Baby Mia (born 12 Nov 2018)
Following my Nietzschean Reflections on the Birth of Baby Mia, I was informed by a concerned correspondent that, in denying human status to newborn babies, I'm not only tacitly supporting abortion, but opening the door to infanticide.
I don't agree with this: nor quite follow the logic of the argument. After all, a flower also lacks moral agency, but I don't wish to nip it in the bud. It has its own unique being, even if it lacks what theologians call a soul. In fact, for me - as for Wilde - the beauty of a flower resides precisely in its impersonality and amorality.
Similarly, the great fascination and delight of a newborn baby lies in the fact that although it has emerged bloody and womb-soaked in the world, it doesn't yet belong to the world and hasn't been codified as human (allzumenschliche). It is, rather, just a little bundle of innocence and becoming; a monster of chaos without form.
Thus, when holding baby Mia, I feel the stirring of strange feelings that come, as Lawrence says, from out of the dark and which one scarcely knows how to acknowledge. Almost it's a kind of terror - certainly it goes beyond mere avuncular affection.
Her inhuman cries seem to echo within oneself, reminding one that life fundamentally involves sorrow and suffering and blind rage. For although babies can make us smile, they're tragic figures who don't even have control of their own bowels or bladders.
To watch these tiny living objects lying naked and so utterly helpless and vulnerable "in a world of hard surfaces and varying altitudes", makes one anxious for their safety. No wonder their mothers not only want to enfold them in love, but wrap them in cotton wool so as to protect their soft round heads and fragile tiny limbs.
Her inhuman cries seem to echo within oneself, reminding one that life fundamentally involves sorrow and suffering and blind rage. For although babies can make us smile, they're tragic figures who don't even have control of their own bowels or bladders.
To watch these tiny living objects lying naked and so utterly helpless and vulnerable "in a world of hard surfaces and varying altitudes", makes one anxious for their safety. No wonder their mothers not only want to enfold them in love, but wrap them in cotton wool so as to protect their soft round heads and fragile tiny limbs.
But babies are pretty resilient things: and, truth be told, they are at more risk from maternal love than they are from the world at large. For maternal love has become a perverted form of benevolent bullying, worked almost entirely from the will.
And as she proceeds to spin "a hateful sticky web of permanent forbearance, gentleness, [and] hushedness" around her naturally passionate babe-in-arms, the ideal mother invariably undermines the future wellbeing - both physically and mentally - of the child.
And as she proceeds to spin "a hateful sticky web of permanent forbearance, gentleness, [and] hushedness" around her naturally passionate babe-in-arms, the ideal mother invariably undermines the future wellbeing - both physically and mentally - of the child.
If you want to save the children, then save them from their mothers and leave them to be young creatures, not persons.
Notes
D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 197.
D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 197.
D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 92-3.
D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), Section VI.
D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), Section VI.
A few perplexities here:
ReplyDelete1. Why does such a relatively simple organism as a (genetically conditioned) flower have a 'unique being' while an incontestably more complex human artist/artwork (cf. the post on David Bromley) apparently does not?
2. Presumably a baby precisely has a 'unique form' (essentially, it's sex made flesh), however pure or primitive its pulsions and angelic/demonic 'agency'?
3. When do inhuman cries become human (in human beings) and why aren't they human from the beginning? In short a baby surely extends (or inaugurates) the human, or literally amplifies our conception of such.
4. For me, Lawrence's maternal anxiety is itself in need of analytic exploration of his own unconscious, betraying as it seems to a suspiciously over-determined fear of the feminine. His 'Fantasia of the Unconscious', characterised by Lawrence himself as a 'pseudo philosophy' that was stung into being by post-Freudian criticism of Sons and Lovers, needs to be analysed at depth in its turn. Both motherhood and fatherhood, qua archetypes, have positive and negative poles, as Lawrence would hopefully have understood if he'd lived long enough to read and digest Jung properly. Too much 'mother' can lead to a surfeit of 'milkiness', just as too harsh a father can brutalise and harden, but all depends on the individual, as in all things. Put simply, both mothers and fathers (and sons and daughters, and lovers of both genders, for that matter) can be bullies. Lawrence's own anxieties are telling - but arguably as much about him as us.