The mouth!

Last night, as we prepared Helena Iara for bed, I began to read one of her favorite books, Little Kitten.  The book is compelling not because of the plot, but because there is a little kitten puppet that sticks its head through a hole in each page, and Helena loves to see it move; and because Helena is teething, as Rita tried to brush Helena's teeth, I needed all of the distraction possible from the book, so the kitten was dancing all over the place.

At one point, as I tried to hold Helena with one hand and turn the page with the other, I simply wasn't dextrous enough to do it, so I pulled the book and puppet close to my face and turned the page with my mouth.  As anyone who works on bikes (or other machines, I suppose) knows, the mouth is a good third hand from time to time... but it seems Helena didn't know that.  She thought that turning pages with you mouth was the funniest thing she had ever seen.  "More, more," she laughed, almost falling off my lap.  "Do it again!"  For the next ten minutes, as long as I turned pages with my mouth, Helena couldn't stop her guffaws.

In Deleuze and Guatari's famous book on Kafka, the put a lot of attention into the role of the mouth in the Czech novelist's strange stories, focusing especially on the fact that one can either eat or talk, but never both.  Things go in and out of the mouth, but not at the same time (the New Testament makes a similar point when Peter doubts if he should eat food with gentiles; the conclusion is that "what comes out of a mouth sullies a man, not what goes into it.").

The mouth is one of those between-places that kids find so interesting: it's the path between the inside and the outside, the air and the body.  The little kitten in the book is rather similar: it also moves in and out of a hole in the book, being both inside the pages and outside them, marking the book as both a book and a toy, or between both of them.  But then, on top of that, I started to use the mouth as it certainly should not be used: as if it were a hand and not an orifice.  At least in Freudian terms, we begin to understand why it was so funny.

And on top of that, I bet I just looked pretty ridiculous.