In the jungle

A couple of days ago, Helena Iara and I began to climb the tall hill behind our house, a wonderful little intact jungle in the middle of the neighborhood (in fact, it was only reforested from a coffee and banana plantation in the 1950s, but the Atlantic Rainforest recovers so quickly in Brazil that parts of the jungle seem virgin).  We have hiked the steep trail before, but always when Helena was so little that we had to put all of our effort into not falling off the rocks into the mud.  This time was different: she was stable enough on her feet that she could look at things.

At first, Helena wanted to experiment with gravity: if she threw a rock down the path, how far would it go?  And a leaf?  A stick?  What about a flat rock?  As she began to pull too many leaves from the bushes, however, I tried to explain why plants need their leaves, with a brief digression into photosynthesis and the sun.  Who knows how much Helena understood, but when we explain a "no" to her, she generally goes along with us (an unexplained rule, on the other hand, will inevitably be broken!), and this was no exception: she stopped pulling the leaves from the plant.

The first biology lesson went so well that I took advantage of a rest break to talk about water, and we traced the roots of trees as they went to the trunks of the trees, and then looked at how each tree was different from the others.  From time to time (and much to my pride) she often said "pretty cool," her favorite term of approbation.

Now, I don't have any illusions about Helena remembering anything about ecology from the walk up the mountain.  Much like so many of my talks about philosophy during her first year of life, the content wasn't the point at all.  If there is any lesson I wanted to pass on, it was to pay attention to nature, to look carefully at it.

As we walked down the steep slope, she wasn't content simply to go home.  She needed to stop at every fallen seed or fruit on the ground, and then either pry it open or ask me to break it open with a rock.  Her curiosity has always run rampant: I didn't teach that.  But she had found some new things to pay attention to, to look at carefully.

Pretty cool.

Oedipus Fisher Price

Rita, Helena Iara, and I are now visiting my parents in Colorado, and Helena simply loves playing with the toys David and I had as children.  The Fisher Price Castle, with its moving stairways, secret passages, and dungeons (with a dragon, no less), may be her favorite, and she loves to move the "little people" (dolls with no arms and legs, for those of you who didn't have them as kids) all around and imagine the relationships they might have.

Last night, she put the queen in bed, and then put a little woodsman -- who might be an archer, horseman, or even Robin Hood -- in bed next to her.  She then found the king and brought him toward the bed, inviting several comments from Rita and me... but Helena quickly clarified the relationship: the little man clad in green was the queen's son.  None the less, she soon moved the king away to a spot atop the castle.

Personally, I love these little toys because they open play into narrative: though it's great when Helena plays with her dolls and stuffed animals by making them dance or slide, telling stories with toys is an even more interesting step.  Up to now, Helena's storytelling has been pretty simple, based around things that she has done, interfamily relations, or the simple joy of putting words together, but the physical relationships of the toys in the Fisher Price Castle seems to allow for longer and more complicated stories.  With the characters in place, she doesn't get lost in her stories very easily.

And with storytelling comes interpretation.  Mine, at least (I doubt that Helena is doing much hermeneutics!).  What would it mean if Robin Hood is, in fact, the Queen's son?  Does that transform the whole story of the Merry Men into an Oedipal drama?  In fact, there is something to this interpretation: after all, Robin Hood offers as a the political justification for his struggle against the Sheriff of Nottingham and Prince John, that he is defending England for Richard the Lionheart (off in Palestine during the crusades).  He is fighting for the definition of England (the mother land) against the law (in Lacanian thought, the law is the Father).

OK, it's a bad argument.  Not very helpful in understanding Helena's play with toys, nor the history of popular rebellions in England.  But the point is, that as babies begin narrative play and to do unexpected things that don't make sense, they make us think.  In some cases, the thoughts are useful, and in others, they don't lead anywhere.  But that, as an professor once told me, is philosophy.

Prohibition and desire

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.