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.

No, no, no!

Yesterday, Helena Iara and I went to a park here in Florianópolis.  This being Brazil, the park fauna included the usual fish and turtles and ducks, but also a yellow throated caiman (a small one), some amazing herons and egrets, and monkeys in the trees.  As we sat by the side of the lake, watching the caiman cruise under us, another girl wanted to come up and see the beast.  "No, no, no!" screamed Helena Iara.  "Don't come!"

"Helena," I replied, "Anyone can come and see the animals.  And why should you care?  If someone else sees the caiman, you can still see it."

"No, no!" Helena insisted.

Ethically, of course I was right to insist that Helena should not be selfish about seeing animals, nor about playgrounds, the beach, or any other places she wants just for herself.  Sharing public goods stands as one of the key elements of a liberal society, after all.  But as I began to analyze the argument I made to her, I began to wonder if I was really correct.  If someone else shares an experience with me is it really the same?  Is it, as I had said, no harm to me if someone else sees the caiman?

Let's think about mountain climbing as a counter-example.  To reach the top of a mountain requires dedication and suffering; the amazing view from the top doesn't include just the visual impact of snow and rock on my eyes, but is also imbued with the struggle required to reach that point.  The view from the top of Mt. Evans or Pikes Peak (Colorado mountains with roads to the top) are simply not as good as the views from neighboring peaks, because it is too easy to get there.

Similarly, part of the excitement of the stories I tell comes from the fact that they happened to me in the mountains of Chile, the wild streets of Medellín, or the jungles of Brazil.  These are "exotic" places, more valued and more interesting (by me and by listeners) because they are so hard to get to, so dangerous, so little visited.  Would these stories be as compelling if everyone could go there?

On a less athletic plane, think about the experience of seeing the Mona Lisa in the Louvre: don't the bustling crowds distract in some ways from the art, or especially from the aura we expect from such a great work of art?  When the painting is too accessible, it may lose something.  Walter Benjamin said something similar about art when it can be reproduced: unlike the saints carried through Italian villages only one day a year, a movie or a photograph can be reproduced infinitely.  The original doesn't carry the air of authenticity, of magic.

None the less, I'm not going to agree with Helena: though someone else seeing a caiman may detract from my experience, that's the nature of democracy, and of being a good person.  And, in the end, Helena will soon learn that meeting people -- and talking with them about the crocodile in front of them -- is an even richer experience than the selfish vision of a mountaintop or a painting.n

Santa Monica

Our kitchen -- or at least part of it -- has turned into the beach.  Several times a day, or perhaps quite a bit more, Helena declares that she is on her way to Santa Monica, loads up several of her stuffed animals in her toy stroller, puts on her sunglasses, and heads off.

Santa Monica is a fun place: there's a beach, big swings, a place where people walk and play music, and (most important to Helena Iara) an aquarium.  She goes to the aquarium, picks starfish out of their tank (the tank is actually the iron support that holds the loft up), shows the seahorses to her stuffed cats, and trembles in fear of the sharks (she does it quite well, so much so that we sometimes wonder if it is just playacting).

When we were in Los Angeles last month, we did all of these things with Helena: she is both playing and remembering (and, to a certain degree, campaigning: she wants us to see how much she loves the ocean and the things around it!).  But there is something wonderful about this make-believe, a joy that seems even more intense than when she was swinging on the beach.

"Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit," are the words Virgil puts into the mouth of Aeneas as he and his comrades suffer outside the walls of Troy: "Someday, perhaps, even this will be sweet to remember."  And when the sweetness of memory gets mixed with the play of a child, the smile on a baby's mouth is wonderful for everyone.

A ball of meaning

For at least a month and a half, Helena Iara has been using words, but it's only in the last day or two that I'm confident that she understands that words aren't only useful, but also can signify.  And the word that has shown this fact is the very simple "ball", which she says (and repeats and repeats) in both Portuguese (bola) and English.

Neurologists and linguists who work with language acquisition talk about "semantic over-reach," lingo which just means that when babies begin to understand how words refer to things, they think the word means a much broader category than it really does.  The classic example is a child who learns the word "doggie", and then declares any four-legged animal, from a puppy to a lion, a "doggie".  Language learning happens through paring down our knowledge, chiseling away the meanings that don't work so that we get down to the "real" meaning of a word ("real" in scare quotes because it is always a little flexible, turned into a metaphor, and in flux).

For Helena, what that means is that any sphere is a ball.  She has a little ball that she loves to kick, but she also likes a full-sized soccer ball and an interesting little empty ball with lots of holes.  Oranges and apples are also balls, as are passion fruit... a problem when she declares "ball" and throws them onto the tile floor. The truth is, though, that an orange seems more similar to her little ball than either the empty ball or the soccer ball: she's developed a theory about "ball-ness" and is trying to apply it.

We don't lose this tendency as we grow up; it just changes.  In college, for instance, marxist cultural  theory was my "ball", something I tried to apply to everything.  Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory?  Jane Austin?  Post-modern philosophy?  The drinking culture of small, liberal arts colleges?  A combination of Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse offered an explanation and solution to everything, generally detailed with excessive pedantry (and a bit of humor) in my monthly column in a college magazine.

Now this isn't a bad thing, even as I make fun of my younger self.  Helena's joyful shouts of "bola, ball!" as she sees anything round make her excited about the world, curious and thrilled about learning.  The same was true of my own theoretical over-reach, and it continues to be: finding an idea that you love is essential not just to intellectual life, but to life itself.

In the long run, we all learn that an apple isn't a ball, and that if we throw it on the ground, it will be too bruised to eat.

Baby photos

Helena Iara is the first kids on my side of the family to grow up in the age of digital photography, when the only real cost of photos is the up-front capital investment (the camera), so different from my own parents who worried about the cost of film and developing.  As a result, we have hundreds of wonderful photos of Helena in her first two and a half months of life.  My parents have just a couple: Rita's parents took no photos of her at all until she was more than a year old.

One doesn't have to be Amish or a member of a tribe that thinks that photographs steal the soul to wonder what the impact of all of these photos will be on a baby's subjectivity later in life.  As I was thinking about this (and after Rita and I took some great photos of Helena a couple of mornings ago), I decided to talk to Helena about Walter Benjamin.

The premise of Benjamin's essay "The work of art in the age of its mechanical reproducibility" is pretty simple: he talks of the sacred work of art in medieval Europe, like the statues of saints kept hidden away in churches, to be circulated only once a year in parades on the saint's day.  These works of art, Benjamin suggested, had an "aura" about them, something of the work of art that was more than the work itself.  We have something of a sense of the power of this aura when we walk into the Louvre and try to get to see the Mona Lisa, only to find access impossible because of the hordes of people who just want to get close to the painting.  Truth is, a good quality reproduction will give you a better idea of the Mona Lisa than fifteen minutes of pushing and shoving to get within twenty feet of it, but when we go to Paris, we still have to go through the ritual of going into that room.

Compare the aura of the Mona Lisa, then, to a great movie or photo.  Is there one copy of Casablanca or Le Meprise which has that kind of aura?  Of course not: each one is just like any other copy.  We might remember our experience of the movie (I saw it in that old theater on Main Street...), but that is a different kind of aura.  Benjamin says that one of the major characteristics of art in the 20th Century was this reproducibility and the loss of aura; to a certain degree he lamented this loss (and most of his interpreters have focussed on this part of his analysis), but he also said that the political consequences would be more positive: when there is no aura, it steals the authority of priests and kings over art and over the ideology that comes with it.

As I explained all of this to Helena (she paid much more attention than you might have expected), I thought about baby pictures.  Rita's grainy baby pictures have definite aura: there are only one or two, so we pay attention to each one, looking for clues to the future her.  There are more pictures of me as a baby, but several of them share something similar: I particularly remember one photo of me with a hose, getting ready to pour water all over the house.

Personal history is almost infinite: so many things happen to us that we can't "remember" them all... or more accurately, few of them are in active memory.  I see that photo of me with the hose as an image that points to me today, while many other images have just slipped out.  And Rita's few baby pictures have to seem like the seeds of her determination and intellect.  But what happens when there are literally thousands of photos of a baby?  How will she select the ones that she considers important, the ones that will point to what she will become?

As this happens, I think that photography becomes more and more like memory.  What matters isn't so much what is there, but how we edit and select it.  But perhaps I'll need another long talk with Helena to figure that one out.

Dreams

One of the most striking things I have observed about Helena Iara is that when she is asleep, her facial expressions seem much more mature an profound than when she is awake.  She laughed asleep before she laughed awake.  I see in her mouth irony, the expression Brazilians call "safado" (which in a child is something of the nautiness we might associate with Denis the Menace or Calvin), a kind of existential exhaustion, a thoughtful melancholy... As I mentioned many blogs ago, we can doubt whether these expressions "express" some kind of external emotion or in fact begin to constitute them, but the face is clearly engaged in something profound.  And here, more significantly, I want to think about what dreams these sleeping expressions might imply.

One afternoon this week, as colic kept Helena Iara from sleeping, I talked to her about one of the more obscure thinkers who've yet appeared on this blog, but also one of my favorites: the German-Chilean philosopher-economists (yes, lots of hyphens in an interesting hybrid) Franz Hinkelammert.  Hinkelammert also talks about dreams, though in their political form as utopia, and his thoughts may help to think about why babies "express" more profound emotions as they sleep.

Over the last twenty years, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it has become part of the conventional wisdom that utopian dreams lie at the base of totalitarianism.  The Nazis, the Russian Communists, Pol Pot and others wanted to "perfect" humanity, but the result was the extermination of anything that didn't fit (Jews, Kulaks, intellectuals, political opponents) and ruthless imposition of the will of the few over the many.  These ideas were first expressed by Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper fifty years ago, but have since become part of the "common sense" of politics.  Dreams are dangerous, they say. 

Hinkelammert's thought emerges in opposition to this anti-utopianism.  Utopia and dreams, he says, must be conceived of not as some reality for which we strive, but as criteria by which we can evaluate the present.  The worst conditions of oppression and misery can seem absolutely normal and inevitable: after a few generations of slavery, slaves may come to think that there is no other way to live in the world.  Medieval peasants came to expect that the lord would get the first night with their new wives.  People might not like their lives, but it seems that there is no other way.  

Walter Benjamin insisted on memory as a way to judge the present -- a better or more just past, memory of previous struggles -- but Hinkelammert sees these criteria in the future.  And more significantly, judging the present based on the future avoids the conservatism that Benjamin's ideas can inspire, the idea that all struggles are to regain the good of the past instead of to create something new.  When we dream of a utopia, Hinkelammert says, we win a way to see the present with new eyes: to say where it fails, and to think critically about ways to make the world better.  Not necessarily to construct that exact utopia, but to change what is wrong about this world.

The upshot of these ideas is that we need to live the future before we live the present.  And that brings us back to Helena and her sleeping expressions: could it be that dreams allow us to practice life, its emotions and experiences and judgments, before we live it?  That babies dream as a way to get a little critical distance on their world, and thus evaluate it?