Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose?

We're back in Brazil, and though 36 hours or traveling with a little girl will never be easy, the trip was much better than we had feared... and in the end, completely worth it when I biked down to the beach today with Helena and saw her joy as she ran through the sand and put her toes in the waves.  She's been very happy to be back: not just the sea, but also her swing in the back yard, the flowers, the lemons and passion fruit falling off the trees, the grass under her feet.  She knows, somehow, that she has come back to someplace she loves (not that she doesn't love Santa Fe -- we saw the same thing when we got there four months ago).

Helena and the ocean made me think about what it means to repeat, to come back.  It seems like such a simple thing, the "there and back again" that stands as the subtitle to the Hobbit... but one soon learns that the "back" is not the same as what we left.  Even if it hasn't changed at all, we have changed, so how we relate to it is different.  The beach, for instance: while Helena is now a little more scared of the water than she was when we left (she felt cold water in the creeks of New Mexico and in the ocean off Santa Monica), but she's much more capable of handling herself in it.

Gilles Deleuze wrote a whole book about these issues of repeating and difference, and his conclusions were about the opposite of what anyone expects.  According to him, repeating is always different (as I mentioned above), but different things are always the same: there is the same amount of difference between them, so that's the real repetition.  A brilliant but at the same time extremely silly conclusion (from a philosopher not known for his silliness), one more obvious than it sounds.  To return to the Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins is so different when he comes back from the Lonely Mountain, that the Shire itself will never be the same again: not to him, but also not to anyone else.

Another line from a favorite adolescent fantasy novel also came into my head as I watched Helena play at the edge of the ocean, Ursula LeGuin's description of the ocean of EarthSea: "Only the ever-changing is unchanging."  At 13, I thought the epigram powerful, profound... but I wonder.  Perhaps over eternity, the idea may be true: each wave moves only a little differently from the last one, and in the end, all of the waves turn into the same thing, smoothed out by a kind of transcendent static.  But in human terms (or baby terms), that isn't true at all.  Our beach is not the same as the one we left: a storm came and flattened the berm, making the waves calmer and the sea safer.  Helena will be able to swim there now, but we would never have allowed her to do so four months ago.  The ever-changing does, in fact, change.

So in the end, contrary to the pretentious cliché (Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose), the sea changes, the baby changes, the world changes.  A cynical adult may fail to see these changes, but even as a baby "returns home", she can't help but notice.

(the pictures are still from the US; we haven't had time to take any here yet)

The mouth!

Last night, as we prepared Helena Iara for bed, I began to read one of her favorite books, Little Kitten.  The book is compelling not because of the plot, but because there is a little kitten puppet that sticks its head through a hole in each page, and Helena loves to see it move; and because Helena is teething, as Rita tried to brush Helena's teeth, I needed all of the distraction possible from the book, so the kitten was dancing all over the place.

At one point, as I tried to hold Helena with one hand and turn the page with the other, I simply wasn't dextrous enough to do it, so I pulled the book and puppet close to my face and turned the page with my mouth.  As anyone who works on bikes (or other machines, I suppose) knows, the mouth is a good third hand from time to time... but it seems Helena didn't know that.  She thought that turning pages with you mouth was the funniest thing she had ever seen.  "More, more," she laughed, almost falling off my lap.  "Do it again!"  For the next ten minutes, as long as I turned pages with my mouth, Helena couldn't stop her guffaws.

In Deleuze and Guatari's famous book on Kafka, the put a lot of attention into the role of the mouth in the Czech novelist's strange stories, focusing especially on the fact that one can either eat or talk, but never both.  Things go in and out of the mouth, but not at the same time (the New Testament makes a similar point when Peter doubts if he should eat food with gentiles; the conclusion is that "what comes out of a mouth sullies a man, not what goes into it.").

The mouth is one of those between-places that kids find so interesting: it's the path between the inside and the outside, the air and the body.  The little kitten in the book is rather similar: it also moves in and out of a hole in the book, being both inside the pages and outside them, marking the book as both a book and a toy, or between both of them.  But then, on top of that, I started to use the mouth as it certainly should not be used: as if it were a hand and not an orifice.  At least in Freudian terms, we begin to understand why it was so funny.

And on top of that, I bet I just looked pretty ridiculous.

Medea in the car-seat

Helena has never really liked her car seat, but yesterday, she absolutely hated it.  She didn't just cry, but wailed, pretended that she was choking, unable to breathe... anything to get out.  She was willing to hurt herself to get what she wanted.  When she finally calmed down, I told her the story of Medea, and then something about masochism and politics, from Deleuze to Marx.  Here, I'll just plagiarize a radio commentary I recorded eight years ago which captures something of the same ideas...

Imagine a little girl, perhaps eight years old, with blond curly hair and a heavy sweater. Her name is Ana Isabel, she tells me. It’s ten o’clock at night in the Alpujarra, one of the areas of Medellín that the police have abandoned to gangs and prostitutes. About fifty homeless kids have come to a filthy little park, hoping that the grass will make for a softer bed than the street. We might be tempted to pity these young refugees from war, poverty, and violence, but they were proud of their ability to survive in conditions that would quickly kill you or me. 



I don’t know why, but Ana Isabel became furious with me -- perhaps because I didn’t give her candy, like the nun who came with me, perhaps because I reminded her of her father. Her cheeks reddened, she stomped her feet, then, with a final look of rage, she put a little plastic bag to her mouth, inhaled and exhaled. Inside was a glue that gave an instant and fatal high. She stepped closer and closer to me until each explosive breath slammed the bag against my stomach. Her red eyes were full of hatred -- against me, against the world, against herself. 



The next night in Medellín embodies the contrasts that define Colombia. Though most famous for cocaine and violence, Medellín is also home to remarkable avante-garde art and theater. I went to see a minimalist version of the classic Greek drama, Medea. Medea, as you may remember, was princess of Colchis before Jason seduced her and convinced her to steal the Golden Fleece for him. When the play begins, years after the adventure of the Argonauts, Jason has abandoned Medea so that he can marry a Greek princess that will aid his new political aspirations. Jason and his allies have condemned Medea to live in a hut far from Corinth, and soon the king will send her into exile.

 

We remember Medea best for her revenge against Jason. The man has destroyed her, but she has no way to hurt him. In madness and despair, she kills their two children.

 

Thanks to Freud, Oedipus became the dominant metaphor for the 20th Century. I wonder if Medea isn’t our Oedipus -- think of little Ana Isabel: like Medea, she is powerless, forgotten. She has no power, no one respects or loves her -- she can’t even make people look at her, except in pity. And proud people -- whether a Colombian street urchin or a princess of Colchis -- despise pity.

 

So what power do Medea and Ana Isabel have? How can they take revenge on those who have hurt them, those who ignore them, on us, who let little girls live on the street? They can only hurt themselves. Medea murders the children she loves, because Jason loves them too. Ana Isabel destroys her brain with glue, because she sees the pain it brings to my face. I don’t need to point out the connection to the teenage Palestinians who strap bombs to their bodies, or anorexic American girls. Medea is the last refuge of the powerless, the hopeless, and the excluded... and a too terrible metaphor for the lives of many people in the 21st Century.

Perhaps I exaggerate: Helena Iara is no Medea, and no Ana Isabel.  But like many of the powerless, she has learned that one of the few ways to get some modicum of power over the other is to hurt herself.

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.

The Fold

A couple of nights ago, Helena Iara was crying inconsolably.  None of the techniques that Rita and I have developed over the last several weeks could calm her, so eventually I just took her into another room and shut the door so that other people in the house didn't have to hear her scream, and perhaps Rita would be able to sleep a bit.  The second strategy certainly didn't work: a couple of minutes later, Rita came in to help, and we put Helena on her back on the bed and started to bicycle her legs, something that sometimes helps her to pass gas or digest.

She continued to cry, if a little less desperately, until suddenly, a backpack lying next to her caught her attention.  The cries stopped instantly, and she simply stared at a fold in the cloth of the backpack, the pain in her belly (and everything else that was bothering her) forgotten in the excitement of discovery.  I don't know if she was excited by the shadows, which she has always liked, or perhaps by the fact that the same material looked so different in different places, but the crying was over.

Now, I could just get excited about the way that her intellect had helped her overcome suffering, and that is pretty cool.  But because she still didn't want to go to sleep, I decided to take advantage of her discovery to talk about, of course, Deleuze (the "of course," is, of course, a joke.  Connections aren't that obvious) and his idea of the fold, the way that doubling something over can turn the two dimensional into the three dimensional.  I stayed in Paris one time with a French architect who had made this concept the center of her work, which always fascinated me, but it didn't seem to interest Helena Iara at all, and she started crying again.  So I decided to talk to her about a part of Delueze's philosophy that I understand a little better: ideas of difference and repetition.

Anyone who has read to a child knows the basics of Deleuze's argument, which I think Alenka Zupancic may synthesize best:

"When a child demands that his parents should textually repeat the story of the previous evening, he expects -- as strange as it might sound -- a surprise.  And he gets it." [The Odd One In, p. 181]

Helena Iara isn't quite old enough to demand the same bedtime story again and again, but she does like this kind of novelty-in-repetition, playing the same little games, wanting to dance before sleeping every night, and enjoying the constant repetition of similar sounds in her "conversations" with Rita.  For her, this repetition does not mean sameness: in fact, there is something new that she gets out of it each time.  [I wonder, by the way, if we might be able to diagnose a calcified mind as one that finds no novelty in repetition, while the growing mind finds difference in repetition).

I shared all of these ideas with Helena, and she seemed to find them more interesting than Deleuze's philosophy of the fold.  I'm more interested by them, too, of course, and I am sure she picked up on that. But the real contradiction, which helped her to fall asleep, is Deleuze's conclusion: having already proved that repetition leads to a certain kind of novelty, he asserts that the only thing that remains the same is difference itself.  We can see a kind of jejune insight here, the "the only constant is change" of consulting company advertising, but if we try to perceive through the eyes of children, I think there is something more interesting going on.  The only constant in repetition (as, in fact, in change), is surprise.  The wonder of finding our minds and our selves changed by what we encounter in the world.  When we lose this, we lose childhood, I think.  And a good bit of our humanity.

The Baby as Gadfly

As I tried to convince Helena Iara to sleep last night (an immense challenge, as she wanted to eat and sleep at the same time, and thus could do neither on Rita's lap), the only thing that calmed her was my voice.  Since I could talk about anything, I decided she needed to learn about the social history of Greece in the time of Socrates ("needed", here, meaning something like, "At least I could talk about it without stopping for an hour at three in the morning").  She seemed fascinated, in the same way that she is fascinated by anything that Rita and I say, as long as we say it while looking into her eyes.

What struck me, though, as I improvised a long free-assocition on the role of world trade, greek colonization, and the sociality of the agorá, was one of the famous things that Socrates said about himself.  For as much as Plato and hundreds of philosophers after him have tried to impose some kind of systematic theory on Socratic thought, it seems that system was what least interested the man.  What interested him was troubling the complacency of others, challenging people to re-think the easy propositions that allow them to lie to themselves about their own lives.  "I am a gadfly," Socrates said, an insect which buzzes and irritates to force people to think.

Helena Iara is a kind of gadfly; for me, at least.  As anyone who knows me is well aware, I am anything but intellectually or socially complacent: I constantly undermine my own thinking, work with child soldiers in Colombia or street kids in Brazil, climb mountains in the Andes... not the stuff of a boring Athenian (or American) citizen content in his mediocrity.  But I think that one could argue (and Rita certainly did argue), that I had become complacent in my incomplacency, content to constantly change my life because living one adventure after another is, in fact, a kind of repetition (there is, by the way, a pretty clear parallel to the self criticism of Deleuze's thought in Difference and Repetition, here).  I knew quite well that the only real challenge to the series of adventures I had been living, was, in fact, an inescapable commitment.  For that reason, of course, I avoided having a child with such intensity.

Older children clearly play the role of gadflies: I remember riding back from a soccer tournament with a friend one afternoon, as he complained about the traffic backed up on the roads in the south of the Island of Santa Catarina.  "Too many people moving here," he declared, "and too many people buying new cars."  His seven year old daughter, in the back of the car, thought for moment and then said, "But Dad, we just moved to the south of the island, and you just bought a new car..."  Children are excellent at catching the small (and sometimes huge) hypocrisies that we adults have so easily naturalized.  (I wrote extensively about this idea in both Agony Street and KidVid and Popular Education.)

I did not expect, however, that a baby, years before learning expose my hypocrisies with her words, would be able to be such an effective gadfly.  But through her cries at three in the morning, she certainly out Socratized Socrates.