Tomorrow

We're now in Recife, in the northeast of Brazil, where Rita and I are starting an internet-based news channel where kids from the favela are the reporters and the producers.  The youth hostel where we're staying has a swimming pool, which is Helena's greatest joy in this hot and not-very-safe city (in addition to the open sewers that run through both favelas and middle class neighborhoods, it was for quite a good part of the last decade the most violent city in the world), but last week, it rained several days in a row.  She couldn't get into the pool, though any time the rain gave us a break, she would walk by it and look into it.

Helena has understood the words "later" and "tomorrow" for quite some time; Rita insisted on "tomorrow," especially, as a way to show that when Helena goes to sleep at night, she'll be able to get up and play in another 8-10 hours.  It's only been at the side of the swimming pool, however, that "tomorrow" has become a happy word, that we can see the excited anticipation in Helena's eyes as she says "I go swimming tomorrow."

The use of the future tense itself is cool, with its knowledge of time, but I like even more the way that she has learned to hope.  Even when she was little, she seemed to understand that things could get better, that (as I wrote in that blog, now almost two years ago,

 if she is crying and you lay her down on the changing table, she stops crying long before you take her diaper off.  When she suffers from colic, just passing her from one set of hands to another will often quiet her.  Taking her clothes off before a bath, and she begins to smile.  The future begins to take effect before it arrives, if that makes sense.

Now, that hope can become verbal.  The future, and the happiness that it promises (a chance to go swimming!) comes to colonize, or at least to imbue, the present.

My father always used to enjoy planning for a vacation as much as the trip itself: looking at maps and photos and travel guides became a way that the holiday would give pleasure long before the car left our driveway.  I've since learned that that kind of planning can spoil the spontaneous surprises, the detours and unexpected friendships that may be the best part of travel, but I still like to think that way, I like the way that talking about the future, planning for it, can make the present better.  Helena has already started doing that, and it's great fun to be a part of it.

The Principle of Hope

Last night, Rita had spent a good hour with Helena Iara, trying to calm her colic pains before we could go to sleep.  Rita is very good at that sort of comforting, but she hadn't had much luck with all of the different things she did.  Finally, I asked her to pass the baby to me (I had just gotten back from a soccer game), and made a couple of waltz steps.  Within seconds, Helena was calm and had stopped crying.

Now, I suppose we could analyze this story as a kind of emotional pickle jar; you know, when you have spent fifteen minutes trying everything to open a jar, and then you pass it to someone else who opens it on the first try.  Your efforts had gotten the lid to the last step, and you just had to try once more.  Rita, in fact, had done all the work with Helena, and I got the joy of hearing her stop crying, just by chance.

However, I shared another hypothesis with Helena Iara as we rocked on the hammock (and occasionally stood or waltzed as she got fussy), one based on the ideas of Ernst Bloch, a German philosopher whp fled the Nazis and became an important in the development of Latin American thought, though he may not be very well known in the US.  His most important book, the Principle of Hope, tries, like the ideas of Franz Hinkelammert I presented in my last post, to defend the value of utopia as a political category.

Hope, for Bloch, is not simply about waiting with bated breath, as we might mean when we say, "I hope it doesn't rain tomorrow."  Hoping is not passive, nor is it basically mental or emotional: hope is the foundation upon which action is built.  We hope that something will be better, and that hope gives us the strength to work to make it better, the faith that our efforts might have real results.  Hope is active and hope is subversive of what is.

So this brings be back to several curious things about Helena.  For instance, if she is crying and you lay her down on the changing table, she stops crying long before you take her diaper off.  When she suffers from colic, just passing her from one set of hands to another will often quiet her.  Taking her clothes off before a bath, and she begins to smile.  The future begins to take effect before it arrives, if that makes sense: she is calmed and made happy by trusting that what will come will make her life better.  She feels hope, and the mere existence of that hope gives her the strength to deal with what she dislikes.

Even for a baby, the present is imbued with the future.