Christmas in the south of Brazil means high summer, the sort of blasted, humid days I remember from August in central Pennsylvania when I was growing up. It's the perfect kind of weather for a little girl who loves to play in the water, and Helena has spent wonderful afternoons over the last several days sitting in a a kiddie pool in the back yard. She splashes and splashes until her hands and feet become prunes. It seemed like a wonderful to talk about the history of water in philosophy.
The day Helena was born, she stared at me with utmost attention, and I felt like I had to say something. I tried to tell her the history of greek philosophy, just because I knew that I'd be able to keep riffing on that theme for a long time, and I told her about Thales of Miletus, who tried to find the first principle of everything in water. Yesterday, I started a little bit south of Greece, with the first words of the Torah: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." It was one of the first texts we had to translate in Hebrew classes, and I still remember the strange vocabulary of "without form and void" or "hovered over the face of the waters." The point, though, is that Moses (or whoever really wrote those words" associated water with creation.
The obvious connection with a baby is that a fetus is also created in water, and many mythical and psychoanalytic ideas about childhood start exactly there. As Helena Iara splashed almost all of the water from the little tub in which she was sitting, however, I began to think of something else: for her (as for many babies, I imagine), water is the first experience of making a concrete impact on the world. I throw my hands into the water and it splashes up to wet my face, my mom, the floor. My actions have consequences. Splashing water is an act of creation, one of the first that a baby experiences.
Water isn't like wood; it doesn't stay carved: however much you splash it, it returns to something like its original state. Simón Bolívar tried to express the futility of his life with the phrase, "Él que hace revolución arra el mar," he who makes revolution makes furrows in the sea." It might not seem the best metaphor for creation. But in fact, when Helena splashes, she does change the world. The surface of the water will not hold her furrows, but there is less of it in the kiddie pool than when she started. I am wet, Rita is wet... and everyone is happy. That's a pretty decent metaphor for the experience of most people with creation: it may not last, it may fade away, but for a moment, it makes us happy.
