The prodigal daughter

Helena has never been a difficult baby.  Rita and I hear stories from other parents that make us wince, of sleepless months and temper tantrums and endless crying, and we can only thank whatever combination of genetics and health care and parenting that has kept us free of such challenges.  But no baby is easy: they all make us suffer in countless small -- and several large -- ways.

I'm not quite sure why I have been thinking of New Testament parables recently, but the Prodigal Son has been on my mind.  Most of us know the story from church, Sunday school, or pop culture: the vagabond son disobeys his father, leaves home, spends all his money on worthless things, and then, finally, comes home.  The father is so happy that he slays the fatted calf and throws a huge party to celebrate; the older son, who has always stayed with his father, obeyed the old man, and helped him, arrives bitter to the party, wondering why the father would do so much for the vagabond, and nothing for the good son.

‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ (Luke 15:31-2)

Most people read the parable through that last phrase: we should forgive and ben happy when we get back something we have lost.  It's not exactly a trite lesson, but I don't think it does much more than express something about how humans deal with loss.

I wonder, though, if there isn't something else going on, a reason that that father loves the prodigal son more than the perfect one.  As anyone who has ever been in love knows, we like people because of their virtues, but we love them because of their faults, their tics, their strange neuroses.  I'm not sure that it's different for children.  Do I love Helena because she's smart and funny and cute?  Sure, that helps.  But I think I really love her because I've had to rock her to sleep when she has a terrible colic at 3AM, because she constantly disobeys and wants to climb the stairs we tell her are dangerous, because if there are olives on the table, she won't eat anything else...  It's the glitches and the errors that make love dawn on us.

Slavoj Zizek makes a whole theological structure out of this idea, suggesting that if we love people for their lacks and sins, it means that God must be lacking, essentially broken.  God is love, after all.  And in fact, I think that the process by which I child comes to love his or her parents is a very strange one, in which she begins loving them because of their omnipotence and the protection they offer her, but (sometime in the teenage years, or later) she has to learn that loving them means understanding and loving their faults.

I don't want Helena to disobey, climb the stairs -- let alone leave home, spend all the money, and do everything else the prodigal son did -- but I know I'll love her even if she does.

Philosophy

Anyone who has read this blog for a while has probably noticed some changes in the last couple of months.  I'm posting less often, and when I do, the comments are less explicitly philosophical, or at least have less to do with elaborating the ideas of individual philosophers.  This change doesn't mean that I'm talking less, or less seriously with Helena Iara, but that as she grows up, interests and relationships change.



When Helena Iara was a little baby, she loved the sound of a voice: intonation, rises and falls, the sound of funny or soothing words.  What mattered most to her was the fact of talk, and the joy of looking into someone's eyes; musing about the history of philosophy helped me to find things to talk about as we rocked in the hammock or walked in the deserts of Santa Fe or the jungles of Florianópolis.  Philosophical reflections were really for me, a way to understand what was going on with her, to have the minimal difference of the other that allows thought to happen.

But as Helena has grown up, she now understands what I have to say, or at least a truly surprising amount of it.  Her interests now drive the conversation, and though those interests aren't any less intellectual or stimulating, they don't emerge from a dialogue with Zizek or Kristeva, but with bow-wows and miows and flowers and the other exciting parts of her world.

 

As Helena and I began these reflections, she taught me by her presence, by what I imagined that she might be thinking.  Now that she can actually tell me what is interesting to her, these lessons are different, less easy to describe in philosophical language... and frankly, more fun to have than to describe.  To paraphrase Marx, "In the past, philosophies have tried to understand babies.  The point, however, is to play with them."

Running

Helena  has everything ready to be walking right now: since she was four months old, she has walked as she holds onto an adults fingers, she stands on her own, she walks four of five steps without a problem... but she still isn't really walking.  Why?  Because she wants to run.  Holding her hands, she won't go slowly, but throws herself forward and sprints her legs with quick steps, running as fast as I can walk and hold her hands.

Now there is an easy lesson in this, one I tried to explain to Helena Iara this morning: you have to walk before you can run.  That idea is such a part of popular wisdom that we can hear it in many different contexts.  Even so...

I wonder if Helena's desire to run doesn't, in fact, express the best thing about her.  Her father doesn't get to brag that "my daughter walked when she was only so many months old," but that doesn't matter so much.  What matters is that she is so enthusiastic that se wants to run, that she loves the feel of movement and laughs as she runs, and that she is always trying to accomplish the impossible.  So instead of the boasts of a proud father, we have a utopian urge, something like the slogan of 1968 in Paris: "Soyons realists, soyons realistes demandons l'impossible": Let's be realists and demand the impossible.

In the end, that attitude makes me much prouder.

11:30

For the last several days, the Brazilian all-news-all-the-time station has been promoting an interview with Slavoj Zizek, one of my favorite philosophers and someone who shows up pretty often in this blog.  (If you want an interesting thought experiment on how bad the American media is, try to imagine what it would take to put that kind of marketing campaign into an interview with a philosopher on Fox News or CNN)  Unfortunately, GloboNews planned to show the interview at 11:30 at night, well after I prefer to be asleep.

Helena Iara fell asleep earlier than usual, and Rita and I prepared for a good night, but at 11:15, a certain small person decided that she did not want to be asleep.  Nor did she want to play in her crib, in bed, or in the hammock.  She wanted to go downstairs.

Now, one can argue about whether or not her real purpose was to see the interview with Zizek (which turned out to be great) or whether she just wanted to go downstairs and play with her toys.  In fact, the second interpretation is far more probable (OK, almost certain).  But to a philosopher-dad, it was a proud moment.

Toys, Gravity, Kant

This morning after breakfast, Helena Iara sat in her high chair, throwing one toy after another to the ground, excited to hear the sound of the plastic hitting the tile floor, powerful knowing that either Rita or I would reach down and pick the toys up.  "One down, two down, three down," I joked as I picked up yet another plastic block.

"Good thing," Rita replied.  "Think of what would happen if Helena were in outer space, with no gravity at all."  An image of Helena outside a spaceship, throwing her toys left and right and "up" and "down" (categories that don't make much sense without gravity), with nothing ever to stop them, flying off into infinity where Helena could never see them or play with them again.

Emmanuel Kant said something very similar, about how what we think of as a problem to do something, may be exactly what makes doing that thing possible: "The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space."  The dove longs for an easier passage through the air, resenting the friction of each passing atom of oxygen... without recognizing that it's exactly that air that makes his flight possible.  In the same way, I get tired of the force of gravity which forces me to bend down and pick up yet another toy, without recognizing how much worse it would be otherwise.

Slavoj Zizek defines this process as the goal of psychoanalysis: seeing that what seem to be the "conditions of impossibility" of an action are really "its conditions of possibility," what seems like a barrier to what I want is in fact essential to doing it.

 It seems like a key lesson to fatherhood, a way to look at the sleepless nights and stomach aches and vomit after eating an apple.  Without these things, without the needs a child has of her parents, we would never construct love, family, all of the things that we want from parenting.  It's all air to a dove.

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...

Happy Babies

For anyone who spends time around babies (or at least most babies; clearly, there are loads of exceptions), one of the most striking and wonderful things is their happiness, the contagious innocence of their smiles and giggles.  For someone like me who likes to think philosophically, this joy is wonderful, but it is also a philosophical problem: why?  Why are babies so happy so much of the time, while adults... well, simply, aren't.

There are lots of answers to such a simple question, of course, and I've tried out a bunch of them at different moments in this blog.  But as Helena Iara and I swung in the hammock yesterday, and she grinned at the swinging motion, at the huge lizard gliding across the yard, at the wind in the trees and the sound of my voice, I remembered some of my father's words from when I was a teenager: "The more different things you can enjoy in life, the better chance you have to be happy."

(Contrast with one of my favorite lines from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: "You know," said Arthur, "it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxication in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young."
"Why, what did she tell you?"
"I don't know, I didn't listen."

Sometimes, it's worthwhile to pay attention to one's parents.)

Dad's lecture... well, not so much a lecture, with the disciplinary tone that entails, but really a kind suggestion, came at the height of adolescent pretension, the moment when we show that we're better than other kids because of what we hate.  Country music, parachute pants, pet rocks, hot dogs, heavy metal... honestly, I don't remember what it was that brought on the conversation, but something I knew that I should not like, if I were to appear the sophisticated grown-up I wanted to be.  An American teenager puts a lot of time into learning how to dislike things, so that he can feel as if he is superior, cool, different, the same...

In truth, what what likes is more about identity, about constructing who I think I am and how I want others to see me, than it is about pleasure.  That's why the question, "What kind of music do you like?" is such a fraught one.  It's not really a question about aesthetics, but about whether you're going to be cool enough to be my friend.

Babies, as I told Helena, don't fall into those traps.  They can enjoy the play of light on the leaves without anyone laughing at them for being simple.  They can express their love for their mommies transparently without being accused of being "Mama's boy."  They haven't yet learned that enjoyment is a complex system of social controls.  They just enjoy.

Hands, Feet, Self

Helena Iara has been on a voyage of discovery recently.  First, during Brasil's world cup victory over Chile, she discovered her hands, and since then, has been finding out new things about them every day, and seeing new things she could do with them.  Rita and I have had a wonderful time as we see her move them slowly, using one finger and then the next.  And today, she discovered her feet, and found out that she could control them, as well.

Putting these discoveries together with her love of mirrors, I have been thinking a lot about Jacques Lacan and his idea of the mirror stage.  According to Lacan, the self is actually constructed over time and through technology: particularly, the mirror.  All of the sensations a baby feels are not necessarily coherent: the baby does not feel that they all apply to him or her, because the border between I and the other has not yet been clearly formed.  But, the moment that baby recognizes herself in the mirror, something new happens: the multiplicity and confusion of sensations gets brought under a single sign, the image of herself in the mirror.  The image in the mirror is stable "in contrast with the turbulent movements that the subject feels are animating him."  To a great degree, the subject is constructed through the mirror, not a something natural or innate, but as the result of a contingent process.

Now, there are some very interesting results to this idea: I remember, for instance, a program for street kids in Brasília which said that the most effective intervention it had made with the kids was to put mirrors every place in the drop-in center, because it assured the kids that they existed as coherent, whole beings, while at the same time making them think that they could improve their appearance (which had as a result improving lots of other things).  And in fact, great part of the contemporary edifice of psychoanalysis, and the thought of great philosophers who I love, like Slavoj Zizek, depends on Lacan's idea of the mirror stage.

But as I told these ideas to Helena Iara this morning, after watching her research her own hands, I think there is a basic epistemological error in the idea of the mirror stage.  Watching Helena, it is clear that the first step to recognizing herself as a subject, as someone with different body parts that come together to act in the world, is the baby's effort to research her own hands and feet.  The first wonder is that she is able to control these things -- and in fact, since Helena recognized her hands (and now her feet), their movements are more coherent and projected.  But then, she begins to see that these things have results, and that she is, to some degree, responsible for these results.  Last night, for instance, as Rita and I watched, she reached out her hand to touch her favorite toy, Pinkme the pink hippo, first in an uncontrolled way, then just feeling the fabric in a kind of caress.  This morning, she hit the hippo lightly, just to see what might happen, and seemed to show regret when the toy fell down (I wrote a long essay on regret on doing harm to the other as the font of subjectivity, but it might be premature to project that onto her...)

It's too early to discard the mirror stage all together -- after all, it's a great theory, and I use it all over the place -- but Helena is already making me rethink Lacan's idea.

The world cup

The world cup here in Brazil is quite something: it's basically a month long vacation with soccer four and a half hours a day, and when the Brazilian national team plays, everything shuts down.  Everything: including health centers and even most of the police.  So as one might imagine, Helena Iara has seen a lot of soccer in the last two weeks; or perhaps to put it better, she has been with me as I have been watching  lot of soccer.

A couple of nights ago as I tried to entertain Helena for a bit (she wasn't sleepy, but everyone else was!), I started off quoting Sartre on soccer, and then wove an argument that I found interesting, and which kept her looking in my eyes attentively.  "In football everything is complicated by the presence of the other team," he declared, and anyone who sits through a 0-0 tie, suffering with a team that simply can't penetrate the other defense, will sympathize with the great existentialist.  On the other hand, talking with a baby, somehow that didn't quite makes sense, or perhaps it just reminded me of another and more thoughtful comment, this one by Emmanuel Kant:

The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space. (From the Critique of Pure Reason)

In fact, Kant is suggesting, the things that we imagine are barriers to what we want, are in fact exactly what we need to get that result: to use a phrase beloved by Zizek, "the conditions of impossibility are truly the conditions of possibility."  The bird needs the air that seems to hold him back, while the soccer team needsa strong opponent in order to play well, to challenge it to do something better: compare Brazil's performance against North Korea to its elegant soccer against Ivory Coast.

Now, what does this have to do with children?  How did I talk about this issue with Helena Iara?  Well, there is a similar kind of common sense about infancy, that life would be much easier if we came out of the womb like a horse, all ready to run.  Instead, we have to teach Helena almost everything: walking and talking and thinking and running (and in a couple of years, playing soccer...).  We even have to teach her to sleep!  Wouldn't it be easier if humans were just born with these capacities?  Especially this week, as we have tried to teach Helena to sleep on her own, I'm very sympathetic with the Sartrean perspective on soccer.

But what would humanity be if we were born with all of these skills?  According to Giorgio Agamben,

Imagine a man already equipped with language, a man who already possessed speech.  For such a man without infancy, language would not be a pre-existing thing to be appropriated, and for him there would neither be any break between language and speech nor any historicity of language.  But such a man would thereby be at once united with his nature; his nature would already pre-exist, and nowhere would he find any discontinuity, any difference through which any kind of history could be produced.  Like the animal, whom Marx describes as "immediately at one with its life--activity", he would merge with it and never see it as an onject distinct from himself. (From Infancy and History)

What does it mean to be human?  According to Aristotle, man is the logicoon zoon, the being with speech... yet we are born without speech.  We come into our essence, we aren't born with it.  So in the end, though Helena challenges us with her inabilities, she also shows us what it means to be incomplete, lacking... human.