The Big Bad Wolf

Helena Iara is afraid of the Big Bad Wolf.  Well, sort of.  From time to time, especially when we are playing hide and seek, she will run toward me with a gleeful scream of pretend fear and say "Lobo Mau, Lobo Mau!" and then jump into my arms.  Then she giggles again, cuddles, and runs off to find any sign of the Big Bad Wolf that might give her a chance to do it again.

There are no wolves in Helena's life.  If she really wanted something to fear, she would do much better thinking about the pit vipers we find in the garden from time to time.  How did the wolf come to occupy such a significant place in her imagination and play?

A couple of years ago, Rita and I made a series of short films with pre-schoolers from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.  A surprising number of them featured the Big Bad Wolf, from the amazingly funny "Incredible story of Granny and the Big Bad Wolf", to "The Magic Wand" and even a music video called "Bats".  These kids lived in a place that was authentically frightening, where we heard gunfights in the streets regularly, and occasionally would see either cops or drug soldiers running through the streets, pursued by their enemies.  Yet only one of the kids' stories made reference to guns, and many of them talked about wolves.

I don't recall whether it was Kierkegaard or Heidegger who insisted that if fear means that you are frightened of something, anxiety is when you are scared of nothing.  The clenched heart and cloying sweat of fear are there, but you don't have anything to look at, to say: "This is the cause of my fear."  And though we often think of anxiety as the domain of stressed-out urbanites and patients in psychoanalysis, early childhood must be a very anxious time.  Think of Helena: from time to time, without any real explanation that she can understand, we pick up her clothes and her toys, get in an airplane, and start living somewhere else: in a favela of Recife, the mountains of Santa Fe, the middle of the Amazon jungle.  And right about when she gets comfortable and starts to like the place, we go back.

There is probably an origin of anxiety in evolutionary biology, too: the need to keep on your toes, or simply that when we evolved the biology of fear, it didn't make as much genetic sense to also evolve the capacity to relax.  So anxiety is with us, even when we are little kids.

The Big Bad Wolf, I think (or any imaginary object that scares us) serves as a way to transform anxiety into fear, a way to find a cause for the broad-ranging uncertainty we feel.  As Helena talks about the Wolf, she consoles herself to say, "Here is the danger.  Other places are safe."  Instead of worrying (another manifestation of anxiety!) that she fears something imaginary, I should be happy that she has found a way to remove anxiety from her life, displacing it onto a game like the Wolf.

Take Care of Her

Over the last several weeks, all of Helena Iara's toys have become mothers and daughters.  The little mouse is the daughter of the big mouse, who is in turn the daughter of the little cat, who is daughter of the big cat, who is daughter of Pato the duck...  In each of these cases, size is much more important than race or appearance.  Natural "enemies" like cats and mice can be mothers and daughters to each other.

Over the last couple of days, she has made it very clear why and how this parenting relationship develops: they take care of each other.  Today, as I held her frog puppet and had it sing songs to her, she put first the little moose (called "Mimoosinho") and then the larger mouse ("Mimoosão") between the frog's long arms and said "Care for her" (cuida dela!).  At that point, she made the relationship clear: "This is their mother."

One of the great philosophical debates of all time is what kind of emotions lie at the base of what it means to be human.  According to Heraclitus, "all things come about through strife". (war, conflict... it's hard to translate the greek polemos).  In the Gospel of John, we see that all comes about through "the word" (logos, sometimes better understood as reason, thought that's probably not what John meant).  I wonder if Helena isn't taking up with another school of philosophical thought, where care lies at the foundation of all things.

Heidegger was famous for putting Sorge (care) at the center of Dasein (being-there), but I think Helena is pointing at something different: for Heidegger, this care was associated with worry and anxiety (he was, after all an influence on loads of pessimistic existentialists later in the 20th century).  Heidegger did see care as the idea that things or people are important, that they matter to us (in Spanish, for instance, one of the ways you can say "I care about x" is "x me importa", it matters to me.).  People are different from animals because we feel this kind of care and concern in discerning what is important.  For Helena's stuffed animals, care for the next smallest member of the group is the way they come to be "her" toys.

Donald Winnicott may actually be the best resource here: he talks about the "holding space" that babies and small children need to feel loved and supported.  For him, like for Helena, "caring for" is not an intellectual exercise (like Heidegger's existential worry), but a physical act: a hug.  When each of her toys "cares for" the next, it holds the next smallest baby: the frog embraces the cat, who embraces the little moose.

A little game, but philosophically profound: and I think it says that Rita and I are doing a pretty good job at showing Helena we love her.  So that she can show others (even her imaginary friends) down on the line.

Thinking with Drums

In the countries that adopted the Greek philosophical tradition, what is called thinking generally takes place through words, whether written or spoken.  That's why we get long philosophical books, debates, and pretentious blogs like this one.  In Brazil, many people have argued that the best thinking happens in song.  During our last week in Los Angeles, we went with Helena to see a show by a Yoruba drummer, who argued that in much of Africa, thinking happens through drumming.

You can see the video of Helena drumming above, and some photos in Saturday's blog.  For a baby (and, in truth, for most of us), thinking through drumming or dancing or singing seems to be a much more compelling and seductive way to do philosophy.  In Yoruba culture, moral lessons, new ideas, and traditional values get passed through the drums, which are said to "talk" -- which in fact they do, when you learn how to lesson for the sounds.  Songs always convey moral lessons to the young in America and Brazil, and I suppose in Europe and many other places as well.  And the incorporation of the body into these lessons must make them that much more powerful.

However, I wonder how counter-thinking happens in a culture where drumming is thinking?  How does one subvert, question, undermine authority?  For all of the excitement of thinking in other ways, I don't want to condemn the verbal tradition of the west.  It makes for a great way to think and question the world, tradition, and the very words one uses to think.

I hope that Helena learns to think with drums and words, dance and song and even in the songs of birds. Maybe she'll learn that in her childhood of much travel and border crossings.

More on Being a Baby

After writing my last blog, with its rather exaggerated conclusion that Helena Iara knows more about Being than Heidegger (because for her "é" is an empty signifier), I began to think a little more about my argument, and to talk it over with Helena as we sat in the winter sun and enjoyed one of the few nice days we've had in the last several weeks.  Nietzsche seemed to be an interesting addition, and since she liked the sound of his name, I talked about him for a bit.

I hope I am getting this argument right here: I have robbed in mostly from one of the best books I've read on the mad German genius, Alan White's In Nietzsche's Labyrinth.  For Nietzsche, "nihilism" is an important category, but not in the sense that was most common in his time, that of the nihilist revolutionaries first chronicled by Turgenev, who tried to overthrow the Russian Tsar.  For Nietzsche, nihilism was an ontological category, a consequence of his discovery that "God is Dead."

I explained to Helena that there are three levels of nihilism in Nietzsche's thought.  First comes religious nihilism, the stage in which most of humanity lives.  It is religious because people believe that there is a God, but because such a being does not exist, they really believe in nothing.  Religious nihilism is about delusion.  At the second level is absolute nihilism, which happens when people come to recognize that God does not exist, and they then accept the truth that they believe in nothing.  But this form of nihilism is basically negative, because these nihilists are disappointed that there is no Divine in which to believe.  Absolute nihilism is the kind of disenchantment we associate with the word "nihilist."

The final level of nihilism, "realized nihilism" (and again, I hope that I have the terminology right), is when one recognizes that there is no God, and that it doesn't matter in the least.  One could argue that the Madyamika Buddhist idea that there is no difference between nirvana and samsara (perfection and the real world) is exactly this: we don't need to condemn the world for being less than we want, but to celebrate it for all of the good it has.

Now, I don't want to enter into the debate about the death of God (because I think the God who Nietzsche declared dead is very different from any God I would find convincing... after all, as I mentioned in the last blog, the Hebrews don't even have a word for Being, so God as Infinite, Omnipotent Being would be very foreign to them.  But the point, I think, works when we talk about Being instead of God.  Helena, who says "é" (it is) and leaves the signified empty, is a realized nihilist, not even concerned that Being, as imagined by philosophers of the West, is a delusion.

Perhaps this is why Buddha is so often represented as a baby...

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.