Country Music

Helena Iara has a new favorite song, and it isn't kiddie music:

 

She started hearing the song more than a month ago, when her aunt was driving in the car without the stereo, and started to sing it to her, and now Helena wants to hear and sing it all the time (on the way to the farmers' market this morning, we heard it three times).  She's also proud to know all of the words, no mean feat for a two year old (after singing along this morning, she declared proudly, and almost with surprise, "I know it all!").

Though I don't have any memories of when I was two, I do know that when I was little, I also liked country music; it is a little different in the United States, but many of the chord progressions and the harmonies are similar.  And ethnomusicologists say that country music exists in almost every part of the world these days, identified by a certain twangy-ness in the instruments, rhythms reminiscent of country life, and breaks in a singer's voice.

Those same ethnomusicologists say that what brings country music together as a world phenomenon is nostalgia, a sadness for a lost past (the horse, the smells of the country, the memory of a simpler time).  In English we don't have a word for that complex sentiment, but in Portuguese they do: saudade.  One of the other songs on the disk that has Helena's favorite, "Chalana", has the following verse, which seems to manifest this idea: "Every chord that I play represents a saudade."  Similarly, the song I remember loving when I was little was Roger Whittaker's "Durham Town" also a song about nostalgia and loss.

Here's the question, though: what has a two year old lost?  My father-in-law, with whom Helena listens to country music, lived the first thirty-five years of his life as a peasant, and when he was forced off the land, he always longed to go back to a life of herding cattle and planting manioc.  It makes sense for him to love the saudade in the music.  But Helena? Or me?

Freud or Lacan could give a psychoanalytic explanation of loss in a small child: they lose the intimate connection to the mother, the one-ness of the womb and the first months of infancy.  Maybe.  And as I wrote last week, the peripatetic life that Rita and I lead means that Helena is always losing a friend, a place she has come to love, a toy.  

But I think that something else is going on: though country music may represent loss, its practice is often the opposite.  Here in Brazil, country music concerts are amazing events, including rodeos, dozens of warm-up bands, and hundreds of thousands of people in small cities in farming areas.  Where Rita's family lives, it is the music of dance, the songs that everyone sings together.  These songs fear and lament loss, but as they do, they bring people together in a shared experience.  As Helena sings "Chalana" with her aunt or her grandfather, that's what matters, a process of coming-into-relationship with them, just like I loved singing Roger Whittaker with my dad as we played on the floor of our suburban house in Denver.

Everything transforms

A couple of weeks ago, Rita, Helena, and I went to visit one of Rita's childhood friends, a family that Helena loves to visit, because the son always brings out his toys.  This visit, she became obsessed with little games that would have been called "Transformers" when I was a kid: these were not exactly the brand name Transformers (cars or other machines that turned into robots when you moved the parts around), but something a little more organic, like rocks that turned into dinosaurs and leaves that became crocodiles.

Helena also loves other stories of transformation: books and songs about caterpillars that become butterflies, stories of peasant girls who become princesses (though, since I'm not always happy about the politics of such stories, I also tell stories of princesses that become peasants).  She also loves doll clothes and the changes that they imply.  All in all, we can say that Helena, like many kids, loves change.

There is something human in this process: children may think that adults are so different from them that in order to "grow up", they will need to pass through a metamorphosis similar to that of a caterpillar.  I wonder, though, if something even deeper isn't going on here: last week Rita was preparing a paper for an anthropology conference in São Paulo in which she compared the role-playing of little kids to the idea of clothing in Amazonian tribes.  In the West, we have the idea that play-acting is like being on the stage: an actor pretends to be something for a time, but then returns to his same being when he doffs the costume and the persona.  Yet in the Amazon, a change in clothes means a change in essence: when I put on the mask of a jaguar, I begin to see the world like a jaguar sees it.  Others treat me as a jaguar.  The clothes of a jaguar make me a jaguar.

Kids seem to see the world in the same way.  They aren't invested in their own personality or identity, in the way that an adult (or especially an adolescent) will say "I'm not the kind of person who..." They are much more willing to transform, to try on other "clothes".  Through many philosophers who write about play (Benjamin, Freud, and Agamben come to mind) talk about the repetition that play involves, I think that this kind of personal experimentation is even more important.  And, quite frankly, much more fun.

In the night kitchen

Helena Iara loves the story of Mickey, who heard a racket in the night, and screamed, "Quiet down there!"  Many other parents can say the same about their own kids and In the Night Kitchen, but the popularity of the book shouldn't hide from us how deeply strange it is.  From the first moment -- when the child (and not the parents) call for quiet -- to the last page -- "And that's why, thanks to Mickey, we eat cake every morning" -- the text is just weird, at least if you look at it with any critical distance.

I'm not the first to point out that something psychoanalytic is going on here: the secondary literature is full of claims that In the Night Kitchen is oneiric, onanistic, and ontological.  What interests me is actually that frame, the first and the last pages where Mickey first hears a sound he can't understand, and the end, turning the whole tale into a kind of "just-so story" that isn't actually true (we don't "have cake every morning.").  Since Helena's nascent storytelling address the structure of the tale than the content, it's worthwhile to think the same way about the stories she likes.

Here's the way that Mladen Dolar summarizes the Freudo-Lacanian theory of fantasy:

When the infant hears, he should not be able to understand anything; when the adult understands, he should not be traumatized; but both of these extremes are impossible: the non-understanding is being derailed, and the understanding does not put it back on track.  The subject is always stuck between voice and understanding, caught in the temporality of fantasy and desire.  In the simplified retroactive perspective, there is the "object voice" in the beginning, followed by the signifier which is a way of making sense of it, of coming to terms with the voice.  But we can see by this simple little scheme that the signifier is always taken hostage by fantasy, it is "always already" inscribed in its economy, it always emerges as a compromise formation.  There is a temporal vector between the voice (the incomprehensible, the traumatic) and the signifier (the articulation, the rationalization), and what links the two, in this precipitating and retroactive temporality, is fantasy as the juncture of the two….

Maurice Sendak seems to be explaining the same process, but with less complicated words and better pictures: Mickey hears his parents having sex, and doesn't understand it.  His brain scrambles around to understand what he hears, and though subconsciously he knows there is something sexual going on (he is naked for the whole book, after all), it makes more sense to fantasize a world under his own where bakers make cake and a boy can turn bread dough into an airplane.  By the time that he makes it back into his bed, he has developed a whole theory of the world ("and that's why") that also seems to catch a bit about reproduction.

(I wonder if Mickey had heard somewhere that old and almost vulgar euphemism that a pregnant woman "has a bun in the oven"?  Rita and I worked with a group of kids from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to re-tell the story of Little Red Riding Hood, and their version ends with Granny marrying the Big Bad Wolf.  We've always wondered if that didn't emerge because the storyteller has heard that "so-and-so ate so-and-so", a Brazilian way of referring to sex.  So if the Big Bad Wolf already ate Grandma, they might as well get married...).

In the end, the process that creates fantasy may seem like detour on the way to truth, or an actual impediment to understanding.  But I think this walk between "I don't understand" and "ahh...", whether it relates to sex or not, is one of the most beautiful things about childhood.  It's the way we learn, create, and come up with explanations that are much more interesting than the boring truth.

The mouth!

Last night, as we prepared Helena Iara for bed, I began to read one of her favorite books, Little Kitten.  The book is compelling not because of the plot, but because there is a little kitten puppet that sticks its head through a hole in each page, and Helena loves to see it move; and because Helena is teething, as Rita tried to brush Helena's teeth, I needed all of the distraction possible from the book, so the kitten was dancing all over the place.

At one point, as I tried to hold Helena with one hand and turn the page with the other, I simply wasn't dextrous enough to do it, so I pulled the book and puppet close to my face and turned the page with my mouth.  As anyone who works on bikes (or other machines, I suppose) knows, the mouth is a good third hand from time to time... but it seems Helena didn't know that.  She thought that turning pages with you mouth was the funniest thing she had ever seen.  "More, more," she laughed, almost falling off my lap.  "Do it again!"  For the next ten minutes, as long as I turned pages with my mouth, Helena couldn't stop her guffaws.

In Deleuze and Guatari's famous book on Kafka, the put a lot of attention into the role of the mouth in the Czech novelist's strange stories, focusing especially on the fact that one can either eat or talk, but never both.  Things go in and out of the mouth, but not at the same time (the New Testament makes a similar point when Peter doubts if he should eat food with gentiles; the conclusion is that "what comes out of a mouth sullies a man, not what goes into it.").

The mouth is one of those between-places that kids find so interesting: it's the path between the inside and the outside, the air and the body.  The little kitten in the book is rather similar: it also moves in and out of a hole in the book, being both inside the pages and outside them, marking the book as both a book and a toy, or between both of them.  But then, on top of that, I started to use the mouth as it certainly should not be used: as if it were a hand and not an orifice.  At least in Freudian terms, we begin to understand why it was so funny.

And on top of that, I bet I just looked pretty ridiculous.

Oedipus Fisher Price

Rita, Helena Iara, and I are now visiting my parents in Colorado, and Helena simply loves playing with the toys David and I had as children.  The Fisher Price Castle, with its moving stairways, secret passages, and dungeons (with a dragon, no less), may be her favorite, and she loves to move the "little people" (dolls with no arms and legs, for those of you who didn't have them as kids) all around and imagine the relationships they might have.

Last night, she put the queen in bed, and then put a little woodsman -- who might be an archer, horseman, or even Robin Hood -- in bed next to her.  She then found the king and brought him toward the bed, inviting several comments from Rita and me... but Helena quickly clarified the relationship: the little man clad in green was the queen's son.  None the less, she soon moved the king away to a spot atop the castle.

Personally, I love these little toys because they open play into narrative: though it's great when Helena plays with her dolls and stuffed animals by making them dance or slide, telling stories with toys is an even more interesting step.  Up to now, Helena's storytelling has been pretty simple, based around things that she has done, interfamily relations, or the simple joy of putting words together, but the physical relationships of the toys in the Fisher Price Castle seems to allow for longer and more complicated stories.  With the characters in place, she doesn't get lost in her stories very easily.

And with storytelling comes interpretation.  Mine, at least (I doubt that Helena is doing much hermeneutics!).  What would it mean if Robin Hood is, in fact, the Queen's son?  Does that transform the whole story of the Merry Men into an Oedipal drama?  In fact, there is something to this interpretation: after all, Robin Hood offers as a the political justification for his struggle against the Sheriff of Nottingham and Prince John, that he is defending England for Richard the Lionheart (off in Palestine during the crusades).  He is fighting for the definition of England (the mother land) against the law (in Lacanian thought, the law is the Father).

OK, it's a bad argument.  Not very helpful in understanding Helena's play with toys, nor the history of popular rebellions in England.  But the point is, that as babies begin narrative play and to do unexpected things that don't make sense, they make us think.  In some cases, the thoughts are useful, and in others, they don't lead anywhere.  But that, as an professor once told me, is philosophy.

Jokes

Babies do lots of funny things, and when they laugh, it is contagious.  None the less, I hadn't really expected that Helena Iara would be able to tell jokes, not until she came up with two in the last couple of days.

The first joke came as we were getting ready to leave to go to the playground.  Over the last couple of months, since we first came to the US, then went to Los Angeles, and are now back in Santa Fe, she has adopted the habit of taking toys with her wherever we go; it seems to be a way to feel secure in the face of so many moves, so many new places to sleep.  So a couple of days ago, she carried a doll over to me and said, "Take [it with us]."

"No," I said, "why not..."


Helena interrupted me with her stuffed duck, Pato, half as big as she is.  "Take."

"No," I said again, trying to push her to take one of her finger puppets, or maybe the little stuffed dog she calls Bow-Wow.

With a huge smile on her face, the ran over to her play kitchen, and said again, "Take!" She burst out laughing.

OK, it's not the deadpan delivery of classic comedy, but she was trying to be funny, and there was a certain ironic wit in the exchange.  Freud says that humor comes from the unexpected juxtaposition of concepts in the unconscious, and her inversion of what it was possible to take along seemed to work there.  She might not know the English phrase about "taking everything but the kitchen sink" on a trip, but if she did, the joke would have been even better.

She has also produced word-play that seems rather like a pun.  One of her favorite songs begins, "Cai cai, balão, cai cai balão..." (Fall fall balloon, fall fall balloon), which she adapted to be "Cai cai, Papai," (fall fall Daddy), which actually has a better rhyme to it than the original.  And then yesterday, as I was reading in my favorite chair (which has recently become one of the places she most likes to play), she changed it to "Sai sai, Papai," with the same melody and rhyme, but now meaning "leave leave, Daddy."

Does it make sense to call these exchanges jokes?  Or wit?  What is certain is that she has observed what she has done in the past to make us laugh, and now does it consciously, making the humor intentional.  Hegel sees this process of coming to be aware of oneself and one's influence on others and then consciously changing intentions based on that, as the essence of the move from the epic to the tragic to the comic in Greek theater.  Hrdy believes that the ability to seduce adults is almost hard-wired into babies, and that children's attempts to make us laugh (along with their extraordinary needs, which no one person can fulfill), lie at the basis of civilization.

I'm not sure I would go that far.  But as Helena learns to make us laugh, and makes this a part of who she is, I feel like something wonderful and important is happening.

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.