In the jungle

A couple of days ago, Helena Iara and I began to climb the tall hill behind our house, a wonderful little intact jungle in the middle of the neighborhood (in fact, it was only reforested from a coffee and banana plantation in the 1950s, but the Atlantic Rainforest recovers so quickly in Brazil that parts of the jungle seem virgin).  We have hiked the steep trail before, but always when Helena was so little that we had to put all of our effort into not falling off the rocks into the mud.  This time was different: she was stable enough on her feet that she could look at things.

At first, Helena wanted to experiment with gravity: if she threw a rock down the path, how far would it go?  And a leaf?  A stick?  What about a flat rock?  As she began to pull too many leaves from the bushes, however, I tried to explain why plants need their leaves, with a brief digression into photosynthesis and the sun.  Who knows how much Helena understood, but when we explain a "no" to her, she generally goes along with us (an unexplained rule, on the other hand, will inevitably be broken!), and this was no exception: she stopped pulling the leaves from the plant.

The first biology lesson went so well that I took advantage of a rest break to talk about water, and we traced the roots of trees as they went to the trunks of the trees, and then looked at how each tree was different from the others.  From time to time (and much to my pride) she often said "pretty cool," her favorite term of approbation.

Now, I don't have any illusions about Helena remembering anything about ecology from the walk up the mountain.  Much like so many of my talks about philosophy during her first year of life, the content wasn't the point at all.  If there is any lesson I wanted to pass on, it was to pay attention to nature, to look carefully at it.

As we walked down the steep slope, she wasn't content simply to go home.  She needed to stop at every fallen seed or fruit on the ground, and then either pry it open or ask me to break it open with a rock.  Her curiosity has always run rampant: I didn't teach that.  But she had found some new things to pay attention to, to look at carefully.

Pretty cool.

The universal tedium of Richard Scarry

Helena Iara loves Richard Scarry books.  I remember loving the stories of Huckle Cat and Lowly Worm when I was a kid, too... but I have to confess that while Dr. Seuss has aged well -- which is to say, I continue to enjoy his books as I read them to Helena -- Richard Scarry now seems a complete bore.  Nothing actually happens, there is little narrative, no rhyme or play with words.  In fact, the book she likes so much only relates the events of a normal day, no different from the cooking and playing and driving around that we experience in our lives.

There the tedium.  More interesting, I think, is what happens when kids read these sorts of stories, see their lives writ large on the pages of a book.  Over the last couple of months, I have been thinking very intently about how people -- especially children -- on the margins of society conceive of knowledge.  Last year, we did a major research project in Recife, looking at the causes of, and possible solutions to, violence in the favelas of that city.  After four months of interviews, mapping, movie-making, and writing, the book was finally done: a toolkit for foundations and government agencies that want to reduce violence.  Adriano had been the first of the four young researchers to arrive at the closing party for the project, and as he read the first pages, a look of amazement filled his eyes.  "It's true," he said, almost stunned.  Several more lines down the page, with even more wonder, "That's just how it is."  As he continued to read, the expressions of surprise only grew.

Words about the favela too often sound like a police report: so many dead, so many arrested.  Those news stories might be strictly accurate, but they aren't really true; they leave far too much out.  We never see the motivations of kids who join a gang or the ethical struggles of kids who don't; the joy of a party on Saturday night or the pride of a old woman watching her grandkids play in the alley.  Our research took the deep experience of living in the favela seriously, seeing it as a possible source of solutions.

Adriano had been a part of every stage of the research, and many of the theories in those pages were originally his, so the surprise didn't come from new ideas or perspectives.  No, I think the real shock was that the written word could express the truth, that a description of his community could be honest to what goes on there.

"Knowledge," with the weight and importance that word implies, always seems to come from outside the favela, from teachers and books and the TV.  But as Adriano read the book, he suddenly came to see that words could reflect the world, that his experiences were important, enough to justify or even demand action.  For the first time, I think, he came to see what knowledge meant, and the power it could have.

Richard Scarry is the complete opposite of the experience of knowledge in the favela.  Instead of seeing their lives as exceptions or spectacles, Scary shows the lives of ordinary, middle class children in the US as universal.  This is how everyone, event cats and worms, lives.  The implicit message to children: "Your life is universal, your particular experience counts as universal knowledge."  Children from the favelas feel frightened to generalize the events of their lives into a word as big as "knowledge," but thanks to Richard Scarry, American TV programs, and other manifestations of US middle class culture as universal reference, kids here don't run into that challenge.

Now, we can easily find a solution in an attempt to universalize other experiences: Sesame Street, where a street in a mythical Harlem stands in for the universal, is an excellent example.  Maybe we should write a Richard Scarry for the favela... to a certain degree, the work that Rita and I do professionally with films made by marginalized kids strives for that.

However, I think there is a real virtue in the way kids from the favela see the relation of their particular to the universal.  Because they aren't convinced that everyone -- even cats and worms -- had their experience, they aren't convinced that they know.  For that reason, they are less invested in their epistemological errors, more willing to change, grow, and learn.  Socrates insisted that the first step in philosophy was to know that one knows nothing: people from the favela have that one down pat.  At that point, perhaps we can all learn together.

And maybe I won't have to suffer through more days reading about the Cat Family going to the grocery store.

I and me

Helena Iara learned to say "me a few weeks ago; she's become very clear in saying what is "for me" and "for you," "for Mommy" and "for Daddy."  What she hasn't said, however, is the word "I".  In grammatical terms, she learned the first person accusative before the nominative; in philosophy, she learned to see herself as an object before she could see herself as a subject.

"Know thyself": from the first Socratic dialogues on, that has been the commandment of western philosophy: I must know myself: which means that I occupy both the subjective and the objective position, standing outside of myself to be both the knower and the thing known.  I don't, however, think that babies learn about themselves this way: before being able to know themselves as themselves, they know how others see them, how others act on them.

I've been thinking recently, for instance, in a piece of contemporary child-rearing advice from the United States: when a child does well on a test or another academic endeavor, we shouldn't compliment her as being "smart" but as "working hard" or "being dedicated."  The idea, I think, is that intelligence is innate, but children develop persistence and dedication, so parents should focus on the virtue that can be trained and improved.

The problem is partly that intelligence isn't innate, but largely defined by others; I've worked with kids living on the street, forever defined as retarded in their school records, whose minds challenges me much more than any of my colleagues from grad school at Harvard.  Even more important, however, is others seeing you as smart: once you have that label, people listen to you more, they laugh at your jokes when you're a kid, they push you into intellectual pursuits, they read your words with more care.  And in the process, the smart kid actually becomes smarter; she trains her mind to do well what people consider to be smart.  (There is, by the way, pretty decent evidence that the climbing IQ scores (30 points higher across the scale since 1900) aren't as much about changes in the test, as they are about urbanization and modernity.  Our lives have taught us to think in new ways, ways that are rewarded by the test.  If IQ tests measured ability to predict weather or sense when a mountain lion might attack you, we'd have dropped even more that we gained.)

Those last paragraphs are the practical upshot of the fact that a baby knows herself as others know her: we have to be very careful how we know her.  But there is also a strange philosophical conclusion to this process: even as we become older, we still have to know ourselves through some metaphor of the same process.  I try to look at myself through other eyes, see myself as others see me.  Rita and I see Helena, and define her in that process, but she also sees us.  For instance, I have always considered myself a good cook, but Helena doesn't much like the food I prepare.  She prefers Rita's.  I find myself thinking of myself in different ways, trusting myself less in the kitchen.  At the same time, she finds me much more reliable and trustworthy than I thought I would be with a baby.  I always thought I would drop her, but since she never expressed fear that I would, I also came to trust myself.

In the end, that old Socratic riff robbed from the Delphic oracle may still hold, but we have to recognize that the only real way to know myself, is to become the other who knows me.

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.

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 Baby as Gadfly

As I tried to convince Helena Iara to sleep last night (an immense challenge, as she wanted to eat and sleep at the same time, and thus could do neither on Rita's lap), the only thing that calmed her was my voice.  Since I could talk about anything, I decided she needed to learn about the social history of Greece in the time of Socrates ("needed", here, meaning something like, "At least I could talk about it without stopping for an hour at three in the morning").  She seemed fascinated, in the same way that she is fascinated by anything that Rita and I say, as long as we say it while looking into her eyes.

What struck me, though, as I improvised a long free-assocition on the role of world trade, greek colonization, and the sociality of the agorá, was one of the famous things that Socrates said about himself.  For as much as Plato and hundreds of philosophers after him have tried to impose some kind of systematic theory on Socratic thought, it seems that system was what least interested the man.  What interested him was troubling the complacency of others, challenging people to re-think the easy propositions that allow them to lie to themselves about their own lives.  "I am a gadfly," Socrates said, an insect which buzzes and irritates to force people to think.

Helena Iara is a kind of gadfly; for me, at least.  As anyone who knows me is well aware, I am anything but intellectually or socially complacent: I constantly undermine my own thinking, work with child soldiers in Colombia or street kids in Brazil, climb mountains in the Andes... not the stuff of a boring Athenian (or American) citizen content in his mediocrity.  But I think that one could argue (and Rita certainly did argue), that I had become complacent in my incomplacency, content to constantly change my life because living one adventure after another is, in fact, a kind of repetition (there is, by the way, a pretty clear parallel to the self criticism of Deleuze's thought in Difference and Repetition, here).  I knew quite well that the only real challenge to the series of adventures I had been living, was, in fact, an inescapable commitment.  For that reason, of course, I avoided having a child with such intensity.

Older children clearly play the role of gadflies: I remember riding back from a soccer tournament with a friend one afternoon, as he complained about the traffic backed up on the roads in the south of the Island of Santa Catarina.  "Too many people moving here," he declared, "and too many people buying new cars."  His seven year old daughter, in the back of the car, thought for moment and then said, "But Dad, we just moved to the south of the island, and you just bought a new car..."  Children are excellent at catching the small (and sometimes huge) hypocrisies that we adults have so easily naturalized.  (I wrote extensively about this idea in both Agony Street and KidVid and Popular Education.)

I did not expect, however, that a baby, years before learning expose my hypocrisies with her words, would be able to be such an effective gadfly.  But through her cries at three in the morning, she certainly out Socratized Socrates.