Tupi-Guarani Philosophy and a good night's sleep

Helena Iara's first name is, of course, Greek, so it made sense that she would enjoy talks about the pre-socratic philosophers of Ionia, where her namesake fled with Paris almost three thousand years ago.  Iara, though, is a Tupi-Guaraní name, for which it seems that everyone has a different intepretation (when Rita and I did a pair of films with Guaraní Indians in Paraguay last year, as we tried to write the subtitles, we were stunned by how polysemic the language was, where one phrase could have half a dozen radically different translations into Spanish).


In any case, last night as I tried to convince her to relax and sleep, I sat in the hammock, rocked her, and talked about Tupi-Guaraní philosophy.  She enjoyed it so much that she slept almost instantly... though probably more because of the smooth swings of the hammock than because of anything I had to say.  She ended up sleeping until two in the morning, and then after a quick nurse and cry, slept again until eight this morning.


Among the tribes of the Amazon and Paraná river basins, philosophy proposes a radically different road to truth, not an attempt at objective knowledge, but at plural subjectivities.  For many of these tribes, one of the fundamental goals of life is to see through the eyes of the other: cannibalism after battle, for instance, symbolically allows the warrior to ingest the perspective of the enemy.  Similarly, shamanism serves as a path to see the world through the eyes of a jaguar or a caiman.  The sacred songs of many Amazonian and Orinocan cultures are the ones they have stolen from their enemies, a way to capture the world others see.  

In the "dialogue" with Helena Iara as she fell asleep, I had to wonder what could make it possible to see through the eyes of a baby, to imagine a world without hard lines, with only two dimensions, where colors are only barely coming into definition, where sounds can't be broken down one from another.  I don't know that Rta or I (or any other parent) can achieve that.  But we can share one of the experiences of shifting perspectives that a baby likes: rocking.  Swinging back and forth in the hammock is a kind of parallax (the word that Emmanuel Kant chose for this idea of shifting perspectives, and which came to be central to his epistemology), if only a small one, as one moves from one point of view to another.  Babies love the motion... because it helps them digest, because it reminds them of the mother's womb, but also, I think, because they love the new while at the same time, they want repetition. 


Rocking with a baby in the hammock may be the best lesson possible in Tupi-Guaraní philosophy, and a real way to share it with her.