Easter

Christmas is relatively easy to explain to a baby: when mean people came from another country to take away the land of people who had lived there for thousands of years, the people who lived on the land dreamed of someone who would save them from the bad people.  One night, they thought that this great revolutionary leader had been born, so everyone celebrated and gave presents to the baby who was going to free them from the Romans.

Yesterday, as Helena and I rode to the playground, we saw children processing through Santa Fe, carrying a cross toward the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Guadalupe.  "Girls and boys," she said.  "Doing what?"  And if Christmas is easy to explain, Easter is a whole lot harder.  Oppression and Salvation can be explained through "mean people" and "freedom", concepts that a baby understands.  But the idea that this great leader failed in liberating Israel, that he never planned on making a violent revolution like Simon (the Zealot) and Judas (Iscariot, or Sicarius; the Zealots and the Sicarii were the two most violent (almost terroristic) groups in Judea at the time) had wanted, that he was convicted and nailed onto a cross...  I had no hope of explaining any of these things to Helena Iara.  I tried, of course, but I could tell that she didn't understand.

Even harder to explain, for a baby who doesn't know what death means, is that Jesus died and was resurrected, and that the "failure" of his movement actually gave it more power, and turned it into a universal movement for liberation, and not just a limited anti-colonial struggle of Israelites against the Romans.  Let alone the way that the crucifixion of Jesus leads to a critique of the idea of sacrifice and the incarnation of God-as-Holy spirit in the community struggling for justice and freedom.

As we rode the bike through downtown, Helena seemed to have turned me off, but her final words as we approached the park seemed to suggest that she understood at least something of Easter.  "Green," she said.  "Playground.  Play!"

It's spring, and time to play in the green grass with friends.  That's not a bad summary of the point of the whole Christian project.

Running

Helena  has everything ready to be walking right now: since she was four months old, she has walked as she holds onto an adults fingers, she stands on her own, she walks four of five steps without a problem... but she still isn't really walking.  Why?  Because she wants to run.  Holding her hands, she won't go slowly, but throws herself forward and sprints her legs with quick steps, running as fast as I can walk and hold her hands.

Now there is an easy lesson in this, one I tried to explain to Helena Iara this morning: you have to walk before you can run.  That idea is such a part of popular wisdom that we can hear it in many different contexts.  Even so...

I wonder if Helena's desire to run doesn't, in fact, express the best thing about her.  Her father doesn't get to brag that "my daughter walked when she was only so many months old," but that doesn't matter so much.  What matters is that she is so enthusiastic that se wants to run, that she loves the feel of movement and laughs as she runs, and that she is always trying to accomplish the impossible.  So instead of the boasts of a proud father, we have a utopian urge, something like the slogan of 1968 in Paris: "Soyons realists, soyons realistes demandons l'impossible": Let's be realists and demand the impossible.

In the end, that attitude makes me much prouder.

Labels, cast-offs, and the sacred

Helena Iara loves the labels on her stuffed toys.  She often spends more time studying the labels than she actually does playing with Pinkme the Hippopotamus or her various soft and cuddly frogs.  Now, though we could fear this as a sign of consumerism, I think there is something else going on.  So as we were walking to the park this week, I began to talk to her to try to think about why.

The anthropologist Mary Douglass did a fascinating study of the philosophical origins of the purity laws of the Hebrew Torah, and concluded (in good structuralist fashion, but probably correctly), that the Mosaic law is based largely on definition and categorization, and what doesn't fit in the categories, is an "abomination", impure.  For instance, one defines fish as things that live in the ocean and swim, but mollusks and shrimp live in the ocean, but they don't swim.  Outside of the category, they are impure and not kosher.  Similarly, animals are defined by the way they walk and the structure of their hooves, so pig and camels, with feet divided in a different way, cannot be eaten.

More telling to the idea of the label, is the way that Douglass interprets the ritual of circumcision.  Douglass says that the Hebrews considered the foreskin to be something "left over", an excess on the body.  It was neither of the body, nor not of the body: it didn't fit into the categories.  Thus, it had to be cut off.  Since Helena doesn't have the anatomical experience to understand these categories, I doubt she understood what I was talking about... but then again, I'm not sure how much of any of these talks she understands, even as she's approaching six months old.

Several decades after Douglass wrote Purity and Danger, the Bulgarian philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva took up her argument, situating it within wider religious ideas of the ancient world.  In Latin, for instance, the word sacer can mean both "abomination" and "sacred", both what is cast off, and what is most valued.  To a certain degree, this idea makes sense, for though shellfish don't fit in easy categories and definitions, gods don't either.  Bringing the idea of the abomination and the sacred under a single category of misfits, Kristeva talked about the abject, or literally, what is thrown down.

You (and Helena) are almost certainly wondering what any of this has to do with Helena's fascination for the labels on her stuffed animals, but in fact the connection is easier than it appears.  Like the Hebrew idea of the foreskin, the label is something that sticks out, something that doesn't really belong.  It messes up the smooth flow of Pinkme the Hippo's rump.  It isn't part of his body, but it isn't part of the rest of the world, either.  For that reason, it fascinates Helena: not one thing or the other, it defies simple categorization.

I went on to argue to Helena that designer labels serve as our postmodern sacred, and the huge "Dulce and Gabbana" or "Nike" that we wear on our chests stand as a symbol of our fidelity and piety to the great gods of our day, consumption and money.  Maybe or maybe not.  Regardless, labels, the sacred, and the cast off all draw a baby's attention.

A Taste of Baby Epistemology

Helena Iara is now able to grab things: not with any particular dexterity, but she understand that her hands can manipulate the world.  So a couple of days ago, I passed her Tereza, her smiling rag doll, and watched as she first embraced it, then pulled it closer and closer to herself, and then, finally, reached out with her tongue and licked the doll's face.  It was a very different action than the need to suck that she (and most babies) have, and also different from older babies' desire to put everything they see in their mouths.  Like a six year old with a precious ice-cream cone, she stuck her tongue out and licked the doll's cloth face.

It isn't the first time I have noticed Helena's concern with taste: whenever she take a bath, if water drips toward her mouth, her tongue darts out to taste it with transparent curiosity.  When she can, she licks my and her mom's skin.  Clearly, taste fascinates her as much as sight or sound.

Helena's epicurian research led me to a couple of chats with her over the last couple of days.  I started off thinking about senses, especially about Franz Hikelammert's hypothesis that the Greek metaphor for learning is sight (think of the verb theatreo, to see, for instance), while the Hebrews preferred sound (hearing and hearkening to the word of Yahweh).  These metaphors, however, are formal epistemologies: how people (adults, mostly) come to know, and to confirm that what they know is true.  Helena uses both sight and sounds to learn about her world, but what about taste?  Does that sense fit into any kind of theory of knowledge?

As I told Helena about Hinkelammert's theory, I remembered one of the oddest images from the Phædrus, a dialogue I haven't studied for a long time (sophomore year in college!), but which can break down any simple interpretation of Plato.  The story is distinctly odd, with Socrates telling a myth about how a man can come to know the truth of the Forms, starting with lying with a comely youth (but not culminating the sexual act) and then moving on to a mystic voyage through the land of the Ideas.  And in the end, the knower does not know the forms by sight, but by taste.  Man eats the Ideas.

In Tupi-Guaraní philosophy, the mouth also takes center stage in epistemology: the ethical and ontological commandment of Amazonian Indians is to live the perspective of the other, to see through the eyes of the jaguar or of the enemy tribe.  But the path to this perspective is oral: one either eats the flesh of the enemy, to consume his perspective, or sings his songs, to feel the words of his language on your tongue.  Ayahuasca, the famous shamanistic drug to transform perspective, is also oral, the first thing that people who take it comment on, is how brutally bitter it is.  For the Tupi-Guaranís, new knowledge come about through taste.

In the contemporary West, on the other hand, taste is an æsthetic metaphor: someone has good taste when she dresses well, recognizes good art, or likes the restaurants I like.    I wonder if we aren't missing something important here, and I shared this idea with Helena as she licked the back of my hand.  Could it be that taste is the best way of thinking about new knowledge, ideas and thoughts that break the paradigms we have always used to understand the world?  Could it be that the fact that Christians eat and drink in their essential ritual is much more interesting that I thought when I took communion in church as a kid?

For Plato, for the Tupi-Guaranís, and for Helena, taste serves as a way to understand something that is completely other.  Helena has only tasted milk, so water is a stunning revelation, the salt on my hand an almost mystical experience.  Think about the first time you felt wasabi in your nose, or the hot-sweet of a Thai curry... one has to step out of himself to live the experience.  Learning about a new tree, on the other hand, is something I can extrapolate from my knowledge of other trees, and I can describe music by reference to other kinds of music you have already heard: "Imagine Paganinni played by Metallica...".  Taste, on the other hand, doesn't fit.  Try to describe wasabi to someone who has never tasted it.

So I think Helena is on the right path.  Taste is a way to knowledge, and it will be exciting to see all of the new flavors that she will experience in the coming years.

Dreams

One of the most striking things I have observed about Helena Iara is that when she is asleep, her facial expressions seem much more mature an profound than when she is awake.  She laughed asleep before she laughed awake.  I see in her mouth irony, the expression Brazilians call "safado" (which in a child is something of the nautiness we might associate with Denis the Menace or Calvin), a kind of existential exhaustion, a thoughtful melancholy... As I mentioned many blogs ago, we can doubt whether these expressions "express" some kind of external emotion or in fact begin to constitute them, but the face is clearly engaged in something profound.  And here, more significantly, I want to think about what dreams these sleeping expressions might imply.

One afternoon this week, as colic kept Helena Iara from sleeping, I talked to her about one of the more obscure thinkers who've yet appeared on this blog, but also one of my favorites: the German-Chilean philosopher-economists (yes, lots of hyphens in an interesting hybrid) Franz Hinkelammert.  Hinkelammert also talks about dreams, though in their political form as utopia, and his thoughts may help to think about why babies "express" more profound emotions as they sleep.

Over the last twenty years, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it has become part of the conventional wisdom that utopian dreams lie at the base of totalitarianism.  The Nazis, the Russian Communists, Pol Pot and others wanted to "perfect" humanity, but the result was the extermination of anything that didn't fit (Jews, Kulaks, intellectuals, political opponents) and ruthless imposition of the will of the few over the many.  These ideas were first expressed by Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper fifty years ago, but have since become part of the "common sense" of politics.  Dreams are dangerous, they say. 

Hinkelammert's thought emerges in opposition to this anti-utopianism.  Utopia and dreams, he says, must be conceived of not as some reality for which we strive, but as criteria by which we can evaluate the present.  The worst conditions of oppression and misery can seem absolutely normal and inevitable: after a few generations of slavery, slaves may come to think that there is no other way to live in the world.  Medieval peasants came to expect that the lord would get the first night with their new wives.  People might not like their lives, but it seems that there is no other way.  

Walter Benjamin insisted on memory as a way to judge the present -- a better or more just past, memory of previous struggles -- but Hinkelammert sees these criteria in the future.  And more significantly, judging the present based on the future avoids the conservatism that Benjamin's ideas can inspire, the idea that all struggles are to regain the good of the past instead of to create something new.  When we dream of a utopia, Hinkelammert says, we win a way to see the present with new eyes: to say where it fails, and to think critically about ways to make the world better.  Not necessarily to construct that exact utopia, but to change what is wrong about this world.

The upshot of these ideas is that we need to live the future before we live the present.  And that brings us back to Helena and her sleeping expressions: could it be that dreams allow us to practice life, its emotions and experiences and judgments, before we live it?  That babies dream as a way to get a little critical distance on their world, and thus evaluate it?   

Schleiermacher and the Sacrifice of Isaac

Helena Iara woke at about 3AM last night, and after eating well, had problems getting back to sleep.  An upset stomach, probably.  So I took her to the little hammock where she likes to sit and rock with me, and it seemed like it was time to talk about high German idealism.  Schleiermacher is the first thinker who entered my mind, and the subject interested Helena enough that she stopped crying.

Friedrich Schleiermacher attempted to merge Kantian rationalism with Christian Theology in the first half of the 19th century, but he may be most famous for his definition of religion as the sense of absolute dependence on God.  With those words, "absolute dependence," it might be a little easier to understand why I would want to talk with a baby about a philosopher who is hardly there in the first rank of famous thinkers.  Because if anything or anyone is truly and absolutely dependent on another, it is a newborn baby on her mother.  In spite of the myths of being raised by wolves like Romulus and Remus, if a baby doesn't have someone to give her milk and clean her bottom, she is not long for the world.

Personally, I have to say that I'm unconvinced by such a definition of religion, maybe just because it isn't the sort of thing I feel in my bones.  So Helena and I moved on to one of Schleiermacher's rivals in that time, Søren Kierkegaard (she had begun to cry a little as I questioned the idea of absolute dependence, so I had to rock harder in the hammock and try a new subject).  And if you're talking about Kierkegaard to a little baby, one subject has to come up: his analysis of the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham in Fear and Trembling.

Kierkegaard's idea of religion is quite different, as expressed by the title of the book: it involved the sense of awe one feels before God, and the need to obey even the most absurd of commands because of the power of this awe.  Kierkegaard imagines what it must have been like for Abraham, after longing so long for a son, to hear God's command to go and sacrifice the boy on the top of a nearby hill.  Abraham heard and obeyed, in spite of the fact that ever fiber of his being, his ethics, his love for his son, his hope for his future... all depended on the life of Isaac.  That troubled and troubling obedience was, for Kierkegaard, the essence of religion.

Imagine the response of a baby, whether little Helena or little Isaac.  Tell the story from the perspective of the child, and it is even more perverse, disturbing.  It seems one of the best arguments to be done with religion, to embrace the happy atheism of the modern age.  I don't want to be anywhere near a God who would even play with such a terrible command, not as a test, not as a game, not as a joke.  And I certainly want to be a long way away when I have my six day old daughter on my lap.

So I started to talk about this history of religion in the Middle East, of the cults of Ba'al and El and the worship of the Hittites.  Human sacrifice played an important role in all of these religions, and priests often commanded their believers to kill their children as a test of a sign of their obedience.  In fact, Kierkegaard had his history wrong: Abraham lived in a world where sacrificing children had been normalized; itwas something that lots of people did, that he might have seen as sad, but hardly the "unthinkable absurdity" of which Kierkegaard talks.

Abraham's courage, then, was not to climb the mountain to sacrifice Isaac.  His courage was to listen to the second voice, when God said "Don't.  Don't kill you son."  It was at that moment that he broke down his expectations, obeyed the unexpected and terrible God instead of the laws of man.  At least that's what I needed to tell Helena Iara.  Otherwise, I wouldn't want her to do anything to do with Yahweh.