Water

Helena Iara's favorite place in the house is probably the bathroom, and not only because she loves to take baths.  No, she loves the bathroom because of the sink.  Neither Rita or I are quite sure why she likes the sink so much, (for Rita, it has to do with the sense of personal agency she gets in turning on and off the tap; I think it has more to do with the fact that the sink is a something that is also a nothing, a way to enclose empty space.  Rita is probably right.) but even if she is in a terrible mood, crying, gumbling, we just have to take her to either of the bathrooms, say, "pia, olha pra pia" (look at the sink!) and she's smiling and laughing again.

We turned on the water in the sink yesterday, and she put her hands under the running stream, her eyes lit with happiness and discovery.  I told her the story of Helen Keller, the deaf and blind girl who first learned the concept of language and signification when her teacher, Anne Sullivan, held her hands under a well-pump and continued to sign "water, water, water," until the girl understood.  Signification -- and the idea that there were other people who could make signs and thus have consciousness -- was the way out of darkness (or perhaps better, out of solitude) for Helen Keller.  Most of us know the rest of the story, one of those "inspirational tales" that we all have to read in middle school, but which can be truly impressive if we go back to them on our own years later.

The inspirational tales don't often tell that Keller became a socialist, a pacifist, and a wobbly.  Sometime they talk a little about the fact that she studied philosophy.  One of her most profound observations, I think, is the following: "Philosophy is nothing but the story of a deaf-blind person, writ large."  Philosophy is, indeed, the vague reaching of people lost in the dark, trying to understand a world to which we have only limited and uncertain access.  For most of us, that quest is ethical or metaphysical, trying to understand what to do or why there are the things that there are, but I think Keller was right on.

We might also say that philosophy is the story of a baby, writ large.  Babies are in the same shoes as philosophers, trying to understand things that don't really make any sense: the material of the world, the social relations between people, the nature of language and signification...  In the end, we're all trying to figure out the water that runs over our hands.  But what I admire about Helena Iara is that, as she feels the wetness over her fingers, she smiles in awe and wonder.  I wish I could do that more.