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.

Creation from Water

Christmas in the south of Brazil means high summer, the sort of blasted, humid days I remember from August in central Pennsylvania when I was growing up.  It's the perfect kind of weather for a little girl who loves to play in the water, and Helena has spent wonderful afternoons over the last several days sitting in a a kiddie pool in the back yard.  She splashes and splashes until her hands and feet become prunes.  It seemed like a wonderful to talk about the history of water in philosophy.

The day Helena was born, she stared at me with utmost attention, and I felt like I had to say something.  I tried to tell her the history of greek philosophy, just because I knew that I'd be able to keep riffing on that theme for a long time, and I told her about Thales of Miletus, who tried to find the first principle of everything in water.  Yesterday, I started a little bit south of Greece, with the first words of the Torah: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."  It was one of the first texts we had to translate in Hebrew classes, and I still remember the strange vocabulary of "without form and void" or "hovered over the face of the waters."  The point, though, is that Moses (or whoever really wrote those words" associated water with creation.

The obvious connection with a baby is that a fetus is also created in water, and many mythical and psychoanalytic ideas about childhood start exactly there.  As Helena Iara splashed almost all of the water from the little tub in which she was sitting, however, I began to think of something else: for her (as for many babies, I imagine), water is the first experience of making a concrete impact on the world.  I throw my hands into the water and it splashes up to wet my face, my mom, the floor.  My actions have consequences.  Splashing water is an act of creation, one of the first that a baby experiences.

Water isn't like wood; it doesn't stay carved: however much you splash it, it returns to something like its original state.  Simón Bolívar tried to express the futility of his life with the phrase, "Él que hace revolución arra el mar," he who makes revolution makes furrows in the sea."  It might not seem the best metaphor for creation.  But in fact, when Helena splashes, she does change the world.  The surface of the water will not hold her furrows, but there is less of it in the kiddie pool than when she started.  I am wet, Rita is wet... and everyone is happy.  That's a pretty decent metaphor for the experience of most people with creation: it may not last, it may fade away, but for a moment, it makes us happy.