Acabou?

Rita and I have becomes used to hearing "Mama" and "Dada" from Helena, but there's a new word in her vocabulary, one that I had not expected.  Linguists who study infants suggest that babies first acquire nouns and proper names, only moving on to verbs much later, but Helena has begun to say the word "acabou," and to use it in a context that makes sense, often repeating it after we say it, but sometimes even producing it on her own.

"Acabou" means "it's over" or "it's all gone" in Portuguese.  Strange words for a baby, who is beginning almost everything, to say.  Yet it's a relatively common word in Brazil, at least when we speak with babies: Rita mashes cooked banana onto a plate, and Helena eats it eagerly.  When she's eaten it all, "Acabou!"  We pile pillows up into a mountain, and Helena tears them down one by one, and when she throws the last one from the couch to the floor, Rita will say, "Acabou," to which Helena replies "'cabou", with exactly the same tone of voice.

There's an easy explanation for Helena's use of the word, something we get from Freud.  He saw his grandson playing with a spool of thread on the floor, throwing the spool under a table where he could not see it and saying “fort” (gone). Then the child pulled the spool back to him and said “da!” (here). The game could go on for hours and hours.

Freud only came to understand what the boy was doing when the child called the spool “mother.” The mother, Freud’s daughter, had been spending many hours away from home, an event which seemed to traumatize her son. By throwing his mother under the table and “hiding” her (sending her away), and then bringing her back, the boy came to feel that he was controlling the trauma. It hurt him, but he chose it. According to Freud, one could see the same impulse in soldiers who suffered from shell-shock, who re-created the trauma again and again in their minds until they felt as if it wad their choice, and therefore under their control.

Is Helena using words to cover up the trauma of the end?  Honestly, I doubt it (and in fact, I think the whole edifice of Freudian theory constructs trauma as much as it describes it, but that's a polemic for another day).  Honestly, I think it's more about understanding the way that words work.  Ends can be clear things -- we put "the end" at the end of movies and books -- and she has come to understand that there is a sound that connects to these ends (as someday she'll understand that "once upon a time" marks a beginning.).  Helena is learning narrative.

Out of control (almost)

Last week, Rita and I hung a swing for Helena in the backyard.  Thanks to the height of the flamboyant tree (that's really its name, give because of the vibrant red flowers), she gets a long pendulum back and forth, and the higher she gets, the louder her shrieks of joy.  Not only is it great to watch, but it gives Rita's and my backs a break from carrying an increasingly heavy little girl, or bending down to help her to walk.

Helena's other favorite new activity is running downhill.  It can be down the ramp at a restaurant or store, down a trail, or even (with lots of help) down the stairs (we're trying to break her of this last game).  Almost like a skier after the lifts have closed, she will point her feet up the hill, demand that I help her walk up, and then turn downhill for the run.

What's the point of these games?  Why are they so much fun?  In fact, I might ask the same of some of my favorite sports -- skiing, rock climbing, now kitesurfing -- which just expand the sense of speed and movement that Helena enjoys.  Looking at her (and thinking of myself), I think the joy comes from just barely being in control, being just on the verge of too much.  Swinging isn't a passive activity for a little girl: Helena is actually using her balance to hold herself upright, and not to fall side to side.  If her weight shifts, she could go crashing into the orchids that embrace the tree.  And she loves the challenge of reaching for clothes on the laundry line, just beyond the reach of the longest swing.  Running down hill is even clearer as game between control and chaos, when a little trip could mean a fall (or would, if she didn't have her hands in mine).

Kayaking and kitesurfing are similar: you don't control the water or the waves or the wind.  They are a movement that you can understand and use, but not influence.  The joy of the sport comes from using these dangerous and unstable (though not unpredictable) elements as toys, exercising what little control I can to make a game.

There's an important metaphor about freedom here, if I can get my mind around it.

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

Over the last several days, Helena Iara has been making lots of new sounds.  Some of them sound like they'll someday become words, while others are more raw, sounds of desire and anger and hurt.  Yesterday, as we had lunch, she began to make one of those angry sounds, and Rita and I began to lecture her on table manners... until we realized that she was imitating a lion.  It was the same sound she used when she plays with her two stuffed lions, or with her feline finger puppets.  Grrrrr....

Watching Helena play with her stuffed animals has been fascinating, because she looks like an infantile version of an Amazonian shaman (at least as they are described by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, the great Brazilian anthropologist), whose power lies in the ability to see through the eyes of other animals.  Knowledge, for the shaman, is not to have an objective view of the jaguar, but instead to see the world as the jaguar sees it.  For Amazonian people, this kind of perspective shift is both epistemology and ethics -- how we know the world and how we act right -- because we not only learn how the jaguar sees the world, but also how to treat it with dignity, even when we need to hunt it.

This way of seeing the world might seem strange to a European adult, but to children, it makes sense.  What is play, make-believe, or just acting out a scene between Barbie and a Teddy Bear?  It is an attempt to step into the shoes of that toy, to see the world as that animal or doll might see it.  They use their toys as a shaman uses Ayahuasca: to get behind the eyes of the other.  Perhaps more significantly, I think that babies play for similar ethical and epistemological reasons: they want to see other perspectives on the world, and they want to get closer to the other.

Why does Helena roar?  She wants to see how she feels with that sound in her mouth, if she feels powerful like a lion, big and brave.  She wants to see how her parents react.  It's a way to learn, a way to try out different personalities that she might like, and a way to get closer to other people.  We can condemn commercial toys for lots of reasons, but (as I think the Toy Story trilogy argues well) when a child can play with many of them, they offer the chance of many changes in perspective, a developed point of view that the child can inhabit for a moment.

And in fact, what is this blog, but an intellectualized version of the same kind of game?  Helena can't tell me what she really feels or things, no more than a jaguar can explain its perspective to the shaman.  So, like a child with a toy, I try to project myself into Helena's perspective, imagine what she is thinking, learning, seeing.  I'm wrong most of the time, of course, but the effort changes the way that I see the world.  And that's both ethics and epistemology.

Making the high places plain

The entropy machine that is our daughter is only getting more efficient as she gets bigger and stronger.  Nothing that sits on top of anything else will stay there, if Helena Iara can reach it, and the bookshelves and CDs are in constant danger.

Last night, I piled up a mountain of pillows and then put her lion on top.  Not only did she pull the lion down, but then took each pillow and threw it to the ground.  Perhaps it was the lion that inspired this memory, but this time, instead of thinking about entropy and chaos, as I had before, a couple of quotes from the Hebrew prophets came into my head:

“I will go before you and level the exalted places, I will break in pieces the doors of bronze and cut through the bars of iron." [Is 45:2]

"Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain." [Is 40: 4]

I never really liked these verses when I was a kid; I love mountains too much to celebrate their demise, even when I understood that it was a metaphor for social justice, for bringing down the rich and powerful and raising up the poor.

It's interesting, I think, to consider the way that the writers of the Christian gospels used these lines as a proof of their ideas about Jesus being the anointed savior of the Hebrew people.  Matthew cites Isaiah in his narrative of the birth of Jesus... is it merely a coincidence that these actions aren't merely a metaphor for social justice and equality, but also a concrete description of what babies do?  They "level the exalted places" and break anything they can find... maybe not "break in pieces doors of bronze and cut through the bars of iron," but that's more for lack of strength than lack of desire!  (St. Augustine once said that "If babies are innocent, it is merely because they lack the strength to do wrong, not because they lack the will."  I prefer, "If babies cannot level the mountains, it is because they lack the strength, not because they lack the desire.")

In any case, might it be that Matthew is suggesting that a baby's instincts are for justice?  That this seeming negation and destruction really stands for revolution, for throwing off the yoke of Babylon or Rome?  Perhaps.  At least those ideas make it a little easier to clean up after Helena...

[The photos, by the way, come from our vacation.  Most parents will recognize chocolate on a baby's face; mine is filthy after a 40 mile bike ride up and down the mountains in the rain and mud.]

Running

Helena  has everything ready to be walking right now: since she was four months old, she has walked as she holds onto an adults fingers, she stands on her own, she walks four of five steps without a problem... but she still isn't really walking.  Why?  Because she wants to run.  Holding her hands, she won't go slowly, but throws herself forward and sprints her legs with quick steps, running as fast as I can walk and hold her hands.

Now there is an easy lesson in this, one I tried to explain to Helena Iara this morning: you have to walk before you can run.  That idea is such a part of popular wisdom that we can hear it in many different contexts.  Even so...

I wonder if Helena's desire to run doesn't, in fact, express the best thing about her.  Her father doesn't get to brag that "my daughter walked when she was only so many months old," but that doesn't matter so much.  What matters is that she is so enthusiastic that se wants to run, that she loves the feel of movement and laughs as she runs, and that she is always trying to accomplish the impossible.  So instead of the boasts of a proud father, we have a utopian urge, something like the slogan of 1968 in Paris: "Soyons realists, soyons realistes demandons l'impossible": Let's be realists and demand the impossible.

In the end, that attitude makes me much prouder.

Games and Freedom

First over Christmas and then during vacation last week, Helena had a lot of time to play with her cousins, especially Luidi (who just turned five) and Henrique (who is almost 4).  It's been interesting to watch their games, because they seem to show something important about human freedom.

Most of the time, Helena has one or two games she likes to play with her toys.  She likes to put them in her mouth, she likes to play peek-a-boo, and she likes to play ball... but a four or five year old knows a much greater range of games.

Maybe an example will help me to explain: Over Christmas, Luidi brought his cars from the movie Cars over to grandma's house, and Helena wanted to play with them with her mouth, and then by throwing them onto the ground (another favorite game).  Luidi, an immensely patient little boy, sat down next to her on the ground and said, "What we do is this:" and he pushed the car along the tiles and said "zoom, zoom."  Helena looked at him strangely, as if to say, "why aren't you putting the cars in your mouth?"

"The cars can talk, too," Luidi went on, and then acted out a scene between Lightning McQueen and the Tow-truck, Tow-Mater.  Helena found the play acting fascinating, and took the other cars out of her mouth long enough to watch.

Whether we can credit Luidi or just the normal process of development, over the last month and a half, Helena now pushes her little truck across the floor and imitates a kind of conversation between her finger-puppets (especially the monkey, toucan, and giraffe, her favorites) before putting them into her mouth in order to scratch her teething gums.  It seems that Luidi's lesson opened up new possibilities for Helena's world, new ways to interact with the objects in it.

A second event last week, when we stopped by Luidi's parents' house for the little boy's birthday, took the lesson to a new level.  Luidi and a couple of his friends were playing with some interlocking construction pieces, and Helena sat in the middle of them, picking up one thing and then another.  Several of the other little boys took the pieces from around Helena to build their own things, but Luidi stopped them, and put half a dozen pieces around her: "These are Helena's," he told his friends.

Games follow rules, and within the game, we have relatively limited freedom: you can't pick up a soccer ball and carry it.  But an even greater limit on our freedom, I think, is that we allow ourselves to get stuck in one game: an adolescent who can only argue with his parents, and doesn't know another way to relate.  The businessman who knows all the rules of the game in his business (including the rules about when he can get away with breaking the rules), but never steps out of that game to ask if what he is doing is right. The girl who thinks that the rules of fashion are obligatory all the time.  These are social games, rather like Wittgenstein's language games.

Luidi taught two important lessons to Helena: first, that she could choose what game to play with her toys.  And second, that not all games are selfish and competitive: games can also be about helping others and making them happy.  And as Helena learns these lessons, more options are open to her.  She becomes a little more free.

Vacation

Rita, Helena, and I have been on vacation for the last week, so I'm still catching up on work, but at least I can share a couple of photos from the trip to Aparados da Serra, in the mountains a couple of hours south of Florianópolis.