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Thirty
years ago, I was standing beside my wife, holding
onto her hand, as she was pushing and swearing and
slowly giving birth to our first child. At the
moment the baby was crowning, I saw a small patch
of wet, dark-brown hair. Unexpectedly and with
unprecedented power, my heart felt pierced, my
breath left me, and I was sobbing uncontrollably.
Tears were washing my face. I felt seized by a
superior force. This seizure repeated itself later,
when through a window, I was allowed to look at my
son who was squirming in the hands of a stranger in
the nursery. This time, along with all the unruly
emotions, I had a thought: "If anything were to
happen to my baby, if he died or even hurt himself,
I would die!" The area of the surface of my
vulnerability had just doubled. For the first time
in my memory, I felt connected, one with another,
for better or worse. I didn't realize it then, but
in that moment I ceased to exist as I had been:
alone and free. Faced with my son, I immediately
became his hostage, and replacing freedom, I was
overtaken with responsibility. I felt smitten and
shaky.
Cupid's
arrow through the heart, involuntary enslavement,
death and rebirth: these are the symptoms of losing
one's usual boundaries, of falling in love. My
newborn's innocence penetrated all the accumulated
crust of defenses around my heart. The joy of that
first Hello already contained the sting of the last
Good-by. Before that epiphany, I was standing
there, the hero, well armored; after that moment I
felt naked and as open to the elements as was my
baby. My armor protected me from wounds, but also
from the depths that can open up in oneself when
the other is allowed to penetrate within. My sense
of isolated self gave way to a lived sense of us of
which I was a part.
Each
of us has started out inside another (mother). My
father's sperm and my mother's egg died into the
zygote that was the cell I grew from. Immediately I
began dividing and growing. As a blastula, a
spherical ball of identical cells, I made my
journey down my mother's fallopian tube and entered
her womb. There, I had to find a place to implant.
The lining of her womb may or may not have been
inviting and welcoming, but I am living proof that
I managed to burrow my way in. The lining covered
me over, and I began to grow in a differentiated
way: now I could grow my head, feet, umbilical
cord, placenta, liver and skin. From a wandering
nomad I settled down, and let my roots take hold.
For nine months I lived like a parasite in my
mother's womb. I took all my nourishment from her
and I eliminated all my waste into her. I was
contained and she was my container.
My
self-image included, all this time, the placenta,
the umbilical cord and the fetus. Every cell in
these three parts carried my genetic signature,
whereas every cell other than these three parts
around me carried my mother's genetic signature.
And then it was time for the big separation. Birth
cost me my environment and half my weight. I lost
the womb, with all its sounds and textures and
ambiance, and my placenta and umbilicus were
amputated. An exile, an immigrant, I met my folks
on the outside.
Nándor
Fodor, a Hungarian psychoanalyst, in 1949,
published a book entitled The Search for the
Beloved: A clinical investigation of the trauma
of birth and pre-natal conditioning. In it he wrote
that "life is a continuity which does not begin at
birth; it is split up by birth." The legend of the
Fall of Man, Fodor suggests, is a record of our
biological origin. He writes that "our last contact
with God was within the womb, at the time of
conception." Be that as it may, the title of
Fodor's book refers to his belief that we
experience our placenta as our lover and sexual
partner, whom we yearn after and seek, for a
lifetime after the brutal separation and loss that
we suffer at birth.
The
myth of Isis and Osiris seems also to contain
information from humanity's common origin, the
womb. Isis and Osiris were twins conceived in the
belly of the Sky Goddess, Nut. The two became
lovers before they were born. When they became
adults, they were married. Later, Seth, brother of
Isis, murdered Osiris and tore the corpse into many
pieces, which he flung and scattered over the
Earth. Isis then discovered and collected and
reunited the pieces of her dead husband's body, was
the chief mourner at his funeral, and through her
divine love and power brought Osiris back to life
again.
Could
this ancient story have been inspired by the
pattern of blood flow between fetus and placenta
through the umbilical cord, driven by the fetal
heart-beat to repeat, over and over, millions of
times? Here is the cycle: blood ejaculates from
fetus into placenta via the single artery in the
cord; blood-vessels split, branch towards smaller
and smaller capillaries, until the tired blood gets
spread all over the large surface of the placenta;
fresh blood, filled with oxygen and nutrients
begins to collect in tiny capillaries that add up
to larger tributaries that eventually flow into the
two veins that wind their way back to the fetus
through the cord, ejaculating into and through the
navel… Fetus and placenta, locked in eternal
intercourse, each being penetrated and penetrating,
in turn.
Mapping
Isis onto the veins, Seth onto the artery, and
Osiris onto the fetal blood supply, illuminates the
commonality of an ancient myth and a biological
reality.
Let
me remind you of Aristophanes' statements in
Plato's Symposium. His speech, in praise of Eros,
concludes with "love is the desire and pursuit of
the whole." Aristophanes says that at the beginning
all humans were kind of spherical beings rolling
around happily. Each had four legs, four arms, two
heads facing in opposite directions, and two sets
of genitals, also pointing in opposite directions.
Some were male/male, some female/female, and some
male/female. These proto-humans came to the
attention of the Gods, who decided to keep them in
their place by cutting each being in half. As you
can guess, from that moment on there were a lot of
two-legged, two-armed, single-genitalled creatures
rushing about, desperately looking for their lost
half. Notice how this story puts homo- and
hetero-sexuality on a par. This "just so" story and
the above conclusion seem to come from the same
intuition Nándor Fodor tuned into hundreds
of years later.
Our
word for intercourse, sex, comes from a Latin root
meaning to cut or sever. Nexus means to connect, so
why, when we make love, do we have sex and not nex?
Robert Stoller in Sexual Excitement: Dynamics of
Erotic Life concludes that "it is hostility --
the desire, overt or hidden, to harm another person
-- that generates and enhances sexual excitement.
The absence of hostility leads to sexual
indifference and boredom. The hostility of erotism
is an attempt, repeated over and over, to undo
childhood traumas and frustrations that threatened
the development of one's masculinity or
femininity." A trauma that threatened one's
existence, regardless of gender, was birth.
Separation. Parturition. Stanislav Grof named the
four phases of birth: Bliss Inside; No Exit; Bloody
Battle; Bliss Outside. Notice that the sequence of
experiences constituting sexual arousal and orgasm
echoes or mimics the birth sequence. Also note that
the phenomenology of both No Exit and Bloody Battle
include rage and hostility. The desire for survival
that is ruthless. Desire per se is ruthless. Love
mitigates this ruthlessness but doesn't always
overcome it.
"A
life contracts death already and birth still in the
spasms of the orgasmic chiasm," Alphonso Lingis
writes, paraphrasing Merleau-Ponty. "Nietzsche
identifies the inner sensation of life with
exultation and not with contentment - life is the
feeling of gratuitously expanding force within, not
the feeling of the filling of hunger, an emptiness
being compensated for with a content," Lingis
continues. For Sartre human relations consisted in
loving and desiring alternately. Devotion to the
subjectivity of another is love; sexual desire is
the concrete form of every project to possess that
subjectivity. The presence of one fades out the
other.
And
then there is communion, or co-presence. Two can
dance together in such a way that neither leads,
neither follows, but miraculously both feel moved
by something greater than either of them. The music
dances them, they both surrender to it, not to each
other. String quartets at times manage to play as
if the four were one. There are magic moments when
the musicians, the music, the composer, the
audience, all feel one. There is a sense of
participation, rejuvenation and bliss.
Meister
Eckhart writes, "The soul, in hot pursuit of God,
becomes absorbed in Him…just as the sun will
swallow up and put out the dawn." This expresses
the relationship of the Spirit to the soul. In
erotic parlance, to be slain and to be in gloria
are one and the same thing. What a dangerous
maneuver it is to get close to the Other: how not
to be swallowed up, how not to be annihilated by
the Other? how not to swallow up, annihilate the
Other? And yet, how to allow oneself to be
assimilated, how to surrender to what is between
self and Other?
James
Keyes wrote, "The meaning of marriage, as I now
see, is that two people become so addicted to each
other that they cannot live happily, or even live
at all, apart. The addiction, each equally for the
other, is their total security, and each renews and
redoubles the strength of the other through an
ecstatic exchange of benefits as long as they both
live." He wrote this in 1972, when the notion of
co-dependence wasn't in fashion yet. Change the
word addiction to devotion and read the passage
again. What foolish daring! What dangerous
inter-dependence!
In
many mythologies Sun and Moon, Breath and
Substance, Soul and Christ are married, progenitive
pairs. The Soul (which must as Eckhart says, "put
itself to death") is to be thought of as the Bride
of Christ. There are inseparable connections
between initiation, marriage, and death, and
alimentary assimilation. The word marriage itself
seems to contain mer (Sanskrit mr to die);
many words, in sacred texts used to denote the
unification of the many in the one, imply both
death and marriage (the Greek teleo, for
instance, means to be perfected, be married,
die).
In
the I Ching, Trigram 61, Inner Truth, cautions
against dependence on inner accord with one's
beloved. Dependence upon inner accord jeopardizes
inner truth. R.D.Laing said, "Do not depend for
safety on feeling safe in the safest embrace. The
sweetest thing in all the world (and one of the
most dangerous) is to love and to be loved in
return."
To
love the other is to see the other as the other is,
whether or not this is how the other needs to be
seen, and regardless of my need to see him or her
differently. To love myself is to love me as I am,
not as I feel I need to be in order to be loved.
Laing wrote, "All alteration of self, of other,
making self and other other than we are is
deception, not true love." Later he added, "Terror
of each other spells the extinction of each other.
Communion is mutual extinction of mutual terror.
Communion: joy in, celebration of our co-existence
in this world we share, co-presence, our beings
being together in the most intimate, in all
possible, spiritual, mental and physical ways,
completely. Our only sustainable existence is
through co-existence. The culmination, fulfillment,
realization of, the perfection of existence is
co-existence, co-presence: healthy, holy communion.
This is our hope, our only sustaining hope of
deliverance from our body of death, death's
body."
What
are the risks of opening oneself to the possibility
of sexual communion? One risk is that it might just
be an illusion. I could be betrayed or I might
betray. "To know the other, and to be known, in the
Biblical sense, through communion-in-sex, is
possible, I think." R.D.Laing continues, "Why go to
such lengths to avoid it? We may miss or avoid this
possibility by faking it, hardening our hearts
against it, by repudiating it, or, tragically,
despite our yearning for it, it may never come our
way. Nevertheless, I believe sexual communion to be
a possible actuality, one of the most precious,
sweetest, feared, envied, dreaded, hated, hazardous
possibilities in life."
Men
want what women want. We all want connection.
Connection that doesn't have to be paid for by loss
of autonomy, by subjugation, by exploitation, by
submission to domination. Connection that makes one
freer, not less free. Disconnection engenders pain
and unmitigated agency leads to death. I will close
with a quote from David Bakan's The Duality of
Human Existence : "The proper way of dying is from
fatigue after a life of trying to mitigate agency
with communion."
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