Thus conscience does make cowards of us all

Helena is walking well these days.  She can stand up on her own for minutes at a time, and walks from one side of the room to the other with very good balance.  Until, that is, she realizes what she is doing.  Then, like Wily E. Coyote running off the edge of a cliff in his vain pursuit or the Roadrunner, she looks at her feet, looks at Rita or me, and falls to the ground.  She can do it only as long as she isn't aware of what she is doing.

Hamlet's famous like that "conscience makes cowards of us all" has become a kind of moral cliché, coming to mean that we would do many more things if our conscience didn't stop us.  In fact, though, conscience has not always referred to that little white angel on the shoulder of a character in a cartoon.  Conscience is awareness, knowledge.  And Helena has found that the moment of self-awareness can be much more fearsome than the thing itself.

Though I don't have much opportunity these days, for many years I loved to rock climb, and as any rock climber can tell you, conscience does make cowards of us all.  I remember one climb in the El Dorado Canyon, west of Boulder, which tested my skills.  Even as I sweated each move, I made my way up the rock, using a wide crack.  Yet the moment I levered myself onto the top of the pitch, clipped into the belay station, and looked down... I knew I'd never be able to climb any higher.  Unthinking, I had been able to make the climb.  Conscious of what I was doing, I had no chance, and somehow I knew I would fall.  I told my brother to lower me down to the ground, and we went home.  A week later, my heart was still beating at an accelerated pace.

I wonder to what degree Hegel's ideas about negation and consciousness have to do with this same phenomenon.  Hegel saw the world before conscience, as somehow present to itself, but the moment that someone becomes aware of the world -- and aware of herself being aware of the world -- it is no longer a seamless whole.  A crack has opened up.  And according to Hegel, this is the beginning of history and, if we think deeply enough, of humanity itself.  Animals don't reflect on the world, don't open up that gap, but people do.  (Perhaps, by the way, this is why we empathize with Wily E. Coyote, and not with the Roadrunner).

So even though I feel sorry for Helena whenever she realizes what she is doing and then falls to the floor, it is also wonderful.  Conscience make make cowards of us all, but it also makes us human.

A ball of meaning

For at least a month and a half, Helena Iara has been using words, but it's only in the last day or two that I'm confident that she understands that words aren't only useful, but also can signify.  And the word that has shown this fact is the very simple "ball", which she says (and repeats and repeats) in both Portuguese (bola) and English.

Neurologists and linguists who work with language acquisition talk about "semantic over-reach," lingo which just means that when babies begin to understand how words refer to things, they think the word means a much broader category than it really does.  The classic example is a child who learns the word "doggie", and then declares any four-legged animal, from a puppy to a lion, a "doggie".  Language learning happens through paring down our knowledge, chiseling away the meanings that don't work so that we get down to the "real" meaning of a word ("real" in scare quotes because it is always a little flexible, turned into a metaphor, and in flux).

For Helena, what that means is that any sphere is a ball.  She has a little ball that she loves to kick, but she also likes a full-sized soccer ball and an interesting little empty ball with lots of holes.  Oranges and apples are also balls, as are passion fruit... a problem when she declares "ball" and throws them onto the tile floor. The truth is, though, that an orange seems more similar to her little ball than either the empty ball or the soccer ball: she's developed a theory about "ball-ness" and is trying to apply it.

We don't lose this tendency as we grow up; it just changes.  In college, for instance, marxist cultural  theory was my "ball", something I tried to apply to everything.  Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory?  Jane Austin?  Post-modern philosophy?  The drinking culture of small, liberal arts colleges?  A combination of Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse offered an explanation and solution to everything, generally detailed with excessive pedantry (and a bit of humor) in my monthly column in a college magazine.

Now this isn't a bad thing, even as I make fun of my younger self.  Helena's joyful shouts of "bola, ball!" as she sees anything round make her excited about the world, curious and thrilled about learning.  The same was true of my own theoretical over-reach, and it continues to be: finding an idea that you love is essential not just to intellectual life, but to life itself.

In the long run, we all learn that an apple isn't a ball, and that if we throw it on the ground, it will be too bruised to eat.

And I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down!

Helena can now recognize the covers of different books, so we can see more clearly which are her favorites: she picks them up and brings them to us.  Unfortunately, two of her favorite books are a retrograde interpretation of the three little pigs (which turns it into a morality tale about laziness, like the fable of the ant and the grasshopper) and a sad tale of a boy her turns into a werewolf and is forced from his home by his friends and family... and the book ends that way, without the redemption of a happy ending.

Now, I could use this blog as a chance to reflect more on the nature of narrative, and suggest that babies don't want the simple beginnings and ends, nor the moral of the story, that we adults want for them.  What's more interesting is what Helena likes about the two stories: the wolves.  At the beginning of each story (the boy before he becomes a werewolf, the three little pigs setting off for the world), she can't even wait for the narration to end before she tries to turn the page, but then, when the wolves appear on the page, she begins to growl.  Loudly.  Furiously.  And with unmistakable joy.

What is Helena Iara up to?  Why these joyful growls?  Here's a hypothesis: where we adults have learned to identify heroes and villains, and to identify with the heroes, Helena is putting herself in the shoes of other characters.  She doesn't find the pigs sympathetic (I never really did, either), but the wolf is exciting, powerful, and goes after what he wants.  Even more important is that the wolf has a cool voice when I read the story, with intonation and accent and (yes) growls.  "And I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down!"  That's much more fun that a bunch of whiney little pigs.

We might look at lots of children's literature through these eyes: might the kids not like the three bears more than Goldilocks?  The big bad wolf more than Little Red Riding Hood?  Shrek, in its best moments, seems to capture this intuitive reversal: kids like the powerful excluded monster more than they like the goody-two-shoes.

Moralists might be worried about this idea, but I don't think they need to be.  Not to say that I am any kind of saint, but I think I'm a pretty decent person, but the role I always wanted to play, whether playing as a little boy or in theater as a teenager, was the villain.  I wanted to explore bad to find out what it was like, to understand bad people... but not to be it.  I've seen the same thing making fictional films with child soldiers and street children and other "bad kids": when they have a chance to explore evil in fiction, they need it less in real life.

Plus, it's really fun to howl and growl like a wolf.

Children's books

This weekend, Rita and I went into a bookstore to buy a book for Helena Iara.  As Rita and Helena paged through the kids' section (Rita paged, while Helena removed each book, looked at it, and then placed it on the floor), I ran into a new translation of Paul Ricoeur's famous book on narrative, where he hypothesizes that time is actually constructed from story, not only that we understand history through tales, but that time itself is the result of narrative.

Helena likes some books that have a beginning, climax, and end -- Little Gorilla, for instance, and Fortunata the Giraffe, which Rita ended up buying for her --  but narrative is hardly necessary.  One of her favorite books right now is My Circus, which pairs simple drawings with single words on each page: "Clown; Elephant; Tent; Acrobat."  If I turn the pages one by one as I read the words, she quickly gets bored, but if she turns the pages, sometimes back to forward, other times forward to back, sometimes skipping pages or flipping back to the beginning, she can sit with the book for fifteen minutes happily.

Clearly, she loves to see the way turning pages impacts her world: as she flips quickly between "Acrobats" and "Jugglers," I have to say the words just as quickly as she turns the pages... and then she flips back to "Children" just to see if I notice.  Kids like to exercise some kind of control over their parents, and turning the pages back and forth does that for Helena.

But I think there's something else going on here, too.  Helena likes to see new juxtapositions.  The list "Drum, Tent, Clown, Magician, Caravan" means one thing, but "Clown, Drum, Children, Acrobat, Elephant," that's a different story all together.  Or maybe not a story... and I guess that's my point.  There is something exciting about putting things or images or ideas together in an unexpected or even prohibited way.  That can mean anything from André Breton's surrealism, where poems are made of the seemingly random transpositions of words, to Dalí's paintings, to the chance placement of a book by Foucault next to the New Testament, making one think of new ways to interpret the epistle to the Romans.

Ricouer is probably right: narrative does create time, or at least the way we understand it (thermodynamics probably has something to do with the physical reality, after all).  And I think babies do understand both time and narrative, but that's not the only lens through which they look at the world.  There is also a jumping, random juxtaposition, and then the struggle to make sense of those new orders.  Narrative can be fun, but so can turning the pages any which way.  Things get placed side by side, the brain has to work to make the connection, and that's fun.

Isn't she just a doll?

On our recent trip to Salvador and Recife, Helena Iara heard one comment time and time again: "Isn't she just a little doll?" ("É como uma bonequinha!")  Helena is a cute baby, but what really attracted interest was how blond she is: in the very African cities of Brazil's northeast (and where the harsh sun burns everyone black pretty soon), such a white baby is shocking.  I'm not exaggerating when I say she stopped traffic on downtown streets.


I began to tell Helena a little more about the philosophy of Jean Baudrillard, which seemed quite apropos... Baudrillard's basic idea is that in post-modernity, the sense of reference is lost.  Instead of a picture signifying some real thing "behind" it, representation develops a new relationship to reality.  What, he asks, does the China exhibition at Epcot Center have to do with China?  He defines the simulacrum as a "Copy for which there is no original."

As I explained to Helena, it seemed even more perverse the doll -- originally a signifier of a baby, but now a kind of simulacrum -- would now become the reference by which real babies are judged.  If a baby is "like a doll", then she is pretty and good. Certain other comments we heard on the street also made it clear that the comparison had to do with wealth: several women declared "She looks like a soap opera baby!" while one street boy innocently spoke the truth that lies behind all of these comments: "She looks almost like a baby of the rich people!"  The rich, like a doll, are unreal and perfect, powerful but untouchable.

Fortunately, Rita was listening to my diatribe and stopped me before it got out of hand.  She explained to Helena that the real problem wasn't ontological, but practical.  When people describe a baby as a doll, they may also treat the girl as a thing.  The cheek-pinching, hair-mussing, and invasive stares she got from people she had never seen before and would never see again served as very good evidence of this fact.

In the end, I still contend that issues of the constitution of being in postmodernity are important... but Rita is basically right.  The real issue with seeing the other was a doll is that she becomes a thing.  Prized and treasured, perhaps, but basically an object.  Instead of another subject with whom I interact, people on the street wanted an object with which they could play.

Sound is like touch at a distance

 I have been editing a lot of film recently: we shot hours and hours in the favela of Recife last month, and have to turn it into a good short film in less than a month, so the pressure is on.  Editing means a lot of time with headphones stuck in my ears, and me lost to the external world.  Several times over the last couple of days, I have heard Rita talking with someone, what sounds like a profound enough conversation that I take off my earphones to see who is visiting... only to find out that it's Helena Iara.

Over the last couple of weeks, Helena Iara has begun to speak.  Yes, there are words that show up, from the expected mommy and dada to strange ones like "ímã" (magnet), but what I'm really talking about is the material stuff of speech, its sounds and rhythms.  When I'm not listening carefully, or when I am paying attention to something else, it sounds as if Helena is talking adult speech.  The tone rises and falls like discourse, the nouns and consonants sound like English or Portuguese, and she has the exact tones of joy and frustration and desire that we associate with speech.

It's cliché to say that 90% of language is non-verbal, but that doesn't make it any less true.  Helena is gathering the lessons of non-semantic language, the tones and music and sounds that will eventually come together to be adult speech.  And she communicates with these sounds, even if she doesn't understand that sounds are supposed to "mean" something, instead of simply being.

By chance, I was listening to an old Radiolab episode a couple of nights ago, where the neuroscientist Anne Fernald suggested that speech begins not as communication, but as a caress (or a punch, a tickle... not as meaning, but as something much more direct).  Across cultures, people talk to babies with almost exactly the same tones of voice, whether soothing or complimenting or disciplining.  Voice serves to embrace a child and educate her, not through its content, but through its music.  Remembering that the cilia and timpanum and hammer that make up hearing are really feeling the motion of the air, Fernald coins the elegant phrase, "Sound is like touch at a distance."

Before Helena is learning language as meaning, she is learning sound as touch, as a direct way to relate with Rita and with me.  Semantics may come later, but for now I'm happy to have touch at a distance.

The evil eye

With the exception of a brief flirtation with a superstition about the number 16 as a teenage soccer player, I've never really had much time for magical thinking.  I'm a pretty hard nosed materialist.  So as one might guess, I've always quietly scoffed at the idea of the evil eye, in spite of its pervasiveness here in Brazil.  None the less, two weeks with Helena Iara in Recife forced me to do some re-thinking on the issue.

Though there are many forms of the evil eye, the most common one in Brazil often isn't intentionally malicious; in fact, the danger comes from admiration.  If someone compliments my clothes or appearance or anything else, it shows the possibility of envy, and that envy has consequences; in fact, in Portuguese, the word "evil" doesn't enter into the dynamic.  People fear the "olho gordo" or fat eye, the desire of the other for what I have.  It makes sense in a culture that has long been poor, and where social equality (within an economic class, though not from one to another) is an important virtue.



The problem comes when the object of envy is a baby.  If someone else admires Helena Iara, or envies Rita and me because she is our daughter, that envy can make her sick.  An entire social group of "benzedeiras" or blessers (sort of like good witches) exist in order to help kids get over the illnesses caused by the evil eye.  This struck me as sort of silly... until Helena became the victim of the olho gordo, as she did last week, with fever, confusion, and inability to sleep.

Lest you think I'm getting soft in the head, let me explain what I think happened.  In Recife, blond children are uncommon, and because they are almost always the children of the rich, they seldom turn up in the favelas and areas of urban decay where we spent most of our time.  For that reason, Helena attracted a lot of attention.  A lot.  She literally stopped traffic from time to time, and people surrounded her as if she were a rock or soap opera star, each one of them with more extravagant compliments.  In a city of almost 3 million people, one of the dirtiest and hottest and noisiest places I know, it was just too much.  Helena became over-stimulated and got sick.

A benzedeira blessed Helena, and I doubt that it did any harm -- in fact, the kind and soothing words of the woman, and the sweet-smelling fond she swung around Helena probably helped.  But what really worked was rest: getting her away from the chaos of the city, from the intense and desiring eyes of thousands of people.  She still had to deal with the heat, but she soon was as happy and healty as she had ever been.  And I came to have a little more respect for folk beliefs that I used to think were all confused with magic...