The "real" Pocoyo

Yesterday, before Rita, Helena, and I got together with some friends who live here in Los Angeles, I was trying to remind her who they were.  "We saw them lots there in Brazil, Helena, and then stayed in their house last year... and remember Tiago, the little boy?  He was born in Spain, where the real Pocoyo is from..."

As soon as the words escaped my mouth, I heard how silly they were.  Yes, the Pocoyo cartoons that Helena loves so much are, in fact, made in Spain.  She often watches to them on Youtube in Castillian Spanish.  But "the real Pocoyo?"  I wanted to indicate something "more" than the plastic Pocoyo toy she plays with every day, but could I possibly say that the video of Pocoyo, something that exists only as the 1s and 0s of a computer program, is any more "real" than the plastic and rubber Pocoyo she was playing with?

In the late 1980s, the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard made quite a splash on the academic scene with his idea of the simulacrum, defined as "the copy for which there is no original."  He saw this phenomenon everywhere in postmodern culture, from the fake culture of Disney's Epcot to Hollywood movies, but it seems that a plastic doll representing an electronic cartoon, where there was never even a "real" drawing of Pocoyo, stands at the peak of the pyramid of simulacra.  When we think of the intentionally decontextualized world in which Pocoyo lives, where the background is pure white most of the time, it becomes even harder to imagine an original of anything having to do with the character.

For all of the nihilism of Baudrillard and his followers, a heavy tone of moralism always accompanied their talk of simulation and simulacra: it was as if they said, "This is how the world is now, but it wasn't always this bad."   After all, the basis for most Western philosophy is Plato's theory of the forms, some original "real," of which all of the things we see in our world are nothing but copies.  Plato condemned art because it was a copy of the things of the world, and as such, really only a copy of a copy, derivative to the second level.

Pocoyo, however, seems to steal the fire from the moralizing postmodernists.  Pocoyo isn't a copy of a real boy, and his world is not a copy of ours.  Certainly there are some references to things that we know, but we don't judge Pocoyo by whether it is true to reality or not.  It's not about representation at all.  It's about fun.  About play.  And though we may play-act, though children may pretend to be something when they play, we don't principally judge a soccer game or play with dolls by whether it "truly represents the world."  We can call it good or bad, beautiful or ugly, but never true or false.  Play escapes the logic of the real and of truth.  It's something else entirely.

And the "real Pocoyo?"  Who cares.  What matters is how Helena makes her doll run around, take baths, cook, slide down the couch.  It's about play, not about truth.

Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny?

I've been thinking a lot about peek-a-boo recently, because any time that Helena and I go for a walk, she places her hands over her eyes until I see what she is doing and say, "where's the baby, where's the baby?"  The game can go on for half an hour.  But this time, I've been thinking the game more with the ideas of early modern philosophy, than we the Lacanian foolishness I'd been using before.  Particularly, through René Descartes.

In the 17th and 18th Century, when science was all the rage -- because, after a couple of rough centuries, people were beginning to do it again -- philosophers put a lot of effort into framing their ideas in scientific terms.  How, for instance, to think about the soul?  Where is it?  How do you examine it scientifically.  And René Descartes proposed that the soul was in the pineal gland, in the middle of the brain, behind the eyes.

Now, the last time I wrote about peek-a-boo, I suggested that Helena is really involved in experimenting on the subjectivity of the other, and that covering her eyes is a way to block the game of intersubjective mirroring between people.  As she plays the game at one year and three months, I think something else is going on, something more... Cartesian?  Can it be that Helena is trying to hide her soul?

That sounds like a joke, but I don't mean it that way.  When we think about "ourselves", about where the essence of who we are is located, it's easy to think like Descartes.  Humans are visual beings, so it makes sense to situate ourselves where our eyes are.  It certainly makes more sense than in the feet or in a kidney... So might it be that Helena does, in fact, think that she is hiding something important when she pulls a cloth, or even just her fingers, over her eyes?

Now, the other thing that Helena does as we walk around is give names to the things in her world.  Like many babies, she uses loads of onomotopeias: "bow-wow" for a dog, "meow" for a cat, various chirps for birds and moos for cows.  Some of the earliest Greek thinkers suggested that language might have started in exactly this way... you can see traces of the idea in Plato's Phædrus, for instance. Most modern linguists dismiss the idea, but at one point, it had a lot of currency.

So, returning from a walk to the beach the the library yesterday, I shared a hypothesis with Helena, one that certainly won't withstand any serious scrutiny, but which was fun to invent.  Biologists love the phrase "Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny," meaning that the development of a being in the womb mimics the evolution of the species as a whole.  A fetus looks like a fish and a bird and loads of other things before it comes to look like a human being.

Might something similar happen in the intellectual development of a child?  Do we go through all of the philosophical errors of the past as we grow up?  Does the history of philosophy mirror the history of Helena's thinking?

Probably not.  But if she comes up with some sort of ideas about the phlogiston or the geocentric universe, you can trust I'll be paying attention.

Horses, representation, play

Last night, Rita and I took Helena Iara to a country restaurant for dinner with her family, and as one might expect, a baby does not find adult conversation interesting enough to sit quietly at the table.  Fortunately, the restaurant owners know this, and they had build a wooden jungle gym, swings, and a couple of kitschy model horses and oxen harnessed to an old cart and landau.  I took Helena out to the front, and we played on the swings and then walked over to the horse.

As we sat on the landau (I say landau, as a two wheeled cart, but do they need to be covered?  I'm not sure: certainly it wasn't a surrey) behind the horse, a three year old boy was playing on the horse's back, and my mind inevitably (if you have read this blog before, you know that "inevitably" isn't as ironic as it might seem) turned to Plato's idea of representation.  Plato said that what's "really real" is the ideas, and that what we see as "real things" (horses, in this particular case) are nothing but inferior reflections of the idea of a horse.  Art, as a representation of this representation, is even worse, and as such should be prohibited.

Was the horse in front of us really a representation of a horse in a field, though?  Today, most kids encounter a horse as a toy long before the encounter one in real life, and the same is true with most stuffed animals: Helena loves frogs and bears and a moose and a couple of rabbits, and she has never seen any of them in real life.  Children don't really see their toys as representations of something else.  They are for play, not for representation.

The easy postmodern out (one much in fashion when I was in college, so much that I wrote my senior thesis on him) was the philosophy of Jean Baudrillard, who theorized the simulacrum, understood as a "copy of which there is no original."  Epcot Center serves as a wonderful example of a simulacrum.  The difference, of course, is that Epcot claims to represent something (the "real" China across the water) and merely does it badly, and Baudrillard secretly desires for there to be an original in the background, and feels a little sad or nihilistic that there is no idea which the simulacrum can represent.  But a toy... it's different.  That a toy bear or frog represents its model poorly is no criticism: in fact, the toy can be much better for not appearing anything like its supposed reference.

There is pretty good evidence that the whole Platonic (and eventually Western and then almost-universal) obsession with representation emerges with money, which can stand for anything.  Coins (first established in the West by Midas in the 6th or 7th century BC), this strange new thing which can become anything in the process of exchange, open the question of representation, to which Platonic philosophy is only the first of many answers.  But many cultures, and all little kids, don't care about that.  Their word isn't governed by symbols and signs, but by the act of play (I reflect a lot on this on the book I wrote about child soldiers in Colombia).

To Helena, the whole question, raised by Plato and still at issue among analytic philosophers today, just doesn't matter.  She just wants to play on the horse.  And honestly, I think that's a much better philosophical position than almost all of the philosophers of language I've read...

The Dinner Party

A symposium sounds so serious, the kind of thing that one tries to avoid on a university campus, knowing that it will probably be staid old men talking about something you know nothing about.  The word comes down to us from one of Plato's best dialogues, called "The Symposium" in most translations, but which really means "the drinking party" (sym being "together" and posion being "to drink").  Similarly, the central rite of Christianity, the eucharist, is also originally a drinking party, where Jesus and his disciples came together to drink wine, tell stories, and think together.  Eating, drinking, and thinking have long gone together.

(photo by David Shaw)

You can see, then, why I have been so excited about the day that Helena would begin to eat solid foods.  I had no expectations that she would suddenly burst forth with reflections on Diotema and Alcibiades (two of the guests at Socrates's symposium), but there is something wonderful about eating together, about sharing food and a table.

One can imagine my sadness when she not only made a face at the apples that Rita had carefully prepared, but then threw them up, together with all of her milk that morning.  And a houseguest -- Barbara, the wife of my mentor in politics, Scott Armstrong -- had to catch the vomit in her hands.  Not exactly the conviviality for which I had been waiting.

In fact, Helena likes the social practice of eating.  She likes to sit with us, take a spoon in her hand, coo in response to the dinner conversation, and even ask Rita to bring the lip of a water or orange juice cup to her mouth.  Perhaps it is a little like speaking, where she mastered the social conventions of talking and listening long before there is any content to her words, she has learned the social game of eating, the dinner party part, long before she has learned the joy of chewing and ingesting food.

We'll see how she takes to eating over the next couple of weeks.  For now, I'm content that she's good company at our daily symposia at the dinner table.

Hunger

“Desire is filthy, barefoot, and homeless; it always sleeps in the dirt, in the open air, in doorways and in the street.”

- Diotema, in Plato’s Symposium

Helena has a new favorite song, at least in the morning, when she is elated to be alive.  It's a kind of funk carioca, an adaptation of funk developed in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, but this one for kids.  And, oddly enough, it's about hunger.  You can listen to it here (even if you don't understand the words, the rhythm is catchy enough that you'll understand why Helena likes to dance to it.)

Homelessness and hunger play an important role in a lot of early philosophy, not just Diotema's quote above, which sees the philosopher in a kind of desperate poverty as he desires knowledge and wisdom, but also Socrates himself, who might have been considered homeless (and, quite frankly, crazy) by a lot of professional social workers today.  Diogenes the Cynic (not to be confused with the way we understand cynicism today, Cynicism was actually a very sincere movement, trying to take seriously the idea that the philosopher needed only the love of wisdom, and no possession more, to be happy) even lived in a barrel on the streets of Athens, where he famously insulted Alexander the Great for placing more value on possessions and conquest than on the values taught by his mentor, Aristotle.

I was explaining this to Helena Iara yesterday as we took an afternoon walk to the park, where homeless people in Santa Fe tend to hang out (since the Bush-inspired Great Recession, the number of homeless men and women has skyrocketed in Santa Fe, though (fortunately) the number of kids has not), when we ran across a virulent argument among an Indian woman and a hispanic man, both of whom seemed, from the dress, to lack homes to which they might return.  At first, it appeared that it was merely an angry dispute, full of curses and offense, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing.  I wanted to walk past them quickly.

As we listened, however (unavoidable, because of the volume of the argument), we heard something else: "What, you don't want me to stand up for myself?"

"I meant you should..."

"I should have a backbone, and that means standing up to you, too."

We didn't hear much more.  Standing around to listen would have been rude.  Even so, that brief exchange, for all of the vulgarity I deleted, showed that philosophy is alive on the street.  It's a conversation about dignity, courage, and meaning, however crouched in words that most academic philosophers might not use on a daily basis.

When I left Harvard, largely because I despaired at the lack of intellectual curiosity there, I was excited to see that ideas really mattered to kids living on the street.  When you're fifteen and sleeping under a bridge, you want to know what's the meaning of life to give you a reason to go on another day.  That, I explained to Helena, is why Diotema is talking about hunger, and why a funk song for children might be more than just fun.

A Taste of Baby Epistemology

Helena Iara is now able to grab things: not with any particular dexterity, but she understand that her hands can manipulate the world.  So a couple of days ago, I passed her Tereza, her smiling rag doll, and watched as she first embraced it, then pulled it closer and closer to herself, and then, finally, reached out with her tongue and licked the doll's face.  It was a very different action than the need to suck that she (and most babies) have, and also different from older babies' desire to put everything they see in their mouths.  Like a six year old with a precious ice-cream cone, she stuck her tongue out and licked the doll's cloth face.

It isn't the first time I have noticed Helena's concern with taste: whenever she take a bath, if water drips toward her mouth, her tongue darts out to taste it with transparent curiosity.  When she can, she licks my and her mom's skin.  Clearly, taste fascinates her as much as sight or sound.

Helena's epicurian research led me to a couple of chats with her over the last couple of days.  I started off thinking about senses, especially about Franz Hikelammert's hypothesis that the Greek metaphor for learning is sight (think of the verb theatreo, to see, for instance), while the Hebrews preferred sound (hearing and hearkening to the word of Yahweh).  These metaphors, however, are formal epistemologies: how people (adults, mostly) come to know, and to confirm that what they know is true.  Helena uses both sight and sounds to learn about her world, but what about taste?  Does that sense fit into any kind of theory of knowledge?

As I told Helena about Hinkelammert's theory, I remembered one of the oddest images from the Phædrus, a dialogue I haven't studied for a long time (sophomore year in college!), but which can break down any simple interpretation of Plato.  The story is distinctly odd, with Socrates telling a myth about how a man can come to know the truth of the Forms, starting with lying with a comely youth (but not culminating the sexual act) and then moving on to a mystic voyage through the land of the Ideas.  And in the end, the knower does not know the forms by sight, but by taste.  Man eats the Ideas.

In Tupi-Guaraní philosophy, the mouth also takes center stage in epistemology: the ethical and ontological commandment of Amazonian Indians is to live the perspective of the other, to see through the eyes of the jaguar or of the enemy tribe.  But the path to this perspective is oral: one either eats the flesh of the enemy, to consume his perspective, or sings his songs, to feel the words of his language on your tongue.  Ayahuasca, the famous shamanistic drug to transform perspective, is also oral, the first thing that people who take it comment on, is how brutally bitter it is.  For the Tupi-Guaranís, new knowledge come about through taste.

In the contemporary West, on the other hand, taste is an æsthetic metaphor: someone has good taste when she dresses well, recognizes good art, or likes the restaurants I like.    I wonder if we aren't missing something important here, and I shared this idea with Helena as she licked the back of my hand.  Could it be that taste is the best way of thinking about new knowledge, ideas and thoughts that break the paradigms we have always used to understand the world?  Could it be that the fact that Christians eat and drink in their essential ritual is much more interesting that I thought when I took communion in church as a kid?

For Plato, for the Tupi-Guaranís, and for Helena, taste serves as a way to understand something that is completely other.  Helena has only tasted milk, so water is a stunning revelation, the salt on my hand an almost mystical experience.  Think about the first time you felt wasabi in your nose, or the hot-sweet of a Thai curry... one has to step out of himself to live the experience.  Learning about a new tree, on the other hand, is something I can extrapolate from my knowledge of other trees, and I can describe music by reference to other kinds of music you have already heard: "Imagine Paganinni played by Metallica...".  Taste, on the other hand, doesn't fit.  Try to describe wasabi to someone who has never tasted it.

So I think Helena is on the right path.  Taste is a way to knowledge, and it will be exciting to see all of the new flavors that she will experience in the coming years.

Music and Speech

Since I got back from Bolivia, one of the major changes I have seen in Helena is that she loves to sing.  Now, I don't want to over-state her musical capacity here: she has only one note and one volume level, and we probably wouldn't even know that it was music were it not for the fact that she only does it when Rita and I sing to her.  There is also an important difference between this vocal activity and the "conversations" that Rita has with her: when she sings, she doesn't wait for us to stop talking so that she can respond.  She sings in a chorus with us.

With this in mind, yesterday morning, after I sang several of her favorite songs to (or with) Helena Iara, I shared with her some of the traditional myths about the origin of music.  In Plato's Phaedrus, for instance, Socrates shares the idea (without really endorsing it) that men got the idea of speech from the singing of birds.  The myth of Marsyas goes into much more detail: Marsyas was a satyr in Asia Minor (now Turkey) who, depending on the story, either found a musical instrument that Athena had cast down from Olympus, or invented the two-barreled pipe by himself, using reeds from a lake near his home.  Regardless, he came to be known as the greatest musician of his day.

Being the best was not necessarily a good thing in the Greek world: myths always have the most competent humans either challenging the gods in an act of hubris, or the gods challenge them to bring them down to size.  In this case, Apollo was the problem: he and Marsyas faced off in a contest between the god's lyre and Marsyas's flute, which has also been interpreted as a dispute between the pentatonic and diatonic scales, Eastern and Western harmonies, reason and genius, Apollo and Dionysus...  And as always happens in Greek myths, the mortal loses.  In this case, Apollo tied Marsyas to a tree and flayed his skin while he still lived, which apologists throughout history have excused as a proper punishment for someone with the arrogance to challenge the gods.

In my last semester at Harvard, when I was taking a course on Greek archeology, I spent a lot of time researching Marsyas and Niobe, pre-Roman nature spirits from Asia Minor who get extreme punishments for daring to place themselves on a level with the gods.  I had been studying a series of beautiful bass-reliefs in the theater Hieropolis, and tried to show how the artist had used these myths to think about politics, with Marsyas and Niobe standing in for the oppressed locals and Apollo and Artemis for the unjust Romans, a rather tendentious argument but a very fun one to make in the stuffy religion department at Harvard.  (There is a decent connection, by the way: Marsyas imagery was associated with the right of free speech in Rome, both by liberty's partisans and its opponents.)

Strangely, Helena continued to listen to this whole story, especially since I broke it up from time to time so we could sing together.  And those songs make, I think, the same argument as the myth of Marsyas and the story of language and birdsong related by Plato.  We often think that song is a kind or ornament, an art that depends upon speech.  Speech proceeds song: speech is involved in the serious business of communication, while song is just play or decoration.  Plato himself, in the Republic, said he would banish singers and poets, because they messed with the real business of speech, which was the communication of profound ideas.

A young refugee with whom I worked in Colombia made the same argument as Socrates in the Phaedrus: he told me of the terrors of life in the northern jungles, where he had seen his uncle murdered by paramilitaries as they rode together on a motorcycle, then of his forced flight to Bogotá when his father was accused of participating in a massacre committed by the guerrillas.  When he came to the city, he refused to speak.  Words were too heavy.  People might kill him for what he knew.  Even so, he found a group of rappers in his neighborhood and began to sing with them, and found his voice through music.  "I had to sing to learn how to speak," he told me.

As I told Helena his final story, I thought about her singing.  She too is learning to sing before she learns to speak.  And I hope with that, she will learn the intonations and poetry of elegant speech: not mere communication of ideas, but beauty expressed through sound.

The Allegory of the Cave

2:45 AM after a hard day with Helena Iara.  She had fussed all day long, and then at about 9, began to scream as loudly as she ever had, complaining of gas in her stomach.  After a couple of hours of comforting, she got to sleep and had slept well until 2AM, when she woke to eat.  And after the midnight snack, the worst vomiting episode yet.

After we got her cleaned up, Helena was calm and even happy: vomiting often seems to relieve the pressure in her tummy.  And as Rita went to the bathroom to clean herself up, Helena started to admire the shadows cast by me, the bed, and the mosquito net playing on the wall.  She smiled, fascinated.

So, of course, I had to tell her about Plato's allegory of the cave.

Behold! human beings living in an underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.

And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are talking, others silent.

And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive some one saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision,--what will be his reply? And you may further imagine that his instructor is pointing to the objects as they pass and requiring him to name them,--will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?

And if he is compelled to look straight at the light, will he not have a pain in his eyes which will make him turn away to take refuge in the objects of vision which he can see, and which he will conceive to be in reality clearer than the things which are now being shown to him?

And suppose once more, that he is reluctantly dragged up a steep and rugged ascent, and held fast until he is forced into the presence of the sun himself, is he not likely to be pained and irritated? When he approaches the light his eyes will be dazzled, and he will not be able to see anything at all of what are now called realities.

This entire allegory, I said, you may now append, dear Glaucon, to the previous argument; the prison-house is the world of sight, the light of the fire is the sun, and you will not misapprehend me if you interpret the journey upwards to be the ascent of the soul into the intellectual world according to my poor belief, which, at your desire, I have expressed--whether rightly or wrongly God knows. But whether true or false, my opinion is that in the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world.

I didn't tell the story in Plato's words.  That would bore the little girl stiff.  But the basic elements were all there.

Now, just about everyone in the history of philosophy interprets this story as a metaphor for the search for knowledge, for coming to value what is true (the sun) and not simply what appears.  But I wonder if there might not be a better way to think about it, as a metaphor for learning and education (after all, one of the prime themes of the Republic).  Babies love shadows and shadow play; it is one of the first things that surprises them and helps them learn how light and matter and physics work.  We'll see what it takes for her to understand that there is a light somewhere that causes the shadow...

And as for Plato's silly sun-mysticism, I'll deal with that another night when she can't sleep.