Country Music

Helena Iara has a new favorite song, and it isn't kiddie music:

 

She started hearing the song more than a month ago, when her aunt was driving in the car without the stereo, and started to sing it to her, and now Helena wants to hear and sing it all the time (on the way to the farmers' market this morning, we heard it three times).  She's also proud to know all of the words, no mean feat for a two year old (after singing along this morning, she declared proudly, and almost with surprise, "I know it all!").

Though I don't have any memories of when I was two, I do know that when I was little, I also liked country music; it is a little different in the United States, but many of the chord progressions and the harmonies are similar.  And ethnomusicologists say that country music exists in almost every part of the world these days, identified by a certain twangy-ness in the instruments, rhythms reminiscent of country life, and breaks in a singer's voice.

Those same ethnomusicologists say that what brings country music together as a world phenomenon is nostalgia, a sadness for a lost past (the horse, the smells of the country, the memory of a simpler time).  In English we don't have a word for that complex sentiment, but in Portuguese they do: saudade.  One of the other songs on the disk that has Helena's favorite, "Chalana", has the following verse, which seems to manifest this idea: "Every chord that I play represents a saudade."  Similarly, the song I remember loving when I was little was Roger Whittaker's "Durham Town" also a song about nostalgia and loss.

Here's the question, though: what has a two year old lost?  My father-in-law, with whom Helena listens to country music, lived the first thirty-five years of his life as a peasant, and when he was forced off the land, he always longed to go back to a life of herding cattle and planting manioc.  It makes sense for him to love the saudade in the music.  But Helena? Or me?

Freud or Lacan could give a psychoanalytic explanation of loss in a small child: they lose the intimate connection to the mother, the one-ness of the womb and the first months of infancy.  Maybe.  And as I wrote last week, the peripatetic life that Rita and I lead means that Helena is always losing a friend, a place she has come to love, a toy.  

But I think that something else is going on: though country music may represent loss, its practice is often the opposite.  Here in Brazil, country music concerts are amazing events, including rodeos, dozens of warm-up bands, and hundreds of thousands of people in small cities in farming areas.  Where Rita's family lives, it is the music of dance, the songs that everyone sings together.  These songs fear and lament loss, but as they do, they bring people together in a shared experience.  As Helena sings "Chalana" with her aunt or her grandfather, that's what matters, a process of coming-into-relationship with them, just like I loved singing Roger Whittaker with my dad as we played on the floor of our suburban house in Denver.

Looking in the eyes

Rita, Helena, and I just got back from two weeks of work in Recife, a city that can be wonderful in many ways... but ethics on the bus cannot be included in that list.  There, commuting is a war, where the drivers of jam-packed busses wrestle their broken-down machines past each other, jerking and accelerating so much that the dozens of strap-hangers can only keep their feet by falling into each other.  Shin-kicking, stepping on feet, elbows... it's all part of the morning in one of the world's most violent cities (the connection between murder rate and bus behavior is not, I think, a random one).

One of the few rules that people obey on the bus is the social obligation to give up a seat for a mother with a baby (sadly, people don't give them up for old or handicapped people).  Over the last several years, however, we have observed a growing exception to this rule: if you don't see the baby, you're not obliged to give up your seat.  As such, on crowded busses, people make a conscious effort to avoid eye contact with any standing mother.

As Rita rode one particularly crowded bus last week, swaying dangerously with Helena in one arm, I counted seven young men who began to "sleep" only after we made it onto the bus, and a couple more people suddenly fascinated by whatever was happening out the window.  Finally, one man let his eyes wander, and Rita's eyes met his.  With a sign and a feigned shrug of "Oh, sorry, I didn't see you," he stood and gave up his seat.

I could write pages on the brutality of public space in Recife (a great part of Rita's PhD dissertation addresses exactly those issues), but here I want to talk about eyes.  What is it about eye contact that inspires responsibility?  Why can we ignore our responsibility to others as long as we can pretend that we don't see them?  And how can we "pretend" this when we, the person to whom we are responsible, and in fact everyone else around, knows that it is a lie?

Fatherhood as failure?

Last week, Eric Puchner published a piece in GQ, in which he went in search of a "cooler version of myself," a kind of dopplegänger, as he put it,

The guy who's actually living that life you'd imagined for yourself before you got married, had a couple of kids, and strapped in to that desk job.

The text is clever and sometimes funny, but what I want to talk about is the basic premise: that having children is a failure.  If men were true to them(our)selves, we would "play in a band, live in California, wake up at ten, and surf before noon."

So here is the basic question: a generation ago -- and perhaps for most of human history -- having children was not only included in dreams of masculine success, it was essential to it.  In the past, one could not be a man without progeny.  Today, it's tough to call yourself a real man if you have kids.

What happened?

First of all, I want to insist that I am as much a victim of this delusion as was the author of the piece in GQ, and many (most?) educated men in my generation.  These last two years with Helena have been wonderful, powerful... and often deeply depressing, not so much because of her as because of the challenge that she implies to my self definition.  So my interest in this problem isn't just academic, because it may give some insight into the dark night of the soul that I have inhabited more than I would have liked since she was born.

The easy Marxist answer is that capitalism is to blame: the basic structural power of consumer capitalism is to tell people "You suck.  You're ugly, unpopular, and unhappy.  But, if you buy Duff Beer, then things will be great!"  The grass is greener on the other side of the fence... or on the other side of the reproduction divide.  By making men unhappy with "conventional" lives, capitalism promotes the purchase of red convertibles, expensive alcohol, and (in my case, at least) kite-surfing gear.

Maybe that's a part of it... but there's also the population issue.  Ever since Malthus wrote her famous essay almost 300 years ago, some people have lived in fear of overwhelming the carrying capacity of the planet.  There are too many of us, we all know (in spite of the fact that the evidence has proven Malthus completely wrong, everyone still believes him), so we shouldn't reproduce.  For ethical absolutists like me, having a kid requires rethinking this story.

I think something else happens in high school, or the general discourse of fear around teen pregnancy.  In our formative years, having children is a disaster.  It's what happens to people who don't take care (in the more charitable interpretation) or who are losers at live (in the subconscious way that the elites think).  It's hard to get over this idea.

Even so, I don't think I understand this change, where children, once the condition of the possibility of happiness (to use Lacan's phrase) have become the conditions of its impossibility.  I'd love ideas, if any readers have them!

In the night kitchen

Helena Iara loves the story of Mickey, who heard a racket in the night, and screamed, "Quiet down there!"  Many other parents can say the same about their own kids and In the Night Kitchen, but the popularity of the book shouldn't hide from us how deeply strange it is.  From the first moment -- when the child (and not the parents) call for quiet -- to the last page -- "And that's why, thanks to Mickey, we eat cake every morning" -- the text is just weird, at least if you look at it with any critical distance.

I'm not the first to point out that something psychoanalytic is going on here: the secondary literature is full of claims that In the Night Kitchen is oneiric, onanistic, and ontological.  What interests me is actually that frame, the first and the last pages where Mickey first hears a sound he can't understand, and the end, turning the whole tale into a kind of "just-so story" that isn't actually true (we don't "have cake every morning.").  Since Helena's nascent storytelling address the structure of the tale than the content, it's worthwhile to think the same way about the stories she likes.

Here's the way that Mladen Dolar summarizes the Freudo-Lacanian theory of fantasy:

When the infant hears, he should not be able to understand anything; when the adult understands, he should not be traumatized; but both of these extremes are impossible: the non-understanding is being derailed, and the understanding does not put it back on track.  The subject is always stuck between voice and understanding, caught in the temporality of fantasy and desire.  In the simplified retroactive perspective, there is the "object voice" in the beginning, followed by the signifier which is a way of making sense of it, of coming to terms with the voice.  But we can see by this simple little scheme that the signifier is always taken hostage by fantasy, it is "always already" inscribed in its economy, it always emerges as a compromise formation.  There is a temporal vector between the voice (the incomprehensible, the traumatic) and the signifier (the articulation, the rationalization), and what links the two, in this precipitating and retroactive temporality, is fantasy as the juncture of the two….

Maurice Sendak seems to be explaining the same process, but with less complicated words and better pictures: Mickey hears his parents having sex, and doesn't understand it.  His brain scrambles around to understand what he hears, and though subconsciously he knows there is something sexual going on (he is naked for the whole book, after all), it makes more sense to fantasize a world under his own where bakers make cake and a boy can turn bread dough into an airplane.  By the time that he makes it back into his bed, he has developed a whole theory of the world ("and that's why") that also seems to catch a bit about reproduction.

(I wonder if Mickey had heard somewhere that old and almost vulgar euphemism that a pregnant woman "has a bun in the oven"?  Rita and I worked with a group of kids from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to re-tell the story of Little Red Riding Hood, and their version ends with Granny marrying the Big Bad Wolf.  We've always wondered if that didn't emerge because the storyteller has heard that "so-and-so ate so-and-so", a Brazilian way of referring to sex.  So if the Big Bad Wolf already ate Grandma, they might as well get married...).

In the end, the process that creates fantasy may seem like detour on the way to truth, or an actual impediment to understanding.  But I think this walk between "I don't understand" and "ahh...", whether it relates to sex or not, is one of the most beautiful things about childhood.  It's the way we learn, create, and come up with explanations that are much more interesting than the boring truth.

The universal tedium of Richard Scarry

Helena Iara loves Richard Scarry books.  I remember loving the stories of Huckle Cat and Lowly Worm when I was a kid, too... but I have to confess that while Dr. Seuss has aged well -- which is to say, I continue to enjoy his books as I read them to Helena -- Richard Scarry now seems a complete bore.  Nothing actually happens, there is little narrative, no rhyme or play with words.  In fact, the book she likes so much only relates the events of a normal day, no different from the cooking and playing and driving around that we experience in our lives.

There the tedium.  More interesting, I think, is what happens when kids read these sorts of stories, see their lives writ large on the pages of a book.  Over the last couple of months, I have been thinking very intently about how people -- especially children -- on the margins of society conceive of knowledge.  Last year, we did a major research project in Recife, looking at the causes of, and possible solutions to, violence in the favelas of that city.  After four months of interviews, mapping, movie-making, and writing, the book was finally done: a toolkit for foundations and government agencies that want to reduce violence.  Adriano had been the first of the four young researchers to arrive at the closing party for the project, and as he read the first pages, a look of amazement filled his eyes.  "It's true," he said, almost stunned.  Several more lines down the page, with even more wonder, "That's just how it is."  As he continued to read, the expressions of surprise only grew.

Words about the favela too often sound like a police report: so many dead, so many arrested.  Those news stories might be strictly accurate, but they aren't really true; they leave far too much out.  We never see the motivations of kids who join a gang or the ethical struggles of kids who don't; the joy of a party on Saturday night or the pride of a old woman watching her grandkids play in the alley.  Our research took the deep experience of living in the favela seriously, seeing it as a possible source of solutions.

Adriano had been a part of every stage of the research, and many of the theories in those pages were originally his, so the surprise didn't come from new ideas or perspectives.  No, I think the real shock was that the written word could express the truth, that a description of his community could be honest to what goes on there.

"Knowledge," with the weight and importance that word implies, always seems to come from outside the favela, from teachers and books and the TV.  But as Adriano read the book, he suddenly came to see that words could reflect the world, that his experiences were important, enough to justify or even demand action.  For the first time, I think, he came to see what knowledge meant, and the power it could have.

Richard Scarry is the complete opposite of the experience of knowledge in the favela.  Instead of seeing their lives as exceptions or spectacles, Scary shows the lives of ordinary, middle class children in the US as universal.  This is how everyone, event cats and worms, lives.  The implicit message to children: "Your life is universal, your particular experience counts as universal knowledge."  Children from the favelas feel frightened to generalize the events of their lives into a word as big as "knowledge," but thanks to Richard Scarry, American TV programs, and other manifestations of US middle class culture as universal reference, kids here don't run into that challenge.

Now, we can easily find a solution in an attempt to universalize other experiences: Sesame Street, where a street in a mythical Harlem stands in for the universal, is an excellent example.  Maybe we should write a Richard Scarry for the favela... to a certain degree, the work that Rita and I do professionally with films made by marginalized kids strives for that.

However, I think there is a real virtue in the way kids from the favela see the relation of their particular to the universal.  Because they aren't convinced that everyone -- even cats and worms -- had their experience, they aren't convinced that they know.  For that reason, they are less invested in their epistemological errors, more willing to change, grow, and learn.  Socrates insisted that the first step in philosophy was to know that one knows nothing: people from the favela have that one down pat.  At that point, perhaps we can all learn together.

And maybe I won't have to suffer through more days reading about the Cat Family going to the grocery store.

Pocoyó!

Most video for little kids bores me to tears.  I can't imagine watching Dora or Teletubbies day after day with Helena.  But the Spanish show Pocoyó -- she loves it, and it even makes me think.  Like a Pixar movie for the under-2 set.  Just one example:

The short film is, I think, the best example I have ever seen of the distinction that Jacques Lacan makes between the speaking and spoken subject... and quite frankly, it's much more fun to watch Pocoyó and Pato explain it than reading any number of academic commentators on the subject.

Now, a lot of left wing theory in the 1950s and 1960s was very pessimistic about the possibilities of human agency.  People like Louis Althusser and the young Foucault saw the subject (the actor, the person who does something) in its etymological sense, as one who has been subjected (literally, "thrown under"); one is, after all, the "subject of the king" or of a country.  A good bit of the philosophy of that era focusses on all of the different external forces that structure our subjectivity: the way that language makes us see the world as we do, or how gender and power and monetary differences limit how we dream or what we think we are capable of.  Though useful as a critique of ideology, it's a deeply pessimistic philosophy, and I think may lie at the root of the current fiasco of the European and American Left.

If we think about these ideas in terms of Pocoyó, it's the first couple of minutes of "Wackily ever after", when the narrator tries to control the story (and the actors) by means of his voice: "Ely will do this," "Pato is the crazy villain..."  The voice is making explicit a kind of "should"that all of us feel: we all should strive for success, which means being a lawyer or an i-banker (even if most of them aren't very happy).  Clothes have this power, too: Pocoyó gets the crown, and so will be the prince, while the top hat and cape make Pato the heavy.  Lacan, however, focusses on the aspect of speech: that's why he talked about the spoken subject, the subject created by the voice of the narrator, the other, or power.

But Lacan opens another door: the speaking subject.  Pocoyó and his friends are not about to let the narrator tell a classic (read: boring!) story about princes and princesses and evil monsters.  Ely wants to be a princess, but the kind of princess who lifts weights and rides a scooter (vide Fiona, in Shrek).  Pato doesn't really want to be the villain: he wants to play and to water the flowers.  Pocoyó isn't going to duel his friend Sleepy Bird, so he invites him to dinner.  The play of children, their resistance to the voice of the narrator, takes the story in new directions, makes the kids speaking subjects as well as spoken ones.

No one really controls everything about his or her own agency: our parents and culture and genes and who know what else are strong influences on what we think and do.  But I think that subjectivity -- for Pocoyó, for Helena, for me -- comes at the intersection of the voice of the narrator and the rebellious play of a child.  Surfing back and forth between those two is what makes us... well, us.

Mimetic Desire

Helena hasn't spent much time with other babies.  Yesterday, however, Rita hosted a baby party for several of the women who had been in her maternity class, so Helena spent the afternoon with four other babies, all of them about her age.  It was a fascinating encounter, perhaps meriting an essay on the anthropology of babies, but I want to talk about just one event.

Helena sat on the living room floor, surrounded by toys and pillows.  Pedro, a handsome little boy about a week younger than she, was playing with a toy truck we brought this week on our long trip from the US.  Helena found her favorite rattle and began to shake it, attracting Pedro's gaze.  He dropped the truck and crawled as fast as he possibly could toward Helena, reached for the rattle, and ripped it from her hand.  Helena didn't even cry, she was so surprised, but Pedro's father took the rattle, explained the need to be kind, and gave it back to Helena.  For the next five minutes, the scene repeated itself, even as Pedro's father gave Pedro another rattle, distracted him with other toys, and tried everything he could imagine.

As I sat on the hammock, rocking with Helena some hour later, I told her about two French philosophers who have thought long and hard about this dynamic, though not necessarily with babies.  One of Jacques Lacan's most famous aphorisms, for instance, is that "Man's desire is the desire of the other," which can be read in many ways, among them that I want what the other wants. (Probably, the most accurate interpretation is that what I desire from you is not you yourself, but your desire for me, but I didn't talk about that with Helena.)

More to the point, though, is the literary theory of mimetic desire, developed most carefully by René Girard as he looked at romantic triangles in novels.  Two men love one woman: this is the stuff of Balzac, Tolstoy, Jane Austen, and who knows how many other great novelists.  For Girard, however, the basic question here is not, in fact, the object of desire (Anna Karenina, the femme fatale of film noir), but the relationship between the two men.  I desire the thing (the woman, the car, the whatever) not because of what lies essential in it, but because I see that another person desires it.  Girard extended this argument to our relationship with fiction (Don Quijote desires what Amadis de Gaul wanted, etc), but the basic point is there: our desires have more to do with imitating the desire of the other than with anything that comes from the object of desire.

 And there, I explained to Helena, is Pedro and his desire for the rattle.  The rattle is cool, of course.  It makes a nice sound, you can chew on it, you can bang it on the floor.  But what really mattered to Pedro is that Helena had it in her hand, that she was enjoying it.  Mimetic desire starts when we're little.

More on Mirrors

Several posts ago, I mentioned the importance of the mirror in a lot of contemporary (and not so contemporary, in fact) theories of subjectivity: how a person comes to see herself as, well, herself.  Last week, before I left for Bolivia, Helena Iara spent more time in front of the bathroom mirror, which gives me some more insight into the way that she is beginning to recognizer herself as an "I".

Helena Iara doesn'tjust watch herself in the mirror.  Her eyes often begin on her own face, then go to my eyes (looking at her, rather as I would with no mirror), then back to her own face, or often her body (especially her hands).  It isn't just that she sees herself in the mirror: she sees me seeing her in the mirror. She sees me, sees that I am "the same" in the mirror as I am "in real life".  She sees me looking at her.  Then she sees herself.  The process of subjectification is, in fact, social.  It doesn't just happen through the strange reflecting object that is a mirror, but through the interactions of multiple people in front of the mirror.

The second thing about the mirror is that Helena doesn't necessarily look at herself as a whole, at least not yet, and that is the basic premise of the Lacanian theory of the mirror stage.  She looks at her own eyes (particularly beautiful eyes, if I do say so myself, blue with a hint of violet), and at her own hands.  Given that she spends so much time playing with her own hands, looking at them and moving them for hours, the fact that she sees her own hands in the mirror strikes me at particularly important.

The mirror metaphor is a particularly visual one for the construction of identity and subjectivity, but hands are something different.  One feels with one's hands, and one feels where one's hands are, even without looking at them.  One also sees one's own hands, and can feel the effect of them on another part of the body when they swing around.  Since Helena has been able to recognize her own hands, she has also gained control over them: she now moves them deliberately (when she wants to, at least) instead of thrashing around as a subconscious expression of happiness, anger, or hunger.  Her control is especially good when she is looking at her hand.

Perhaps the construction of subjectivity is better seen as synesthesia, as the ability to conjugate different senses and see them as pertaining to the same event, than it it about seeing oneself.  Helena sees her hand, feels my hand on hers, and feels where her hand is.  Then, she looks in the mirror and sees herself seeing her hand, felling herself seeing the hand, feeling my hand, which she knows as my hand, touching hers...  What she is learning is to put all of these sensations and experiences together.

Lacan insisted that because one becomes a subject in the image, subjectivity is imaginary.  From what I have seen of Helena, however, it is better seen as gregarious, as the process of gathering together sensations, people, and the perspectives of those other people.  More complicated than a simple mirror, but much more interesting, too.  Maybe that's why Helena smiles so much when she sees herself in the mirror.  You can almost hear the joy of the synapses popping.

Hands, Feet, Self

Helena Iara has been on a voyage of discovery recently.  First, during Brasil's world cup victory over Chile, she discovered her hands, and since then, has been finding out new things about them every day, and seeing new things she could do with them.  Rita and I have had a wonderful time as we see her move them slowly, using one finger and then the next.  And today, she discovered her feet, and found out that she could control them, as well.

Putting these discoveries together with her love of mirrors, I have been thinking a lot about Jacques Lacan and his idea of the mirror stage.  According to Lacan, the self is actually constructed over time and through technology: particularly, the mirror.  All of the sensations a baby feels are not necessarily coherent: the baby does not feel that they all apply to him or her, because the border between I and the other has not yet been clearly formed.  But, the moment that baby recognizes herself in the mirror, something new happens: the multiplicity and confusion of sensations gets brought under a single sign, the image of herself in the mirror.  The image in the mirror is stable "in contrast with the turbulent movements that the subject feels are animating him."  To a great degree, the subject is constructed through the mirror, not a something natural or innate, but as the result of a contingent process.

Now, there are some very interesting results to this idea: I remember, for instance, a program for street kids in Brasília which said that the most effective intervention it had made with the kids was to put mirrors every place in the drop-in center, because it assured the kids that they existed as coherent, whole beings, while at the same time making them think that they could improve their appearance (which had as a result improving lots of other things).  And in fact, great part of the contemporary edifice of psychoanalysis, and the thought of great philosophers who I love, like Slavoj Zizek, depends on Lacan's idea of the mirror stage.

But as I told these ideas to Helena Iara this morning, after watching her research her own hands, I think there is a basic epistemological error in the idea of the mirror stage.  Watching Helena, it is clear that the first step to recognizing herself as a subject, as someone with different body parts that come together to act in the world, is the baby's effort to research her own hands and feet.  The first wonder is that she is able to control these things -- and in fact, since Helena recognized her hands (and now her feet), their movements are more coherent and projected.  But then, she begins to see that these things have results, and that she is, to some degree, responsible for these results.  Last night, for instance, as Rita and I watched, she reached out her hand to touch her favorite toy, Pinkme the pink hippo, first in an uncontrolled way, then just feeling the fabric in a kind of caress.  This morning, she hit the hippo lightly, just to see what might happen, and seemed to show regret when the toy fell down (I wrote a long essay on regret on doing harm to the other as the font of subjectivity, but it might be premature to project that onto her...)

It's too early to discard the mirror stage all together -- after all, it's a great theory, and I use it all over the place -- but Helena is already making me rethink Lacan's idea.

Mirrors

A couple of days ago, Helena Iara's mirror neurons were in high dunder.  I would stick out my tongue, and she would imitate me.  The same with arm motions, the curl of a tongue as I made the shhhh sound.  It was great fun for both of us.  So that evening, when I had some time alone with her in the hammock, I started to tell her about those mirror neurons... only to find my lecture wonderfully undermined by irony: instead of looking at me as she normally does, she had begun to look in a mirror, and she couldn't take her eyes off of it.

Now, in most of the history of western philosophy, people use mirrors in order to look at themselves.  There is the myth of Narcissus, of course, and Plotinus' comment that "the soul is a mirror that creates material things reflecting the ideas of the higher reason."  Even Lacan, normally so far out of the philosophical mainstream, declares the Mirror Stage as the moment that a baby is able to recognize herself seeing her reflection.  Helena, however, didn't have much time for philosophical commonplaces: she liked the mirror not because it reflected her own image, but because it showed the back of the hammockin which we were sitting.  She could see both the front and the back of something, and she was thrilled.  Rita tells me that the day before I saw this game of mirrors, Helena was doing the same thing with Rita's image reflected on the computer screen through the PhotoBooth program, looking back and forth from Rita to her image on the screen, trying to make sure that both were really there.

It's nice to think that Rita and I are raising a daughter who is not a narcissist, but I think that something more is going on.  Mirrors do show us our own reflections, but even more significantly, they alter perspective, allowing us to see the world through eyes that are not our own.  When Helena was able to see both the front and the back of the swinging hammock, she got an exciting look at the plurality of the world, its three-dimensionality, and its complexity in the eyes of many different people.  I have mentioned the different concepts of knowledge in the west and among Amazonian tribes, and this game of mirrors seems to represent exactly that difference.  In the west, the mirror is a chance to stand outside ourselves and see ourselves as an object.  In Amazonian thought, in contrast, the point is to incarnate a different perspective, to use the songs of another tribe to feel what they feel, to use ayahuasca to see through the eyes of a jaguar.  Helena Iara, faithful to her second guaraní name, was using the mirror in the second way: to change her perspective on the world.

Alenka Zupancic says that this shift in perspective is central to comedy:

Thanks to the redoubling, we leave behind the imaginary mirror-turn logic for another logic, that of the shift: we get a reality slightly out of place in relation to itself... This shift opens the space for the symbolic Other as immanent to the given situation (as opposed to the Other constituting its framework or outer horizon.). [The Odd One Out]

The pleasure and laughter of comedy comes from this small shift: not to see the world from some God's eye view, but only a little askew, a little different.  And as Helena looked into the mirror, seeing the back of the hammock instead of its front, she smiled.  It was wonderful.

Theories of Desire

Babies are desire-machines, who simply want and who don't take no for an answer, so it would make sense to talk about theories of desire with Helena Iara for that reason.  The truth is, though, that last night's conversation, as I tried to keep her occupied a bit so that Rita could have some brief time on her own, was much more solipsistic (one could argue that this entire exercise never goes beyond solipsism, of course, but this seems extreme): I wanted to talk about my own desires about children.

Because here is the truth of the matter: not only did I not ever want to have children, I actively wanted not to have kids.  And yet, having this basic desire negated in the most absolute way (a baby on my lap as we swing on the hammock) has, in fact, made me immensely happy.  So I wanted to think hard about the relationship between desire and satisfaction and happiness, and Helena seemed at least moderately interested in my reflections on Lacan and Buddhism.  At least she kept looking in my eyes, didn't sleep, and didn't cry.

Psychoanalysis has always put desire on the first plane, and with Jacques Lacan, it became the closest the French analyst got to a commandment: "Do not give up on your desire."  Lacan and his followers did not have any illusions that the satisfaction of these desires would make one happy (in fact, philosophers like Slavoj Zizek explicitly reject happiness as a criterion for judgement), nor were they naïve in thinking that any whim that comes into a person's head ("I want a new TV set") rises to this sort of level of ethical imperative.  But desire served as a way to see if a person was being honest with himself, or was selling out on what he truly wanted from life.

Now, on the other hand, Buddhism has the opposite perspective on desire: desire is the origin of suffering, because people suffer when we want something and can't get it.  And since we never really get what we want (and when we get "what we want," we soon find that it isn't what we really wanted, as anyone who ever won the jackpot in the lottery will be quick to show), desiring things makes us miserable.  The only way out, said the Buddha, was to learn to stop desiring, to eradicate wants and wishes from our thoughts.

Babies are much more Lacanian than Buddhist, of course: they want to eat, to be warm, to be changed, and they will not stop crying until they get what they want (fortunately, Helena is great about this: as soon as we figure out her desire and satisfy it, she's a content baby again).  Perhaps my coincidence, Helena was much more attent as I told her about Lacan than as I told her about Buddhism (most likely, she just picked up on my own interested and biases).  But Lacan doesn't really work for the aporia I was trying to work through with Helena Iara: how the absolute negation of my desire could bring me such happiness.

In her brilliant analysis of comedy The Odd One In, Alenka Zupancic notes that both tragedy and comedy depend on the mis-encounter between demand and satisfaction.  Both tragedy and comedy happen when we don't get what we want.  For tragedy, we can think that Hamlet doesn't get revenge, Oedipus gets more than he wanted when the kingdom he desired requires that he kill is father and marry his mother, Antigone can't bury her brother...  In comedy, Cyrano doesn't get Roxanne, and then gets more than he expects; Olivia falls for Cesario, only to find out that "he" is really Viola; Jack Lemmon can only seduce Marilyn Monroe dressed as a girl...  Zupancic proposes to understand the difference between comedy and tragedy as one of point of view: tragedy is this mis-encounter seen from the point of view of desire/before, while comedy is the same mis-encounter, seen from the point of view of satisfaction/after:

"The discrepancy that constitutes the motor of comedy lies not in the fact that satisfaction can never really meet demand, but that demand can never meet (some unexpectedly produced, surplus) satisfaction."

We might be able to describe this better if we think about love: all of us know someone who knows everything he or she wants in a romantic object, so any real person always turns out to be a let-down.  The magic of love is that it satisfies a desire we never had even thought about, never knew we had.

So how to think about this happiness with Helena Iara?  It could easily be a tragedy, the end of so many dreams of travel and instigating revolutions and who knows what other things I thought I needed to be childless for.  That would be seeing from the perspective of desire.  But I think it's much better to look from the point of view of satisfaction, from the feeling of contentment I have with a wonderful little girl on my lap as I rock back and forth on a hammock.  That makes the story a comedy, one that ends in happiness.  Or at least runs with happiness as the moral for a while...