant both suffering and passivity, was the thing that the Peripatetics, the Stoics, and many of the rest of the philosophical schools of the ancient world were trying to avoid.  A pathetic peripatetic isn't just a weird insult: it's a metonymy for failure.  The Peripatetic's philosophy, it appears, was insufficient to guard him from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, which was the whole point of philosophy: to be a shield against the suffering endemic to the world.  Of course I explained all of this to Helena, but what she really liked was the alliteration and rhythm of the words.

It's interesting how often walking comes up as a philosophical or religious practice: I told Helena about mendicant monks in Theravada Buddhism, about the vision quests of Native North Americans, and about the way that the prophet Micah summarized the message of the Hebrew religion: "He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?"  (The King James translation doesn't catch the heavy political tones of Mishpat and Hesed, the words translated as justice and kindness, but that's for me to explain to Helena Iara another day)  Jesus called his philosophy the 'hodos, the path or way, and he's hardly the only thinker to do so.  Walking, wandering, wondering, all of them seem to get mixed up as a way to talk about philosophical reflection, but without a mirror.  Perhaps it's a way for us in the west to think through the shift in perspectives that is so central to Tupi-Guaraní philosophy.

After all of these digressions with Helena, I finished with the story of Justin Martyr, who's confessions are also about walking... walking from one philosophical school to another as a way to find truth, happiness, and some kind of justice in an unfair world.  Though we don't generally associate Justin with a good sense of humor, one of the things I remember from my attempts to translate his writing in grad school is how he made fun of the cynics and stoics, the epicurians and the peripatetics.  What's interesting, however, is that the last philosophical school he found, the one that gave him the most useful way of thinking, was Christianity.  We see it as a religion today, but in the 2nd century, it was a philosophy: a powerful one, one that made people willing to rise up in revolution against the Romans or be martyred in hundreds of icky ways, but a philosophy.  Away to walk, we might say.

It's pretty exciting that Helena Iara ca walk and think every day a little more, and with a little more autonomy.