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"Oh – that's
just sematics!"
In the Fillmore
district of San Francisco, where typically mom-&-pop
local shops line main streets, protesters often gather
on the sidewalk in front of one of these, on O'Farrell
off Divisadero. With no signs advertising the business,
its protesters figure anomalously amid the
neighborhood's otherwise bucolic landscaping of
agapanthus beds and trees of sweet bay, laurel, ficus,
Russian olive, and New Zealand bottle brush.
The protestors,
however, mean business. All middle-aged or older
whites, they carry placards on sticks, some holding
rosaries, others little statues of cradled fetuses.
When women walk past them to the doors, the protesters
reach out with their implements and urge each woman
please to have her baby, not to kill her child.
You can talk
with them. Some claim to be so pro-life that they also
attend vigils protesting capital punishment, and
demonstrations against war. But you cannot get very far
with them if you suggest the term fetus as the object of
their concern. They see embryonic human as already a
baby, or a child, from the moment of inception. Because
they feel a woman should want to carry her fetus all the
way to birth, they feel everyone may use the terms baby
or child for anyone's unborn fetus – as women do when
they look forward to their babies being born. So as the
protesters cannot understand women who may not relish
having fetuses grow to full-term live birth, those
entering and leaving the clinic hear invocations to baby
and child, never fetus.
You can talk
with the protesters, too, at least on a logical level,
about the crucial distinction between fetus and baby,
the one that comes with actually being born: how birth
abruptly expels the little one from its
previously-lifelong protective world, and how, as this
happens, the entirety of its earlier soft life crashes
into the crush of pummeling vaginal muscles, abrupt
exposure to fallen temperature, and arrival into the
floating space of air, with strange hands, table, or
crib introducing gravity. Each new baby thus learns the
shock of vulnerability. Everything has changed. Where
before one was a connected part of a larger organism,
birth quite rudely separates one from everything that
had been enveloping. The protesters, logically, anyway,
understand the magnitude of this change. They
understand, rationally, at any rate, this signal
initiating, beginning, metamorphosing fact: that
without asking for it, fetus gets spilled into
consciousness of being separate. Birth delivers this
rude awareness when baby finds oneself dumped into
totally-new isolation. The protesters say they
understand the shift from cocooned fetus to the trauma
of individuality. But let another woman approach the
clinic, and the words baby and child fly again. If you
groan, no, fetus isn't baby, you get informed: oh,
that's just semantics!
What their
Bible says
As these
protesters show their rosaries, their placarded images
of saints and the Virgin Mary, and their statuettes of
swaddling Jesus as anonymous fetus, they might know that
in back in the basis of their religion, the Ten
Commandments more than anything stress language. Four
of them focus on getting words straight. In the first,
the Lord recalls to Moses the way he, the Lord, from out
of the burning bush had first identified himself to
Moses when (in Exodus chapter 3, verses 6 and 14)
the Lord emphasized himself as above all in the name, "I
Am." In another commandment the Lord forbids graven
images, lest they detract from the more complicated
awareness language gives – in this case a respect
linking Moses to his father, his father's father, and
his. As Jack Miles elsewhere argued, the Lord here was
obliging Moses to see divinity, the Lord himself, as
simultaneous with past and present human stories.
Another commandment requires this awareness not be taken
in vain, or taken for granted. Another forbids false
witness.
The protesters
know, technically, their ten commandments. But they
have impatience with anyone defining fetuses as anything
less than fully-born humans. They want – people in
every culture do – to idealize a humanity quite other
than the one that includes our originating condition of
wrenching separation. People around the world want
something – anything – other than that first human
consciousness: as if humanity might innocently return
again to another version of Eden.
Cushioning
systems
Newborns have
their abrupt awareness of having been thrown out.
Something called "time," however, lets this
consciousness dim. Authorities help. They promise
systems, careers, hierarchies. All receive the promises
of routines reassuring with order. Children find
comfort in the predictabilities of parents, schools, and
groups of other children. Everyone learns further
comforts in belonging: affection transferred to
religions, nations, tribes, teams, employment groups,
and consumer demographics.
The logic of the
womb – humanity as alternate versions of return-to-the
womb – works appealingly well in every culture. But it
only works so long as we forget the unique basis of
humanity presented long time ago to the followers of the
book. All Jews, Christians, and Muslims owe the
strangest of loyalties to a wisdom that locates divinity
not in any group, but in stories – in the ways language
lets us chart relations and relationships. God made it
clear to those Hebrews trundling about the desert with
Moses that they had no automatic pass just for belonging
to a group, even God's "chosen" group; they had,
instead, entirely new sets of obligations.
When the Lord
introduced himself to Moses, every time he
referred to himself as "I Am," he also stressed how he
occurred to the ancestors of Moses – Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob. He was calling attention not simply to any
closure such as graven images can capture, but to
ongoing issues in those outside of us which only
stories, poems, and hymns can trace. God existed, he
repeatedly stressed, not as semantic "I Am"
technicality, but as an ever-evolving means enabling and
impelling us to see key parts of ourselves also outside
of ourselves, in predecessors, ancestors, "others."
This obliged respect and skills for having respect: no
tickets for anyone to any comfy womb. No closure
entitlements.
Bob Dylan:
"How does it feel / To be on your own . . . ?"
Summer 2005
Greil Marcus put out a book, Like a Rolling Stone,
celebrating the forty-year anniversary of what many have
called the greatest song in rock'n'roll history. His
book reminds us of the folly many have had in
attributing the song's lyrics to any number of people
Dylan might have had grievances against. No, says
Marcus: we lessen the song to fit it to isolated spleen
or narrow petulance. We can, instead, see the
magnificence of how Dylan sees all of us. He understood
the difficulties all have escaping our forms of
narcissism. He knew how all fall to religion, tribe,
nationality, and more. He felt how, to some degree, all
enter personal relationships to hold others as if
accomplices in the black holes we can make of our
dreams, illusions, theories and plans. The protesters
you can see on O'Farrell off Divisadero are just doing
as all do. In their case, shanghaiing all
(usually-young) women as players in a script confusing
humanity with fetal innocence. In their world, humanity
fits an ethics stripped of the originating fact of
humanity. In their world, one may feel entitled to a
system that protects one. One may hear the promise that
one never be ejected – never need ask "How does it feel
/ To be on your own."
Essaying
Differences recognizes the womb, the tribe, the
nation. Essaying Differences proceeds
from the fact that all cultures have authorities making
their promises for belonging and inclusion – but, along
with authorities, we have artists, too. Artists give us
other promises, too. All may not read, listen to music,
or go to films, but all express ourselves in the styles
artists give us for the clothes we wear, landscapes we
inhabit, buildings we occupy, transport we use, and
foods we take.
When schools of
higher education funnel all into their routinely
specialized departments, all faining impersonality, all
mutually-isolated, these schools and their dead priest
authorities rehearse the false humanity of the abortion
clinic protesters. Normal systems of higher education
everywhere around the globe repeat the same trackings,
modular-steps, hierarchies, career rungs, and heavy,
expensive, and deadly corporate textbooks. And yet,
percolating meanwhile, our artists also hold other
possibilities for very other humanity, such as W. H.
Auden described in his poem, "Under Which Lyre."
This summer a
movie, Mad Hot Ballroom, celebrated the ways
fifth-grade schoolchildren learned to see themselves in
relation to others. In it the ten- and eleven-year-olds
learn different styles of dancing with each other. Then
they learn by these dance skills to interact with very
different ethnic others from the other parts of New York
City. More than anything else their schooling affords
them, they learn about themselves, and the related
humanity in others,. The arts of different styles of
dance allow this. Schools can do this. But schools
more typically shun such group activities. Schools now
serve more than anything the reduction of all to the
isolating machineries of standardized testing. They
could do more. They could stress more group activities,
as in Mad Hot Ballroom, where kids learn to see
and to connect to very different humanity. Schools
could, as they do over in Berkeley, across San Francisco
Bay, allow group gardening projects, as Alice Waters has
pioneered, so kids even of middle school age learn
connections from their gardens to their lunchroom, and
to further knowledge of nutrition, biology, geography,
and the environment. Schools could give kids more
practice in music, by choral groups, bands, and
orchestras. They could practice theater arts, with all
the related arts of literature, costuming, and staging.
So much, so much
we all could do, from schools for youngsters who could
learn the humanity of group work with others, to schools
of our current "higher education" where all could essay
differences in the ways all negotiate the lies in all
our cultures. |
