Can mothers have it all?

This week, Facebook and blogs and even (gasp!) real life conversations have been lit up by an article by Anne Marie Slaughter, who had worked in policy planning at the Obama State Department, about the (im)possibility of mixing motherhood and career.  The piece, an honest portrayal of the difficulties of second and third generation feminist women to "have it all" has clearly touched a vein among my friends who work as lawyers, policy professionals, doctors... truth is, pretty much everyone with whom I went to Harvard or Williams, and who then went on to be a mother and a high powered professional.

Rita and I have not had to face anything like the world Slaughter describes: no 20 hour work days, no leaving the house before the kids wake and coming home after they are asleep, no impossible choices between a sick baby and a professional deadline.  Next month, Rita will go to an anthropology conference in São Paulo, and it will be the first time that Helena Iara will have to spend a night without her mommy in the same house.  None the less, we have seen enough of the challenges of parenting and working to know how much harder it must be for someone working at the United Nations, in government, in a bill-by-the-hour law firm.  Slaughter is right: after fifty years of feminist successes in policy and ideology, children still make it much harder for women to climb the professional ladder.

I don't recall which of my professors declared that philosophy does not have the role of answering questions, but of asking why we ask those questions in the first place, but it's a good place to enter this debate (and is the starting point for William James and Ludwig Wittgenstein, two of my favorite thinkers).  So here's my poor contribution to the debate:

I've been readying Dostoyevsky recently, and finding some humor amidst the gloom by laughing at the silly hierarchies of state bureaucrats, classed just like military officers in 19th Century Russia, with a "Collegiate Registrar" equivalent to a warrant office,  a "Titular Counsellor" like an Army Captain, all the way up to an "Actual Privy Counsellor" who held the same rank as a Field Marshall.  Russians of that age may have taken the quest for honor so far that it becomes ridiculous, but they aren't that much different than we are, with different levels of professorships, pay-grades for government service, and whether or not one becomes a partner.  Men have always dedicated themselves to honor, in one way or another.

Mainstream American feminism has done an extraordinary job of showing why and how women have been oppressed and excluded, but at a price: it has accepted masculine terms for the debate.  When we look at definitions of success for women (or for feminism in general), we ask about how many women sit in corporate boardrooms, what salary women earn, how many women work in policy roles in government.  I wonder, though, if these concerns don't simply accepted traditional masculine (and not universally human) milestones for success.  Even the question "Why can't women have it all?" uses the verb most associated with honor in postmodern capitalism.  As Marx (among many others) noticed, capitalism moves us from a concern with being to one of having.

That move from being to having was critical: no one would ever ask if you can "be it all."  Of course not: you can't be mother and father, God and man, master and servant... the  verb "be" recognizes that certain things exclude each other.  But "have"... It seems like, hypothetically at least, we could possess everything.

Slaughter addresses this question in a way: she says that she and many women like her (and many men, as well), work as hard as they do because it is the way they can change the world; she herself was working in Planning for the State Department, and cites many women in government, academia, and the international human rights system.  Here, for better or worse, I might be able to add something useful: I know lots of people who have both worked at the grass roots and in "the system", and almost all of them say that they are not only happier on the "outside", but that they do more good (a quick caveat to expose my bias here: after working in Washington think tanks and going to Harvard, I made a conscious decision that I didn't want that life; I'm not an objective observer).  People at UNICEF, the Foreign Service, government education departments... To quote one high UNICEF bureaucrat I met last year, "Let's be honest, I could do a lot more elsewhere.  But when I look at myself, I know that I wouldn't earn as much or get as much prestige elsewhere.  So I stay."

The point isn't that mothers shouldn't try to "climb the latter".  Power matters, and who holds it is no small thing.  But I think we need to ask deeper questions about the nature of success, happiness, and even "having;" it allows us to ask the question in a much better way, and maybe even one that will make us happier and more able to change the world.

Her Mommy

Over the last week, we've see the same scene several times: Helena takes two toys, one big and one small, and then says of the larger, "É a mãe dela." (It's her mother)  She's excited about the idea, and won't staop saying it until we repeat and agree.

When you think about it, "Mother" (or father, uncle, any kinship terms) are a strange kind of noun.  If you and I are talking together, and we say "tree" or "car," we can trust that we are probably referring to the same concrete thing.  But when I say "Mother" and you say "Mother," we are in fact talking about very different people.  The same word "means" different things.

I was tempted to write that Helena is learning that Mother is a term of relationship, and not one of reference, but that assumes that the "original" or real way we use words is that of signifier and signified, a sound that refers to a concrete thing.  I'm not sure that's true, though: babies may understand relationship nouns before they understand absolute nouns.  "Mommy," "Daddy", and many of the other first words in a baby's vocabulary are, in fact, relational.  Perhaps the "her Mommy" is in fact a way to transform relational into absolute, and not the other way around.

One of the most interesting developments in Brazilian anthropology in the last decade has been based on the same idea: for the native people of the Amazon basin, all nouns are relational.  It isn't just that "Mother" points to the relationship between the speaker and a woman, but "jaguar" or "fish" do as well. This idea seems at first impossible, until we see that what "jaguar" means is really "he who can eat anything."  Thus, if a fish could say "jaguar", it would be talking about a fisherman.  If a monkey could say "jaguar", it might refer to a harpy eagle, which hunts monkeys as it flies through the trees.

We see this kind of language in European poetry, or in proverbs like "man is a wolf to man," but we seem to think it is a secondary, metaphorical way to use language.  Both babies and Amazonian indians suggest that it may be the other way around.

Fear

Helena is afraid.  Or more accurately, she tells us she is afraid.  She certainly doesn't fear the things she should, like climbing down the stairs alone or falling into deep water at the lake, but from time to time the movement of shadows under a tree or the sight of a leaf that looks like a spider will inspire her to say, "fear," and shy away.

There is a wonderful passage in the Philosophical Investigations, where Wittgenstein addresses the analytic philosophers of his day (heirs of Hume and other radical empiricists), who insisted that because we cannot feel the pain of other people, we can't know that what they call pain is the same as what I can pain.  "Just try for a moment," Wittgetstein ironizes, "to think that someone is not in pain when they wince in front of you."  Pain is not, in fact, a personal thing contained only in my body; it is social.  We know that other people are in pain and, as Bill Clinton famously said, we actually feel that pain.

I think I understand how a baby comes to understand what "pain" means, seeing how others react when a hammer falls on their feet, and then feeling the same thing.  Fear, though, strikes me as something different, perhaps because it is much less quotidian: Rita and I don't feel fear on a daily basis.  Jaguars and FBI agents don't surround the house to inspire such feelings so that Helena would know the social element of fear.

She started to talk about fear after we read Little Yellow Riding Hood, a fantastic book by the Brazilian poet and musician Chico Buarque, to her.  The story is about a little girl who is afraid all the time, and of everything... but especially of the big bad wolf, though she has never seen the beast, and it probably only exists in the mountains of Germany.  But because she fears the wolf so much, one day she conjures it up, and it really appears... and the reality is, of course, no where near as bad as her fears.

There's an easy Foucauldian lesson here: just as all prohibition actually inspires the desire to break the law, a book that tries to calm fears may actually inspire them.  But I don't think that's what is really going on.  I think the book taught Helena that fear is an important category of human (or childhood) existence, so she has to figure it out.  And since she doesn't have frightened adults around her on a regular basis, she has to do experiments.

Human feelings are confused and diverse.  "Fear" isn't so much a description of any singular sensation, as it is an umbrella under which we put lots of different feelings.  So Helena tries something out: she's confused by the play of shadows, and that messes with something in her belly; she calls it fear.  Rita and I say, "No, there's nothing to be afraid of," so she sets that category aside as a failed experiment.  "Fear," she says when she sees something that looks like a snake, and I say, "Don't worry, that's not a snake."  She reads that as, "you don't need to be afraid right now," but also as "Snakes are something that should cause fear."  And gradually, she learns how people use words to describe complicated emotions.

I just hope it's a while before she needs to understand "anxiety" and those other heavy words!

MommyDaddyBaby

Helena has a way to say "family": MamãePapaiBebê, all said together as one word.  Since she is just working on the idea of plurals (her three dolls are "bebês", the only plural she uses), it isn't strange that collective nouns like family express concepts that are still difficult for her... but her word brings up the basic question of how collective nouns are possible at all.

The history of metaphysics spent a lot of time on an even simpler question, that of the noun itself.  If we think about, for instance, the birds that flit outside of Helena's window, she'll she sparrows and canaries, azure crows, bem-te-vis, and loads of songbirds... but also arancuás, which look like chickens and jump from tree to tree like monkeys.  And in the marshes on the way to the beach, she sees ibis and herons wading.  Then frigate birds and gulls high above... and how does she know to call all of these animals "birds"?  An amazing process of categorization is going on here.

Bertrand Russell famously insisted that the only real "proper nouns" were "this" and "that", because even to say that John in the morning is John in the afternoon, is really giving the same name to a person who has changed.  (Borges made a great story out of the idea, Funes el Memorioso)  The point is, that seeing the sameness of things around us isn't as simple as we feel it is: in fact, the mind is involved in a major effort of organizing and categorizing a waterfall of colors and sounds that come through the senses, trying to make them meaningful and comprehensible.

Fortunately, babies don't get lost in that kind of speculative claptrap, and Helena isn't worried about why nouns work.  She just uses them.  However, the next step of generalization, that of collective nouns (family as a group of people, forest as a group of trees), still stands a little beyond her.  MamãePapaiBebê works as a list instead of a collective, something that might work for small groups like out family.  But when Rita was a girl, with seven brothers and sisters, as well and Mom and Dad and a couple of uncles and aunts living in the house, I doubt that she could have described family with a list.  It just gets too long and complicated, like saying "aspen, pine, lodgepole, grass, aspen, bear, deer, pine (and one and on)" instead of saying "forest."

It's interesting to see how watching a baby learn language, clarifies old debates between Hume and Kant, Russell and Wittgenstein, which seemed so academic twenty years ago.  They aren't academic at all; they're exactly what goes on in a baby's mind as she learns to speak.

Adventures in language

Yesterday, I took Helena to the grocery store, and as always, she was the hit of the day, with everyone staring at her, talking to her... (in fact, we may have to work hard so that she doesn't get too arrogant, given how everyone dotes on her in public.)  Then, at the cashiers, we checked out and Helena said "obrigada" to the girl working the line.  The girl was in a bad mood, and didn't pay attention to Helena, so Helena spoke in a louder voice, "Thanks!"  The message, at least the one I understood, was "if you don't understand me in Portuguese, then let me try English!"  Better, after all, to think that someone doesn't understand, than to think that they are being rude.

The point of all of this, I suppose, is that Helena has learned that language is descriptive; it's also a way to ask for what you want.  But at some basic level, language is a social lubricant, a way to make contact with other human beings.  And when they don't recognize that element (something common to rude cashiers and many types of analytic philosophers), Helena wants to try something else.  Even if that means talking English in Brazil.

This morning, another interesting bilingual game.  Helena loves to use the diminutive and the aggrandizing forms of nouns: Mãe (mother) becomes maezinha (little mommy), a rock is a pedrinha, and she sings "macaco, macaquinho, macacão" (monkey, little monkey, big monkey) to herself for hours on end.  As she walked around her room this morning, looking for her stuffed alpaca ("paca, paca?"), she had to step around a number of pillows.  She looked at Rita and me in the way she does when she wants us to do something, and said, "pilinho."

"Pilinho" would be the perfect diminutive form if pillow were a Portuguese word, meaning "little pillow."  It isn't, of course, and Helena probably learned quickly as we laughed.  But it makes me wonder how Helena distinguishes one language from another.  How does she hear the difference?  Know that she should speak one language to me, and another to a person she meets on the street?  Honestly, I'm not sure how she figures it out, but as her language skills get better (and as we travel to the US next month, where she'll have to figure out the whole context anew), I have a lot to learn.

Boots

"Bota bota," Helena Iara said this morning as she woke up, and then pointed to the door, as she does when she want to leave the room and go out into the world.  A simple event in the life of a little girl, but as I walked through the jungle this morning, climbing the little mountain behind our house, it occurred to me that this little exchange says something very important about language and meaning.

There's an important back-story here: about three months ago, Rita bought Helena a pair of boots.  Helena loved to wear them, but she also loved (and still loves) to say the word "bota," boot.  Soon, she began to use that word to refer to lots of other things: shoes and sandals, soon even feet, the paws of a stuffed lion, or the hairy pods of a cockroach in one of her children's books.  This is a process that linguists call semantic overreach: kids learn a word and begin to apply it to everything that sort of fits the category, until they learn to shave off the extraneous meanings and get to something closer to the way other people use words.  The most common example is that a "doggie" or "bow-wow" can refer to anything with hair, anything with four feet, anything that barks or growls... until Mom and Dad explain that "dog" is a much more limited concept.

Lots of Helena's words work like this.  "Up" (which she says in English) means "lift me up" as well as the direction up, and it also the way she refers to the teeter-totter in the park.  "Mana", a mis-speaking of banana, also means any other fruit she likes, from guavas to mangos (apples, strangely enough, get their own word).  And the most interesting case is "bola" (ball), which started out meaning ball and then moved on to round fruit.  As she learned that oranges and mandarins are not, in fact, balls, she began to push the meaning of "bola" in new directions: round ceramic flower-pots made sense, but then "bola" moved on to mean other things that are fun to do: dolls and cars and even her swing win cries of "bola." Then, "bola" moved on to mean "cake" and "waffle", because the word for those things in Portuguese is "bolo" (o instead of a, but maybe she can't hear the difference), and though she knows that a cake is different from a ball, she likes both of them.  By now, "bola" has become a fascinating semantic tangle, meaning almost anything that Helena likes a lot.

Which brings us back to "bota", and then pointing to the door.  "Bota," we've come to learn, doesn't just mean footwear.  It also means "walking".  Then from walking, she extended "bota" to mean going outside and seeing the world (her favorite activity), and perhaps even the abstract concept of freedom (she'll sometimes say "bota" as she pulls her hand out of mine or Rita as we try to help/control her).  So as she woke this morning and said "bota", she didn't just mean, "put my shoes on," but also "and then let's go out in the garden and look at flowers and run around and don't think that I'll hold your hand the whole time, either!"  Which is, by the way, what she and Rita are doing as I write this blog.

When linguists and philosophers of language distinguish between denotation (the dictionary definition of a word ) and connotation (the associations that spring to mind because of the word), valuing the first, and saying that connotations are derivative and mushy and not at all serious.  But a baby's use of language (if Helena is an example) seems to say exactly the opposite: connotation comes first.  "Boot" means freedom before the word is cut down and shaved into meaning just "footwear that covers the ankles."

So bota bota.  I'm off for a walk.

Why words?

Today, as Helena and I walked to the beach, she bow-wowed at every dog we saw, meowed at every cat, and even tried a neigh at the horse tied up in the wetlands by the dunes.  She makes the same sounds when she sees animals in her picture books: a couple of posts ago, I suggested that she is naming the animals in a kind of onomotopeia, but today as she and I talked, I reconsidered.

One of Helena's favorite videos right now is a Italian song about the sounds animals make: Il croccodrillo como fa?, and she loves another video that just shows animals and the sounds they make... What's interesting, though, is to watch how she gets scared at the sound of certain animals: yes, the crocodile, but also the cicada and the certain birds.  And as she and I talked as we walked to the beach today, I realized that (at least in the videos), she never gets scared by the animals whose sounds she knows how to make.

In the history of the West, at least since the Greeks, the role of language is to represent: words refer to things, and we judge their truth based on whether or not they reflect what's there in the world truly.  And though it might seem that Helena uses "bow-wow" to refer to a dog, honestly I don't think that's what she is doing.  I think there is something much more complicated and interesting going on here.

According to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, while European epistemology (the science of how we know what we know) is based on ideas of reference and signification, Amazonian Indians see truth not as representation, but as a shift in perspective.  The shaman doesn't know the jaguar by studying it from outside, but by learning to look through the eyes of the jaguar.  One of the techniques that Amazonian shamans use to see through the eyes of the other is sound: one tribe will "steal" the songs of another and then sing them to try to understand the perspective of their enemy (in Araweté, strikingly, the word for "enemy" literally translates as "future music".).

Let's add another element here: understanding is one way to overcome our fear.  Just giving a thing a name can help, but the better we understand the motivations, the experience, the perspective of what frightens us, the less we fear it.

 I wonder, then, if Helena Iara making the sound of animals that scare her, isn't living out the Guaraní heritage of her middle name.  Helena used to be fascinated and terrified by dogs, but since she has learned to say "bow-wow," both naming them and putting their voice in her mouth, the terror has subsided.  She makes a sound, incarnates their perspective (even if in a very superficial way), and comes to fear them less.

If she's really doing this, she's pretty darn clever.

And she saw that it was good

I've been rather slow in posting blogs over the last several days; since Easter, we have been staying with Rita's parents in Braço do Norte, in the interior of the state, where the internet connection isn't as good as it might be.  That doesn't mean that Helena has stopped thinking, not I thinking about her thinking...

For the last several mornings, when Helena Iara has come to the breakfast table, she has pointed first at one thing, and then at another, perhaps asking to taste things or just to hold them in her hands.  Today, she pointed to Rita's mother's coffee cup, and the coffee had cooled enough that Rita's mom offered her a little bit.  Helena tasted it and made a strange face.  We all laughed, which made Helena ask for the coffee again.  This time she drank a couple of drops, made the same face again, and then looked up.  "It's good," she said clearly.  "É bom."

Now, my guess is that Helena was repeating what we say any time that she doesn't like food or drink.  "It's good," we say, as a way to convince her to try it again.  What she has interpreted, however, is that "it's good" means "Helena doesn't like the taste of this," as if the comment were descriptive, and not prescriptive.  Because what we really "mean" -- our purpose with the words -- by saying "this is good," is "you may not like it, but try it again."  Which is exactly what Helena had done with the coffee.  She thought it was awful, but she asked to try again.  "It's good."

The most famous "It is good" in the history of the world is probably Yahweh's, who, at the end of each day of creation, looked at the world and saw that it was good.  I wonder if we shouldn't use Helena's interpretation of "It's good" to re-think those lines from Genesis.  It might, in fact, be Yahweh describing the results of creation.  But it might also be prescriptive, or even Helena's idea of "It's not really good, but I'll keep trying."

When we look through a baby's mind, even the simplest words can be wonderful complex and ambiguous.

Sound is like touch at a distance

 I have been editing a lot of film recently: we shot hours and hours in the favela of Recife last month, and have to turn it into a good short film in less than a month, so the pressure is on.  Editing means a lot of time with headphones stuck in my ears, and me lost to the external world.  Several times over the last couple of days, I have heard Rita talking with someone, what sounds like a profound enough conversation that I take off my earphones to see who is visiting... only to find out that it's Helena Iara.

Over the last couple of weeks, Helena Iara has begun to speak.  Yes, there are words that show up, from the expected mommy and dada to strange ones like "ímã" (magnet), but what I'm really talking about is the material stuff of speech, its sounds and rhythms.  When I'm not listening carefully, or when I am paying attention to something else, it sounds as if Helena is talking adult speech.  The tone rises and falls like discourse, the nouns and consonants sound like English or Portuguese, and she has the exact tones of joy and frustration and desire that we associate with speech.

It's cliché to say that 90% of language is non-verbal, but that doesn't make it any less true.  Helena is gathering the lessons of non-semantic language, the tones and music and sounds that will eventually come together to be adult speech.  And she communicates with these sounds, even if she doesn't understand that sounds are supposed to "mean" something, instead of simply being.

By chance, I was listening to an old Radiolab episode a couple of nights ago, where the neuroscientist Anne Fernald suggested that speech begins not as communication, but as a caress (or a punch, a tickle... not as meaning, but as something much more direct).  Across cultures, people talk to babies with almost exactly the same tones of voice, whether soothing or complimenting or disciplining.  Voice serves to embrace a child and educate her, not through its content, but through its music.  Remembering that the cilia and timpanum and hammer that make up hearing are really feeling the motion of the air, Fernald coins the elegant phrase, "Sound is like touch at a distance."

Before Helena is learning language as meaning, she is learning sound as touch, as a direct way to relate with Rita and with me.  Semantics may come later, but for now I'm happy to have touch at a distance.

The semiotics of a Baby Bjorn

For the last several days, any time that Rita or I pass by the coat tree as we carry Helena Iara, she reaches out, laughs, pleads, and stares.  Her Baby Bjorn infant carrier hangs there, sometimes clearly visible, other times almost hidden behind coats and coats.  But with even a glimpse of the black straps, Helena explodes into a cacophony of sounds of desire.

Not an amazing story: babies learn what they want, and the learn to show it.  But what's interesting here is that Helena doesn't want the baby carrier.  She wants to go for a walk.  The Baby Bjorn has become a symbol of her real desire, which is to go out in the street to see dogs, pick flowers, and meet people.  It's a complicated sort of symbolism, but a process of signification none the less.  Something stands in for something else.

In fact, Helena is less involved in metaphor and more in metonymy, where the symbol participates in the signified, in some small way.  If Helena were to associate a frying pan with her afternoon walks, that would be a metaphor, but because we use the baby carrier as a part of the walk, it's metaphor or synecdoche.

It might seem that this distinction matters only to linguists and rhetors -- and that's probably what Helena thoughs as I tried to explain it to her on a walk yesterday -- but it does say something important about the way that humans learn language.  Augustine's famous description of learning words involves adults pointing at things and then saying their names, but I think that idea doesn't work for Helena yet.  Instead, she learns symbolization in a series of small steps, taking a part of the walk and making it stand in for the whole experience.  The next step, I think, will be to see that the symbol need not have anything to do with what it symbolizes.  That -- according to child neurologists, at least -- will be years in coming.

Acabou?

Rita and I have becomes used to hearing "Mama" and "Dada" from Helena, but there's a new word in her vocabulary, one that I had not expected.  Linguists who study infants suggest that babies first acquire nouns and proper names, only moving on to verbs much later, but Helena has begun to say the word "acabou," and to use it in a context that makes sense, often repeating it after we say it, but sometimes even producing it on her own.

"Acabou" means "it's over" or "it's all gone" in Portuguese.  Strange words for a baby, who is beginning almost everything, to say.  Yet it's a relatively common word in Brazil, at least when we speak with babies: Rita mashes cooked banana onto a plate, and Helena eats it eagerly.  When she's eaten it all, "Acabou!"  We pile pillows up into a mountain, and Helena tears them down one by one, and when she throws the last one from the couch to the floor, Rita will say, "Acabou," to which Helena replies "'cabou", with exactly the same tone of voice.

There's an easy explanation for Helena's use of the word, something we get from Freud.  He saw his grandson playing with a spool of thread on the floor, throwing the spool under a table where he could not see it and saying “fort” (gone). Then the child pulled the spool back to him and said “da!” (here). The game could go on for hours and hours.

Freud only came to understand what the boy was doing when the child called the spool “mother.” The mother, Freud’s daughter, had been spending many hours away from home, an event which seemed to traumatize her son. By throwing his mother under the table and “hiding” her (sending her away), and then bringing her back, the boy came to feel that he was controlling the trauma. It hurt him, but he chose it. According to Freud, one could see the same impulse in soldiers who suffered from shell-shock, who re-created the trauma again and again in their minds until they felt as if it wad their choice, and therefore under their control.

Is Helena using words to cover up the trauma of the end?  Honestly, I doubt it (and in fact, I think the whole edifice of Freudian theory constructs trauma as much as it describes it, but that's a polemic for another day).  Honestly, I think it's more about understanding the way that words work.  Ends can be clear things -- we put "the end" at the end of movies and books -- and she has come to understand that there is a sound that connects to these ends (as someday she'll understand that "once upon a time" marks a beginning.).  Helena is learning narrative.

Games and Freedom

First over Christmas and then during vacation last week, Helena had a lot of time to play with her cousins, especially Luidi (who just turned five) and Henrique (who is almost 4).  It's been interesting to watch their games, because they seem to show something important about human freedom.

Most of the time, Helena has one or two games she likes to play with her toys.  She likes to put them in her mouth, she likes to play peek-a-boo, and she likes to play ball... but a four or five year old knows a much greater range of games.

Maybe an example will help me to explain: Over Christmas, Luidi brought his cars from the movie Cars over to grandma's house, and Helena wanted to play with them with her mouth, and then by throwing them onto the ground (another favorite game).  Luidi, an immensely patient little boy, sat down next to her on the ground and said, "What we do is this:" and he pushed the car along the tiles and said "zoom, zoom."  Helena looked at him strangely, as if to say, "why aren't you putting the cars in your mouth?"

"The cars can talk, too," Luidi went on, and then acted out a scene between Lightning McQueen and the Tow-truck, Tow-Mater.  Helena found the play acting fascinating, and took the other cars out of her mouth long enough to watch.

Whether we can credit Luidi or just the normal process of development, over the last month and a half, Helena now pushes her little truck across the floor and imitates a kind of conversation between her finger-puppets (especially the monkey, toucan, and giraffe, her favorites) before putting them into her mouth in order to scratch her teething gums.  It seems that Luidi's lesson opened up new possibilities for Helena's world, new ways to interact with the objects in it.

A second event last week, when we stopped by Luidi's parents' house for the little boy's birthday, took the lesson to a new level.  Luidi and a couple of his friends were playing with some interlocking construction pieces, and Helena sat in the middle of them, picking up one thing and then another.  Several of the other little boys took the pieces from around Helena to build their own things, but Luidi stopped them, and put half a dozen pieces around her: "These are Helena's," he told his friends.

Games follow rules, and within the game, we have relatively limited freedom: you can't pick up a soccer ball and carry it.  But an even greater limit on our freedom, I think, is that we allow ourselves to get stuck in one game: an adolescent who can only argue with his parents, and doesn't know another way to relate.  The businessman who knows all the rules of the game in his business (including the rules about when he can get away with breaking the rules), but never steps out of that game to ask if what he is doing is right. The girl who thinks that the rules of fashion are obligatory all the time.  These are social games, rather like Wittgenstein's language games.

Luidi taught two important lessons to Helena: first, that she could choose what game to play with her toys.  And second, that not all games are selfish and competitive: games can also be about helping others and making them happy.  And as Helena learns these lessons, more options are open to her.  She becomes a little more free.

Mama

Like most great moments, the first time that a baby says "Mama" isn't really a single moment, except in history or memory.  The American revolution doesn't really begin with Beacon Hill or Paul Revere or the Declaration of Independence, but with thousands of little disobediences, refusals to pay taxes, resistance of colonial officers.  Nor can we mark the beginning of a war with the annexation of the Sudetenland or the Anschlüss.  But we choose to mark one of the moments of a process as the "real" beginning.

For me, Helena just said Mama.  Said it, in the way that human beings use language to mean something, to do something.  She was sitting on my lap in the hammock, a little tired, but happy to be outside and looking at the trees.  Then she asked for my fingers so she could stand up on my legs, looked at Rita working in the garden, and called out "Mama."  Then she screwed up her face, looked into the sky, and whined.  It was clear: she wanted Mama to help her go to sleep, because she was tired.  And as I write this, Helena Iara sleeps in the next room as Rita watches over her.

In grammatical terms, Helena used Mama as a vocative, a call to someone, just like I might say, "Hey, David" to my brother before making a comment or asking a question.  I don't think that Helena used the word as a signifier, as a sound that refers to a thing: I doubt that she even considers Rita (or me, or anyone) to be a thing, a substance with properties, let alone understands that words refer to things.  But she used the word.  She used it with purpose, with a plan.  And as Wittgenstein says, "In most (but not all) cases, we can say that the meaning of a word is its use in a language game."

Signification and meaning may come later, but for me, today is July 4 or July 14th, the arbitrary day we choose to call the one that matters.  Today, when she said "Mama", she was speaking.

Etiê Apuã

Helena Iara has been speaking a lot of new words recently, if "words" is the right term.  She repeats the same sound again and again, as if they were words, but without a clear meaning or a connection to sounds we can understand.  And her favorite of these repeated sounds is "etiê apuã," together with some variations like eteteiê, abuã, ebwa...  And then, of course, there is the ever-present mamama, which may or may not refer to Rita, though she does seem to us it in the right context from time to time, meaning something like, "Mom, I need you."

It's the repetition of etiê apuã that's been fascinating, though.  She's used the words for the last two weeks, and they seem to be important to her, even if not in the conventional sense of meaning, of connecting a sound to a thing to which it refers.  I'd love to think that apuã is a real word for her, because it means both mountain and head in Guaraní, the native language that used to be spoken in this part of Brazil (and the origin of Iara, Helena's middle name), and given my love of both mountain climbing and intellectualism, what could be a better first word for my daughter?  Unfortunately, though, I don't think there is any way in the world I get to make that argument.  Besides the Guaraní loan words common in Portuguese, Helena has never heard the language spoken.

It's the variations on the words that strike me as perhaps a more honest way to think about etiê apuã.  She'll sometimes drag out the vowels, other times repeat the consonants, other times almost sing the words as if they came from a tonal language.  Sometimes the nasal vowels (ê, ã) are more defined, other times those same sounds seem more flat and English.  She is experimenting and playing with sound, but in a way that reminds me of what John Coltrane did to well-known melodies: she takes them, tears them apart, puts them back together.

The traditional definition of the human being was as a logicon zoon, an animal with reason or language (logos means both in Greek), but Hannah Arent famously turned this idea on its head, showing that many animals use sounds as a way to convey symbols, while some people cannot.  Art, she says, is the aspect that makes us human: no other animal makes art.  Helena's game of theme and variation on etiê apuã makes me think she may be right: before language is meaning, it is art, an attempt to play with sounds in order to create beauty.

The sounds of Being

For someone who supposedly does not speak, Helena Iara is tremendously verbal.  She responds when we talk to her, sings along with her favorite songs, and tells us very clearly when she is happy or unhappy.  And amazingly enough, at the age of three months, she speaks one word very clearly, "é", the Portuguese word for "it is", or (in response to some questions: Portuguese is complicated that way") "yes".

You're allowed to doubt me, of course: everyone knows that children don't speak until they are around a year old, and when they do speak, nouns come first.  It's mere chance that one of her first sounds happens to mean something in one of the languages that her parents speak.  She can't possibly understand the meaning of "To be" or "Yes", immensely complex ideas.

This whole counter-argument is quite true, but I still want to contend that Helena is, in fact, speaking as sensibly as any adult does.  Half of the argument depends on Ludwig Wittgenstein, the other on a rather difficult critique of the whole western philosophical tradition.

Wittgenstein, as a pointed out in a conversation with Helena many weeks ago, insisted that the essence of language does not lie in a single way that words mean or signify things or ideas.  In fact, there are many different ways that language works, and we have to pay attention to what kind of a "language game" we are playing.  If, however, we were to begin a general theory of language based on Wittgenstein's later works, though, it would probably begin with remark 42 of the Philosophical Investigations (and I'm citing from memory here, though it has been a long time since I studied the book): "For a large class of cases -- though not all -- it can be said that the meaning of a word is its use in a language game."

When Helena speaks with us, and we ask her "are you a cute baby?  Are you the smartest baby around?" and she responds "é", she is, in fact, playing the language game correctly, answering with one of the acceptable ways to say "yes" in Portuguese.  She may not know what the word means, but she is using it correctly: and the truth of the matter is, if you ask me about a lot of words I use, I might have to defend myself the same way: a perfect definition may slip away from me, but I know how to use the word!

Which brings me to the second question, the one about the western philosophical tradition.  Martin Heidegger famously insisted that the real question of philosophy is "what is Being?" and that most of post-socratic philosophy is a bad-faith detour to escape that very simple issue.  He then wrote five hundred pages of indecipherable prose to try to investigate Being, and didn't even get halfway through his project before giving up.  Freshman philosophy students have run the same gamut since philosophy became an academic discipline.  "What does 'to be' mean?"

"É"is the third person singular of the word "to be" (ser) in Portuguese, even if it is also used to mean "yes."  But many non-indo-european languages don't have a word for "to be" or "it is": in years of studying Hebrew, it was always a challenge to try to translate English phrases with "is" or "was" into classical Hebrew, because the word just doesn't exist.  The word that most often gets translated as "being" in the Old Testament (including in the famous self definition of Yahweh as "I am that I am") really means "to become" or "to make oneself".  [That phrase from the Moses story is even more complicated by the fact that in Hebrew, there is also no present tense: it might be best translated as "I will become what I will become," which makes God into a very different divinity than most Christians think!]  In my brief attempts to learn Aymara and Kuna (two native American languages) I have also failed to find a word that really captures the sense of "being" in English (or any other indo-european language I know).

So here's the point: we could say that Helena's use of "é" is empty, without content because she doesn't know the meaning behind the signifier.  One could argue, however, for as many pages as Heidegger tried to say something else, that "being" is an equally empty word, and we don't know what "is" means any more than Helena knows what "é" means.  In Hebrew, if you want to say something like "roses are red" you just say "roses red" -- the connecting role played by "are" (to be) is simply understood or silent.  Which to me means that "being" is a blank, a signifier without a signified.  So if Helena is using "é" in the right context, she has as much right to the word as Martin Heidegger.

Ordinary Language

Over the last several weeks, Rita and Helena Iara have been talking quite a lot.  I'm not joking: Helena is responding thoughtfully, engaged in a real conversation with her mother.

Helena isn't even eight weeks old: clearly her proud father is exaggerating.  Everyone knows that children may speak their first word at about twelve months, and certainly won't converse for a good time after that.  And etymologically, "infancy" comes from the Latin of "do not speak".  So what in the world am I talking about?  These reflections became the theme for a long conversation with Helena Iara a couple of nights ago, after she and Rita had spent a good half an hour talking back and forth.

Now, if language is essentially the communication of meaning through verbal symbols, as most people have defined it through history, then I'm just writing nonsense.  However, over the last sixty or seventy years, beginning with Wittgenstein and JL Austin, philosophers and anthropologists have looked at other ways to define language, not merely as meaning, but also as a social practice.  Austin called his famous series of lectures How to do things with words, trying to show that meaning was only one of many activities that one can do with language.  When a priest or a judge says "I hearby declare you man and wife," for instance, he doesn't mean anything.  His words change the world, create or formalize a relationship that did not exist before.

Austin focussed on these kind of uses of words, but we can also see lots of other ones.  When two teenagers flirt with each other, for instance, the meaning of their words is less important than the romantic game they are playing.  Many modernist poets insisted that they wanted to create beautiful sounds more than convey meaning: after all, poein in Greek, the origin of poem, means "to make".  And words always work as a way to bring people together or force them apart, to create relationships, to develop intimacy.  They are a tool for sociality.

Since this theory that I'm proposing is a major part of Rita's research, it shouldn't surprise me that she would play these sorts of games with Helena Iara.  She speaks or giggles or grunts, and then waits for Helena to respond with a different sounds.  To which Rita will then respond, and the game goes on.  "Game," I say, but it is really the social practice of language: not the language game (Sprachspiel, in Wittgenstein's terms) of meaning, but a language game even so.  Helena has learned to speak long before she has learned how to mean.