Genesis

On the Origins of Ourselves

Human infants, unlike most other creatures, are unformed and virtually helpless, with little or no control over their own bodies or emotions.  They do not know where they begin or their mothers end, and have nmo sense of the outside versus the insides of their selves.  It has been said that they are born as external foetuses and their environment is a virtual external uterus.

In nine months of growth the foetus regresses to an earlier stage

Than almost any creature, bones ill-formed, nerves

Not yet strung and webbed, muscles weak,

Unable to move or see; any other animal age

For age can stand and move, press into the curves

Of its mother, and quickly find itself, within a week

It begins to follow, imitate and assert

Itself, while we, wee things, do not have the sense of being selves.

A mother bear licks her cub into shape, a cat enfolds her kitten into a creeping creature, a puppy already flops across the floor.  A giraffe or an elephant drops its new-born to awaken it, and guides its wobbly legs into a sort of independence, and little time is needed to achieve the age when habits and awareness may be learned.  But the human child is unprepared to absorb the significance of words or gestures, unless pressed into shape by a mother who may not be mature enough to enter into the necessary gaze.  The baby desires what it cannot have or know what it is missing.  At best it babbles, plays and begins to invent a language which the parent must learn and repeat.  The infant creates and acculturates its social world, and rages against its inabioity or unwillingness to serve tis every need.

They are like dust and exert

No presence in the world, which yet has to be formed,

Articulated other than ourselves,

Neither inside nor outside, a gormless jelly

Of unconsciousness, aware at best of something

Pressing in on us to keep us whole, warmed

Against the void of chaos; we are belly

And hunger, excretion and desire, a sting

And fright, not yet able to scream and rage,

Mere frustration and wordlessness, like elves

Who swallow earth through tunnels they create,

Having neither traction or friction, dream or fiction.

Wild children without language were thought to invent the original tongue, until it was discovered they had no memories to hold on to.  To have no senses which coordinate experience is to be a present without past or future, an appearance without illusion or dreaming. Until there is a space between what is perceived and what is articulated, there can be no metaphors or language.  Then, suddenly unexpectedly, one is born, not again or for the first time, but simply thrown out into the world.

Not even Helen Keller before she knew the name

Of water on her fingers, or distinguished skin

From stones; nor any wild boy without language,

When everything is always the same and never sure.

The world is an external uterus, a swirl

Erotic feelings, a longing for what cannot be,

A nothing turned in upon itself, until it learns

The sensation of something that is not there,

And absence becomes a cipher, a symbol, figure

And mark of presence in the abyss of self

And otherness, the metaphor of grief.

In the supermarket, a little boy reaches out for bright sparkly packets, and his mother pulls him way.  He reaches again from his trolley-seat. “Mmm”, he says, and again nore insistently “mm-mm-mmm-mm.”  He is trying to say something for the first time.  He wants his mom to let him reach out for something but he cannot say what it is or exactly what he wants to do and only knows in some sort of a way that she is is not part of himself, not answering him, keeping him away, separating herself from him and th e world oyut there he wants.  He is more and less than he was, not all together, not all there, and and something he does not know surges up and out of him: mm-mumm-mm. A word, a world is born./

This the myth of an eternal violation,

The first inkling of the cosmic thief

Who steals the thunder from the clouds, a finger

Inside the mouth, a nipple long denied,

Imposture of denial and abandonment,

The cry of rage at last and satisfaction,

Mm-mm-mm, to suckle and to spurn

What will not be a loving part of the self,

A sacrifice of unity and love, anger spent

That brings exhaustion, sleep and dreams,

Mm—mummum—mummy.