Learning to desire

There can be a legitimate debate about whether or not Helena learns as much critical theory from Pocoyo as I think she does.  There's no doubt, however, that the writers for the series are really smart, and consciously trying to deal with issues that challenge both kids and adults.  For instance, one of Helena's favorite episodes these days tells the story of a day that Sleepy Bird has to run errands, and thus asks Pocoyo and Pato to babysit for Baby Bird.  Valentina the caterpillar shows up as well, simply overwhelming Pocoyo and Pato, especially when they try to convince the kids to sleep.



Pocoyo and Pato only get the kids into bed with a trick: they pretend that they want to use the beds, thus making Valentina and Baby Bird envious... and getting them in the right place.

How do we learn to desire?  Certain basic things are biological: we don't need anyone to teach us hunger or thirst or exhaustion.  But even such a simple desire as wanting to go to bed emerges from a complex pedagogy, and according to both Pocoyo and René Girard, we learn most desire mimetically.  That is to say, we learn it by imitating others.  If someone else wants something, then it must mean that I should want it, too.

Girard made most of his reputation with a critique of memetic desire, showing it to be the root of intra-tribal violence, the scapegoating process, sacrificiality, and almost every religion.  Oh, and capitalism, too, of course.  At the same time, he recognizes its importance:

Even if the mimetic nature of human desire is responsible for most of the violent acts that distress us, we should not conclude that mimetic desire is bad in itself.  If our desires were not mimetic, they would be forever fixed on pre-determined objects; they would be a particular form of instinct.  Human beings could no more change their desire than cows their appetite for grass.  Without mimetic desire there would be neither freedom nor humanity.

Desire feels so natural and that we assume it to be part of us, but the truth is that most of the desires we have are a strange kind of outside-inside, both ours and not-ours.  Raising a child is, in great part, a co-learning how to desire -- not a conscious teaching process, because when Helena learned to desire, she doesn't learn from what we say, but from what we do.  It is imitation, not pedagogy.  So in the process, Rita and I have to learn from ourselves, make our actions and desires coherent with our ideals.

And Helena, like Baby Bird, is gradually learning to go to sleep when she's tired.

Easter

Christmas is relatively easy to explain to a baby: when mean people came from another country to take away the land of people who had lived there for thousands of years, the people who lived on the land dreamed of someone who would save them from the bad people.  One night, they thought that this great revolutionary leader had been born, so everyone celebrated and gave presents to the baby who was going to free them from the Romans.

Yesterday, as Helena and I rode to the playground, we saw children processing through Santa Fe, carrying a cross toward the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Guadalupe.  "Girls and boys," she said.  "Doing what?"  And if Christmas is easy to explain, Easter is a whole lot harder.  Oppression and Salvation can be explained through "mean people" and "freedom", concepts that a baby understands.  But the idea that this great leader failed in liberating Israel, that he never planned on making a violent revolution like Simon (the Zealot) and Judas (Iscariot, or Sicarius; the Zealots and the Sicarii were the two most violent (almost terroristic) groups in Judea at the time) had wanted, that he was convicted and nailed onto a cross...  I had no hope of explaining any of these things to Helena Iara.  I tried, of course, but I could tell that she didn't understand.

Even harder to explain, for a baby who doesn't know what death means, is that Jesus died and was resurrected, and that the "failure" of his movement actually gave it more power, and turned it into a universal movement for liberation, and not just a limited anti-colonial struggle of Israelites against the Romans.  Let alone the way that the crucifixion of Jesus leads to a critique of the idea of sacrifice and the incarnation of God-as-Holy spirit in the community struggling for justice and freedom.

As we rode the bike through downtown, Helena seemed to have turned me off, but her final words as we approached the park seemed to suggest that she understood at least something of Easter.  "Green," she said.  "Playground.  Play!"

It's spring, and time to play in the green grass with friends.  That's not a bad summary of the point of the whole Christian project.

Sacrifice

A couple of nights ago, during dinner with some friends, Helena wasn't interested in eating.  She wanted to get on the floor, chase the cats, and explore a new house, and not just eat, which is something she could do anywhere.  Our collective solution?  We fed her doll first, and then passed the doll's food on to Helena.  By the end of the meal, she had eaten quite well.


Though most people know about the role that animal sacrifice plays in most religions, I never spent much time thinking about who would really eat the goat or bull that was killed "for god."  They burnt to whole thing, right?  There's all of that language in the Old Testament about how Yahweh loves the smell of meat sacrificed to him, and Greek myths have the same sort of language.  So it was quite a surprise, when I studied classical history, to find out that the meat from a sacrifice was not, in fact, sacrificed.  People ate it: different people according to the values of different cultures (the Hebrews gave it to the poor and landless, the priests ate it in many Phoenician cults, the community as a whole in the worship of many Greek gods), but this meet sacrificed to the gods was really used for parties among flesh and blood people.

What doe these stories have to do with each other?  Helena had to "give" her food to her doll before she would eat it herself.  The Greeks "gave" their meat to the gods before they ate it.  Though the parallel isn't exact, it seems to at least merit some thinking-through.

Now, it seems that the logic of sacrifice in antiquity was that the gods, and not people deserved the best food.  They were, after all, gods.  But when the gods didn't eat the food, well, someone had too, so it might as well be the people.  The word "sacrifice" come from the Latin "to make holy," but the real process was rather the inverse: by offering the food to the gods, people de-sacralized, reduced its importance enough that they felt themselves worthy to eat good food like a bull.  In the same way that we cook food as a way to take it out of the realm of nature and make it part of culture, sacrificing the animal to the gods paradoxically made it available for human consumption.

Might Helena have been doing something similar?  We were at the home of other adults, eating adult food out of adult place-settings.  By giving the food to her baby, might she have been "de-adulting" it, bringing it into the world of play and childhood?  Then, since the doll couldn't possibly eat the food, it became open to her eating.

Maybe.  Or maybe kids just like to play with their food.

The evil eye

With the exception of a brief flirtation with a superstition about the number 16 as a teenage soccer player, I've never really had much time for magical thinking.  I'm a pretty hard nosed materialist.  So as one might guess, I've always quietly scoffed at the idea of the evil eye, in spite of its pervasiveness here in Brazil.  None the less, two weeks with Helena Iara in Recife forced me to do some re-thinking on the issue.

Though there are many forms of the evil eye, the most common one in Brazil often isn't intentionally malicious; in fact, the danger comes from admiration.  If someone compliments my clothes or appearance or anything else, it shows the possibility of envy, and that envy has consequences; in fact, in Portuguese, the word "evil" doesn't enter into the dynamic.  People fear the "olho gordo" or fat eye, the desire of the other for what I have.  It makes sense in a culture that has long been poor, and where social equality (within an economic class, though not from one to another) is an important virtue.



The problem comes when the object of envy is a baby.  If someone else admires Helena Iara, or envies Rita and me because she is our daughter, that envy can make her sick.  An entire social group of "benzedeiras" or blessers (sort of like good witches) exist in order to help kids get over the illnesses caused by the evil eye.  This struck me as sort of silly... until Helena became the victim of the olho gordo, as she did last week, with fever, confusion, and inability to sleep.

Lest you think I'm getting soft in the head, let me explain what I think happened.  In Recife, blond children are uncommon, and because they are almost always the children of the rich, they seldom turn up in the favelas and areas of urban decay where we spent most of our time.  For that reason, Helena attracted a lot of attention.  A lot.  She literally stopped traffic from time to time, and people surrounded her as if she were a rock or soap opera star, each one of them with more extravagant compliments.  In a city of almost 3 million people, one of the dirtiest and hottest and noisiest places I know, it was just too much.  Helena became over-stimulated and got sick.

A benzedeira blessed Helena, and I doubt that it did any harm -- in fact, the kind and soothing words of the woman, and the sweet-smelling fond she swung around Helena probably helped.  But what really worked was rest: getting her away from the chaos of the city, from the intense and desiring eyes of thousands of people.  She still had to deal with the heat, but she soon was as happy and healty as she had ever been.  And I came to have a little more respect for folk beliefs that I used to think were all confused with magic...

Mimetic Desire

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

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

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

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

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