Entropy

Babies are chaos machines.  Of course, that's the nature of the universe, or at least of the second law of thermodynamics, that entropy tends toward a maximum, that order devolves into disorder.

Helena has always loved to make a mess, but now that she is bigger and more mobile, she is more effective at destruction.  Perhaps her favorite activity in the world right now is tearing down towers that Rita and I build from plastic blocks.  It animates her like noting else, bating her breath, inspiring her to do things she doesn't like to do, like crawl; she's always wanted to walk, but crawling just doesn't do it for her.  Even so, right now, as I am writing, Rita has been building towers, and Helena has convinced herself to crawl just to topple them.

I think, though, that this little experiment shows the conflict between the laws of thermodynamics and the process of human history.  While Helena increases entropy in the world, she's actually building order in herself: she's learning new things, building new neural pathways, and growing up.

Physicists suggest that entropy may be the arrow of time, what makes humans perceive time as passing, and not like the other three dimensions, which we feel as spacial, through which we can move and then return.  But the way we understand time growing up is exactly the opposite, as an increase of order.

All of which, I suppose, returns us to what Helena taught me about Hegel this weekend.  The old German philosopher may be right that that history advances through negative, but it is a very strange sort of negation that does it.  Rather like learning how to crawl in order to tear down a tower so that, to quote Joshua before the battle of Jericho, one stone not lie atop another.

Helena Iara has a new game: "No".  She has come to love shaking her head back and forth with such velocity that trying to imitate her hurts the neck of stiffer, older people, and rotating her body in the opposite direction to keep her balance.  Sometimes, this game of "No, no, no" makes sense as a simple negation, like after she tries to do something dangerous, we tell her no, and then she responds with shakes of her head.  Other times, though, the head movements don't fit into times that we would expect a "no," like when she is standing alone, preparing to take a couple of wobbly steps toward Rita, or when she hears music she likes and begins to dance.

Helena's little game of negation inspired me to talk to her about Hegel... not so much because she would understand (who really understands GWF Hegel, after all?  Not I, not many philosophy professors, probably not the man himself!), but because talking with Helena helps me to get my ideas around messy problems.  That's the goal of this blog, after all, not to create a precocious philosopher, but that looking at the world through Helena's eyes might help me to understand.  And Hegel, who made his whole career around negation, seems like he might be helpful to understand the game of No.

Hegel famously said that history advances through a long series of Noes, of the negation of what is.  Judaism didn't so much create monotheism as a new and independent idea, as the postulation of a new, positive truth, but as the negation of the many gods of the Phoenicians and the Egyptians; this is certainly clear in the story of Elijah, in the book of Kings, and the stories of the reconquest of Judea after exile in Egypt.  Christianity, in its turn, may have tried to present love as central to its message, but that was hardly new to Judaism.  The novelty of the new religion lay in the way it rejected the centrality of Law to Hebrew through.  Luther is a No against Rome, Thomas Münster a No against Luther... and so we continue.

But here's where Helena's game of No helped me.  We often think of negation as that of an angry two year-old, a boy who says, "no, no, no, no!" and refuses to do anything.  This is also the no of Barlelby the Scrivener, Melville's character who simple says that he would "rather not do it."  Helena's "no" isn't that simple kind of negation, though.  She's not just digging herself into the dirt and saying "I will not move," but instead playing with the No, dancing with it.

In this way, resistance isn't just a reactionary, even conservative urge.  It's playful, dancing, maybe even productive.  When Hegel says that History advances through the negative, I think her attitude is exactly what he's talking about.

Samba

On Sunday night, Rita and I took Helena Iara to the park, but in January in Brazil, things aren't quite so simple: the Escola de Samba União da Ilha had taken over the little plaza in the center of the Lagoa neighborhood, and was in full scale preparation for carnaval.  Maybe fifty zabumbas (base drums), thirty tamborins (not like a US tambourine, this one has no bells, and it's hit with a stick), dozens of cuicas, cavaquinhos...  A furious and joyous sound.

Looking back over Sunday night, when Helena slept really badly, I think that we probably over-did the noise and stimulation, but Helena loved it.  She sang along with the music (she has about a two note range now, but a decent sense of rhythm), danced by swinging her head back and forth, and played games with anyone she could find.  It's very clear that she loves samba.

Samba is one of those art forms that a lot of people use for thinking life through, and for making manifestos about art.  This morning, as she and I sat in the hammock after breakfast, I sang Helena one of these songs, Desde que o Samba é Samba, by Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso.  The lyric she paid most attention to, and the central one to the philosophy of the song, is

O samba é pai do prazer                             Samba is the father of pleasure

o samba é filho da dor                                Samba is the child of pain

o grande poder transformador                    The great power of transformation

Brazil is famous for alegria or constant joy, but the truth of the matter is much more complicated: the history of the country, especially for those who make the extraordinary art and music that gives Brazil its reputation, is full of tragedy: slavery, war, hunger, social exclusion.  The people are happy not because of who they are or what they have lived, but because they use art to struggle to win joy out of pain.  That's why samba is the child of pain, but the father of pleasure.

Helena Iara has been living something similar over the last several weeks, as she learns to control her mouth and breath and begins to utter sounds that seem more and more like words.  The miracle of language is that, like samba, it can turn pain into pleasure: think of the enjoyment of a movie with a tragic ending, or the elegant feeling of grace at the end of a novel by Henry James.  Virgil may have put it best in the words of Aeneas:

Vos et Scyllaeam rabiem penitusque sonantis


accestis scopulos, vos et Cyclopea saxa


experti: revocate animos, maestumque timorem
mittite: 

forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

"You have braved the fury of Scylla, the deep-ringing boom

of her craggy home, you have faced the rocks of the Cyclops.

Pluck up your courage, let fear and sadness alone --

Perhaps, one day, even this will be good to remember."

As Helena finds more words and word-like sounds, she has cried less, complained less, and enjoyed more things (sitting and reading a book with me, singing...).  Words that turn the challenge of a belly-ache or a baby's tedium into art.  Her babbling songs may not be as beautiful as the words of Virgil or the voice of Caetano Veloso, but that's what they're striving for.

Falling down

As Helena Iara has been learning to stand and walk, I've discovered that she loves to fall.  Not all the time, of course, and she'll cry when her hear hits the floor, but on a nice soft surface, or when she just lands on her butt, she'll look up with a blissful smile.  So this weekend, I told her a story of an encounter I had with a teenager living on the street, about a decade ago when I was working with street kids in Santa Fe.  Since I wrote a radio commentary about the story back then, I'm going to shamelessly plagiarize myself here:

            Last week, one of the homeless kids I work with came into the drop in center elated.  A friend had loaned him a snowboard and taken him up to the Santa Fe Ski Basin, and the experience had left a smile on his face that I didn’t think even surgery could remove.

            “You’re not just dead?”  I asked, remembering my first day on a snowboard, where have a zillion flips over my toe-side edge had left bruises on my palms and sorer muscles than anything else I could remember. 

            His smile grew a touch more thoughtful.  “Sure, I crashed a lot, but I’m good at falling.”

            Several days later, the same kid came in.  Perhaps he had gone to the plastic surgeon, I thought at first, because that permanent smile had been completely effaced.  We talked for a while, played a game of chess, and finally, slowly, the truth began to come out.  The sort of truth that fulfills everyone’s nightmare.

            Several months before, an acquaintance had invited him and his girlfriend to sleep on his floor for the winter.  At the time, it had seemed a kind gesture.  But then, yes, the hero of my story walked in on his girlfriend and their host.  Naked.  In bed.

            My heart contracted.  He moved his knight to put my king in check.

            “I’m so impressed with how you’re handling this,” I said, reaching for any good thing to say, any silver lining to the blackest cloud a young man can have pass in front of the sun.

            “Remember what I told you?” he asked.  “I’m good at falling.”

            If there’s any truth to the old saw about how suffering builds character, it’s in those few words.  And unfortunately, because life has become so easy for most middle and upper class Americans, we have no chance to learn how to fall.  I imagine an average kid thrown into the same circumstances -- he would demand years of therapy, a prescription for Zoloft, and a new puppy.  For a kid who’s been homeless for years, who’s been knifed in the back by his father -- sure, the experience is further evidence that life sucks, but it does not destroy him.

            On the streets, among the orphans, the girls who were sexually abused for years, the gay boys kicked out of the house by their dads, and children from families too poor to support them, there are also some rich kids.  The life of Jack Kerouac seems romantic to them, and they might talk about the joys of the open road, but in truth, they want to learn how to fall.  Most children from American families have no chance to find out what they’re made of, to see if they are worthy of themselves.

            So in the end, there’s a simple lesson and a more complicated application.  We all need to learn how to fall better -- the question is how.

            Maybe I’ll try snowboarding again.

            This is Kurt Shaw for Radio for Change dot com.

 You can see why I'm so excited that Helena is learning to fall.

Identity and Memory

This week, Helena has come to love books.  Now, she's always enjoyed standing in front of the bookshelf and looking at the spines, and more recently, in trying to pull them out and throw them on the floor, but this week she learned how to turn the pages, look at the pictures and relate them to the story... a book as a book, not as a mere object.

In the process, she's concluded that her favorite book is Little Gorilla, the story of a baby gorilla loved by everyone in the jungle, and his anxiety about growing up, because if Little Gorilla isn't little anymore, will everyone still like him?  I think this deeper theme still escapes Helena Iara, but she loves the pictures of all of the different animals, and thinks that the lion is especially great (she has a stuffed lion, whom I bring into the story with a roar).

Yesterday, with each page that she turned, she reached onto the page to touch Little Gorilla, finding his little black form on almost all of the pages (though not when just a hand or foot represents the character metonymically: that's a hard step intellectual, I imagine).  At first, recognizing the gorilla doesn't seem like that big a deal, but the book represents the little baby in lots of positions, doing many things, and eventually Little Gorilla gets big, and looks almost nothing like himself.  Yet Helena always recognized him.

I told her a story of José Luís Borges, Funes el Memorioso, where the protagonist has perfect memory, and can re-create any day in his life in exact detail.  Soon, he concludes that language is insufficient for his world: "It annoyed him that a dog at 3:14PM (seen from the front) would have the same name as a dog at 3:15 (seen in profile)."  In the end, the perfect detail of his memory made abstraction, generalization, synthesis -- all of what we call thinking -- impossible.  Unable to forget, he was unable to remember, or at least remember as we use the word.

 Helena's recognition of Little Gorilla on many different pages, in many different incarnation, is a kind of forgetting of difference, a recognition of what matters and what doesn't, and as such, something that makes thinking possible.

11:30

For the last several days, the Brazilian all-news-all-the-time station has been promoting an interview with Slavoj Zizek, one of my favorite philosophers and someone who shows up pretty often in this blog.  (If you want an interesting thought experiment on how bad the American media is, try to imagine what it would take to put that kind of marketing campaign into an interview with a philosopher on Fox News or CNN)  Unfortunately, GloboNews planned to show the interview at 11:30 at night, well after I prefer to be asleep.

Helena Iara fell asleep earlier than usual, and Rita and I prepared for a good night, but at 11:15, a certain small person decided that she did not want to be asleep.  Nor did she want to play in her crib, in bed, or in the hammock.  She wanted to go downstairs.

Now, one can argue about whether or not her real purpose was to see the interview with Zizek (which turned out to be great) or whether she just wanted to go downstairs and play with her toys.  In fact, the second interpretation is far more probable (OK, almost certain).  But to a philosopher-dad, it was a proud moment.

Toys, Gravity, Kant

This morning after breakfast, Helena Iara sat in her high chair, throwing one toy after another to the ground, excited to hear the sound of the plastic hitting the tile floor, powerful knowing that either Rita or I would reach down and pick the toys up.  "One down, two down, three down," I joked as I picked up yet another plastic block.

"Good thing," Rita replied.  "Think of what would happen if Helena were in outer space, with no gravity at all."  An image of Helena outside a spaceship, throwing her toys left and right and "up" and "down" (categories that don't make much sense without gravity), with nothing ever to stop them, flying off into infinity where Helena could never see them or play with them again.

Emmanuel Kant said something very similar, about how what we think of as a problem to do something, may be exactly what makes doing that thing possible: "The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space."  The dove longs for an easier passage through the air, resenting the friction of each passing atom of oxygen... without recognizing that it's exactly that air that makes his flight possible.  In the same way, I get tired of the force of gravity which forces me to bend down and pick up yet another toy, without recognizing how much worse it would be otherwise.

Slavoj Zizek defines this process as the goal of psychoanalysis: seeing that what seem to be the "conditions of impossibility" of an action are really "its conditions of possibility," what seems like a barrier to what I want is in fact essential to doing it.

 It seems like a key lesson to fatherhood, a way to look at the sleepless nights and stomach aches and vomit after eating an apple.  Without these things, without the needs a child has of her parents, we would never construct love, family, all of the things that we want from parenting.  It's all air to a dove.