Mama

Like most great moments, the first time that a baby says "Mama" isn't really a single moment, except in history or memory.  The American revolution doesn't really begin with Beacon Hill or Paul Revere or the Declaration of Independence, but with thousands of little disobediences, refusals to pay taxes, resistance of colonial officers.  Nor can we mark the beginning of a war with the annexation of the Sudetenland or the Anschlüss.  But we choose to mark one of the moments of a process as the "real" beginning.

For me, Helena just said Mama.  Said it, in the way that human beings use language to mean something, to do something.  She was sitting on my lap in the hammock, a little tired, but happy to be outside and looking at the trees.  Then she asked for my fingers so she could stand up on my legs, looked at Rita working in the garden, and called out "Mama."  Then she screwed up her face, looked into the sky, and whined.  It was clear: she wanted Mama to help her go to sleep, because she was tired.  And as I write this, Helena Iara sleeps in the next room as Rita watches over her.

In grammatical terms, Helena used Mama as a vocative, a call to someone, just like I might say, "Hey, David" to my brother before making a comment or asking a question.  I don't think that Helena used the word as a signifier, as a sound that refers to a thing: I doubt that she even considers Rita (or me, or anyone) to be a thing, a substance with properties, let alone understands that words refer to things.  But she used the word.  She used it with purpose, with a plan.  And as Wittgenstein says, "In most (but not all) cases, we can say that the meaning of a word is its use in a language game."

Signification and meaning may come later, but for me, today is July 4 or July 14th, the arbitrary day we choose to call the one that matters.  Today, when she said "Mama", she was speaking.

Watermelon

 
 

Horses, representation, play

Last night, Rita and I took Helena Iara to a country restaurant for dinner with her family, and as one might expect, a baby does not find adult conversation interesting enough to sit quietly at the table.  Fortunately, the restaurant owners know this, and they had build a wooden jungle gym, swings, and a couple of kitschy model horses and oxen harnessed to an old cart and landau.  I took Helena out to the front, and we played on the swings and then walked over to the horse.

As we sat on the landau (I say landau, as a two wheeled cart, but do they need to be covered?  I'm not sure: certainly it wasn't a surrey) behind the horse, a three year old boy was playing on the horse's back, and my mind inevitably (if you have read this blog before, you know that "inevitably" isn't as ironic as it might seem) turned to Plato's idea of representation.  Plato said that what's "really real" is the ideas, and that what we see as "real things" (horses, in this particular case) are nothing but inferior reflections of the idea of a horse.  Art, as a representation of this representation, is even worse, and as such should be prohibited.

Was the horse in front of us really a representation of a horse in a field, though?  Today, most kids encounter a horse as a toy long before the encounter one in real life, and the same is true with most stuffed animals: Helena loves frogs and bears and a moose and a couple of rabbits, and she has never seen any of them in real life.  Children don't really see their toys as representations of something else.  They are for play, not for representation.

The easy postmodern out (one much in fashion when I was in college, so much that I wrote my senior thesis on him) was the philosophy of Jean Baudrillard, who theorized the simulacrum, understood as a "copy of which there is no original."  Epcot Center serves as a wonderful example of a simulacrum.  The difference, of course, is that Epcot claims to represent something (the "real" China across the water) and merely does it badly, and Baudrillard secretly desires for there to be an original in the background, and feels a little sad or nihilistic that there is no idea which the simulacrum can represent.  But a toy... it's different.  That a toy bear or frog represents its model poorly is no criticism: in fact, the toy can be much better for not appearing anything like its supposed reference.

There is pretty good evidence that the whole Platonic (and eventually Western and then almost-universal) obsession with representation emerges with money, which can stand for anything.  Coins (first established in the West by Midas in the 6th or 7th century BC), this strange new thing which can become anything in the process of exchange, open the question of representation, to which Platonic philosophy is only the first of many answers.  But many cultures, and all little kids, don't care about that.  Their word isn't governed by symbols and signs, but by the act of play (I reflect a lot on this on the book I wrote about child soldiers in Colombia).

To Helena, the whole question, raised by Plato and still at issue among analytic philosophers today, just doesn't matter.  She just wants to play on the horse.  And honestly, I think that's a much better philosophical position than almost all of the philosophers of language I've read...

Helena and the Monkeys

One of the wonderful things about the house that Rita and her father built a dozen years ago here in the jungle south of Florianópolis, is that monkeys come to visit from time to time.  They are small monkeys, marmosets really (I think black tufted marmosets, but many distributions maps don't have that species coming that far south), and occupy more or less the ecological niche that squirrels do in the United States. but it's still pretty exciting to be sitting outside reading a book, only to hear the whistling call of a monkey and to see a family playing in the trees.

Day before yesterday, Helena saw the monkeys for the first time.  Seeing a little monkey in the trees isn't really all that easy, and you have to learn a lot about perception before you can pick out the difference between monkey-brown and tree-trunk brown, but once she learned to see them, she'll often see them before we do.  She starts by staring, then shouts, and then claps three or four times in a row.  And strangely enough, the monkeys seem to like Helena Iara as much as she likes them.  They have come back many more times recently than they ever did before.

So of course... Helena and I had to talk about Darwin as we swung on the hammock and looked into the jungle this morning.  I explained a little bit about the theory of evolution, about the finches of the Galápagos and moths in England during the industrial revolution, but mostly I told her about how mad people got, and many continue to be, about Darwin's argument that man is a primate, that Helena's monkey friends are also her very, very distant cousins.

I think the problem is basically this: many people want to think that we are different from the animals in our essence, in something that precedes us, something given by God.  I argued to Helena that it's actually the reverse: if we are different from animals, it isn't because of what someone (God, providence) did to us, but what we do, what we create.  The difference between men and animals comes after, because of what we do, not what we are.

Etiê Apuã

Helena Iara has been speaking a lot of new words recently, if "words" is the right term.  She repeats the same sound again and again, as if they were words, but without a clear meaning or a connection to sounds we can understand.  And her favorite of these repeated sounds is "etiê apuã," together with some variations like eteteiê, abuã, ebwa...  And then, of course, there is the ever-present mamama, which may or may not refer to Rita, though she does seem to us it in the right context from time to time, meaning something like, "Mom, I need you."

It's the repetition of etiê apuã that's been fascinating, though.  She's used the words for the last two weeks, and they seem to be important to her, even if not in the conventional sense of meaning, of connecting a sound to a thing to which it refers.  I'd love to think that apuã is a real word for her, because it means both mountain and head in Guaraní, the native language that used to be spoken in this part of Brazil (and the origin of Iara, Helena's middle name), and given my love of both mountain climbing and intellectualism, what could be a better first word for my daughter?  Unfortunately, though, I don't think there is any way in the world I get to make that argument.  Besides the Guaraní loan words common in Portuguese, Helena has never heard the language spoken.

It's the variations on the words that strike me as perhaps a more honest way to think about etiê apuã.  She'll sometimes drag out the vowels, other times repeat the consonants, other times almost sing the words as if they came from a tonal language.  Sometimes the nasal vowels (ê, ã) are more defined, other times those same sounds seem more flat and English.  She is experimenting and playing with sound, but in a way that reminds me of what John Coltrane did to well-known melodies: she takes them, tears them apart, puts them back together.

The traditional definition of the human being was as a logicon zoon, an animal with reason or language (logos means both in Greek), but Hannah Arent famously turned this idea on its head, showing that many animals use sounds as a way to convey symbols, while some people cannot.  Art, she says, is the aspect that makes us human: no other animal makes art.  Helena's game of theme and variation on etiê apuã makes me think she may be right: before language is meaning, it is art, an attempt to play with sounds in order to create beauty.

Sharing Joy

Several days ago, Helena Iara and I sat on the floor playing with some of her toys.  I took a small lion and pushed the button on its back, which inspired a low, electronic roar.  Helena beamed with joy, then looked at me with the most wonderful, innocent of gazes, a gesture that said "cdid you see that?" better than any words can do.

With that look, Helena taught me something that I've never read in a tome of philosophy or theology: the wonder of sharing wonder, and what that means about childish joy and adult anomie.

As children and teenagers, we learn to hide our joy.  I'm not sure quite why, though I shared some ideas with Helena Iara: might we think that if others see our wonder, they'll gain that power over us?  Or that we need to seem blasé and sophisticated, which are the opposite of wonder?  That the definition of adult is the loss of wonder?  Perhaps is is mostly about modesty: when we show so clearly what we love and what gives us joy, we become naked in front of the other, a kind of intimacy we learn to share with only a few people.  Certainly, if I think of my adolescence, one of the ways I could define it is as the process by which I learned to hide wonder from others... and sometimes, even from myself.

Helena, however, wants to share her joy and wonder.  Whether it is the feel of sand under her toes, the elation of water that splashes on her face, or a music video on YouTube, she not only expresses her joy, but also looks at Rita and me to insist that we admire it as much as she does.  And as we look at the world through her eyes, we come to the same kind of joy.

Almost twenty years ago, I climbed a 20,000 foot peak in Ecuador with several Swiss and Spaniards whom I had never met before.  When we came back from the summit, after (literally) pulling each other up the immense mountain, I wrote to my parents saying that I had seldom felt so close to other people in my life, that nothing builds intimacy like shared suffering, the rope that connects climbers and makes us responsible for the lives of out climbing partners.  Yet even so, I never saw any of those climbers again.  Perhaps the intimacy was too frightening, we had become too exposed.

Something does build intimacy even more than shared suffering, though: shared joy.  Not only that bond that Rita and I develop with Helena Iara, but the one we share with my parents, with Rita's parents and brothers and sisters... with anyone that will open herself to the wonder of a little baby.  It's a wonderful thing, but also a frightening one, so I suppose I understand why teenagers work so hard to cut themselves off from it.  But perhaps it's also the reason that many people have children: because it gives us a small chance to return to something like that wonderful innocence.

Creation from Water

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.