“I did not know that I could only get the most out of life by giving myself up to it,” the British psychoanalyst Marion Milner wrote under a pseudonym in her superb century-old field guide to the art of knowing what you really want — that most difficult, most rewarding among the arts of living. It is hard to know what we want because, disquieted daily by “this sadness of never understanding ourselves,” it is hard to know who we are. To want anything is to acknowledge a lack, a gap between the real and the ideal, between the life we have and the life we desire, which is fundamentally a gap between who we are and who we wish to be.
In our yearning for an answer, for a bridge between the real self and the ideal self, we have invented religion and psychotherapy, we have turned to shamans and self-help gurus, we have fasted and prayed, filled out personality tests and followed autosuggestion protocols. But while a certain level of restlessness is necessary to our creative vitality — that “divine dissatisfaction” out of which art is born — living with a sense of perpetual deficiency petrifies the possible in us. For, as Kurt Vonnegut knew, there is no greater enemy to happienss than the sense of not enough, the feeling that we need to have more or be more in order to live with a fullness of being and an inner completeness.
British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips offers an antidote to our civilizational cult of self-improvement in his slender, potent book On Getting Better (public library).
We are trapped, he observes, by our frame of reference:
If you have a broken leg, or a fever, you know what is to be aimed for; if you have a broken heart or a sense of shame, it is not quite so clear… Patients come to psychoanalysis with an idea of cure because, historically, they have been to medical doctors, and before that they have been to religious healers. A culture that believes in cure is living in the fallout, in the aftermath, of religious cultures of redemption.
[…]
Self-improvement can be self-sabotage. Too knowing; too knowing of the future. A distraction, a refuge from one’s personal vision.
He considers the paradox at the crux of our zeal for self-improvement:
We can’t imagine our lives without the wish to improve them, without the progress myths that inform so much of what we do, and of what we want (we don’t tend to think of ourselves as wanting to be what we are already). Whether we call it ambition, or aspiration, or just desire, what we want and what we want to be is always our primary preoccupation, but it is always set in the future, as though what could be — our better life, our better selves — lures us on. As though it is the better future that makes our lives worth living; as though it is hope that we most want.
The problem with an idealized future is that every ideal is not only a form of wanting but a form of presumed knowledge — about what is optimal and desirable, about the vector of change — and yet the future is fundamentally unknowable. (This is why the things we most ardently desire are the most transformative, but we suffer a congenital blindness to what lies on the other side of transformation.) Phillips writes:
One cannot know the consequences of one’s wanting, because one can’t know the future except as an assumed replication of the past… It is almost certain that we won’t or can’t get what we want, partly because, from a psychoanalytic point of view, we are largely unconscious, unaware, of what we want.
With an eye to a word so fashionable that we have hollowed it of meaning by overuse and mususe, by making it a catchall for anything that challenges and disquiets us — trauma — he adds:
There is, after all, no life without trauma; indeed, the word misleadingly makes us think of something being interrupted, rather than of something integral, something essential to our lives. So much depends on what we can make of what happens to us, and on what we make of what we do; on our being able to metabolize or digest our experience; on our capacity or willingness to transform our experience rather than be merely victimized by it. When getting better doesn’t only mean getting safer, it means being able to risk feeling more alive, to risk taking risks, to risk learning and not learning from experience.
[…]
Learning from experience means learning what your experience can’t teach you — the nature and quality of future experience.
Those soul-broadening, life-deepening risks, those blessed unknowns of the future fometing the capacity for self-surprise that keeps us from ossifying, are precisely what Mario Benedetti placed at the center of his stunning poem “Do Not Spare Yourself.”
Where we go when we go to sleep and why we go there is one of the great mysteries of the mind. Why the mind at times refuses to go there, despite the pleading and bargaining of its conscious owner, is a greater mystery still. We know that ever since REM evolved in the bird brain, the third of our lives we spend sleeping and dreaming has been a crucible of our capacity for learning, emotional regulation, and creativity. But the price we have paid for these crowning curios of consciousness has been savage self-consciousness, thought turned in on itself, nowhere more maddening in its mania for rumination than in insomnia — that awful moment when, facing the fissure between your conscious wishes and your unconscious will, you realize that you are helpless against yourself, that there is not a single you pulling the strings of the mind but a tangle of thought and feeling rendering you a troupe of marionettes.
Against this already discomposing backdrop, insomnia foregrounds an added cruelty: the more you think about not being able to sleep, the less able to sleep you are, spiraling into anxiety about how the night’s helpless wakefulness will compromise your day. But while lack of sleep does diminish basic functions like reflexes and recall, paradoxically, the brink of sleep can be salutary to creativity: In that liminal space between restlessness and rest, the mind’s organizing principles begin to fray with the fatigue of the day’s conscious labors and unbidden thoughts begin to emerge from the recesses of the unconscious, begin to collide with one another in the seething cauldron of the insomniac’s angst, begin to form the unexpected combinations we call originality.
Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883–June 3, 1924) — one of history’s most prolific insomniacs — knew this, celebrated it, relished it.
Franz Kafka
Throughout his struggles with creative block, Kafka regularly found himself sleepless. Like Patti Smith, who fights insomnia with an imaginative visualization, he would cross his arms and lay his hands over his shoulders, visualizing himself laying as heavy as possible “like a soldier with his pack.” On his good days, he saw his insomnia as a badge of honor for a mind ablaze with thought: “I can’t sleep because I write too much,” he writes in his diary. On his bad days, he felt in it the tension between “the vague pressure of the desire to write” and “the nearness of insanity,” feared it left him too tired for creative work. On one such day, he records:
Because of fatigue did not write and lay now on the sofa in the warm room and now on the one in the cold room, with sick legs and disgusting dreams. A dog lay on my body, one paw near my face.
But another part of him realized that sleeplessness, rather than a hindrance to his creative vitality, is a function of it, honed on the edges of the night:
Sleeplessness comes only because… I write. For no matter how little and how badly I write, I am still made sensitive by these minor shocks, feel, especially towards evening and even more in the morning, the approaching, the imminent possibility of great moments which would tear me open, which could make me capable of anything, and in the general uproar that is within me and which I have no time to command, find no rest.
In a passage that suggests the creative impulse may just be our best way of calibrating how much reality we can hold, how much of the pain and rapture of being alive we can bear — what Virginia Woolf called “the shock-receiving capacity” that makes one an artist — Kafka adds:
In the end this uproar is only a suppressed, restrained harmony, which, left free, would fill me completely, which could even widen me and yet still fill me. But now such a moment arouses only feeble hopes and does me harm, for my being does not have sufficient strength or the capacity to hold the present mixture, during the day the visible word helps me, during the night it cuts me to pieces unhindered.
It is in the liminal times bookending the sleepless night that he discovers the fount of his creative powers:
In the evening and the morning my consciousness of the creative abilities in me is more than I can encompass. I feel shaken to the core of my being and can get out of myself whatever I desire.
“They do not sweat and whine about their condition,” Walt Whitman wrote of the other animals, “they do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, they do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things.”
Here was “the poet of the body and the poet of the soul” holding up a mirror to us creatures inhabiting an animal body complicated by a soul — that organ of want and worry which we ourselves invented to explain why we make art, why we fall in love, why we yearn to converse with reality in prayers and postulates.
It is daring enough to ask what a soul actually is. Carl Jung knew that it defies the substance we are made of: “The soul is partly in eternity and partly in time.” Virginia Woolf knew that it defies our best technology of thought: “One can’t write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes.” It is doubly daring to question the age-old dogma that the soul is the province of the human animal alone. Even as we have incrementally and reluctantly admitted other creatures into the temple of consciousness, we have denied them souls — denied them, because our tools of communication and computation have failed to probe it, an inner life capable of imagination and play, of love and grief, of dreams and wonder. And yet our very language defies our denial: the word animal comes from the Latin for soul.
Art by Jackie Morris from The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane
In 1991, long before we came to consider the soul of an octopus, long before fMRI and EEG studies revealed not only that birds dream but what they dream about, Gary Kowalski took up this daring question in The Souls of Animals (public library) — an inquiry into the “spiritual lives” (and into what that means) of whooping cranes, elephants, jackdaws, gorillas, songbirds, horses, dogs, and cats. At its center is the idea that spirituality — which he defines as “the development of a moral sense, the appreciation of beauty, the capacity for creativity, and the awareness of one’s self within a larger universe as well as a sense of mystery and wonder about it all” — is a natural byproduct of “the biological order and in the ecology shared by all life.” (There are in this view echoes of Kepler, who believed that the Earth itself is an ensouled body, and of myriad native cosmogonies that regard other animals as sources of more-than-human wisdom and emissaries of the numinous.)
Kowalski — a parish minister by vocation, who spends his days praying with the dying, blessing bonds of love, and helping people navigate moral quandaries — celebrates the soul as “the magic of life,” as that which “gives life its sublimity and grandeur,” and reflects:
For ancient peoples, the soul was located in the breath or the blood. For me, soul resides at the point where our lives intersect with the timeless, in our love of goodness, our passion for beauty, our quest for meaning and truth. In asking whether animals have souls, we are inquiring whether they share in the qualities that make life more than a mere struggle for survival, endowing existence with dignity and élan.
[…]
Many people think of soul as the element of personality that survives bodily death, but for me it refers to something much more down-to-earth. Soul is the marrow of our existence as sentient, sensitive beings. It’s soul that’s revealed in great works of art, and soul that’s lifted up in awe when we stand in silence under a night sky burning with billions of stars. When we speak of a soulful piece of music, we mean one that comes out of infinite depths of feeling. When we speak of the soul of a nation, we mean its capacity for valor and visionary change… Soul is present wherever our lives intersect the dimension of the holy: in moments of intimacy, in flights of fancy, and in rituals that hallow the evanescent events of our lives with enduring significance. Soul is what makes each of our lives a microcosm — not merely a meaningless fragment of the universe, but at some level a reflection of the whole.
Without anthropomorphizing our nonhuman relations we can acknowledge that animals share many human characteristics. They have individual likes and dislikes, moods and mannerisms, and possess their own integrity, which suffers when not respected. They play and are curious about their world. They develop friendships and sometimes risk their own lives to help others. They have “animal faith,” a spontaneity and directness that can be most refreshing… all the traits indicative of soul. For soul is not something we can see or measure. We can observe only its outward manifestations: in tears and laughter, in courage and heroism, in generosity and forgiveness. Soul is what’s behind-the-scenes in the tough and tender moments when we are most intensely and grippingly alive.
By investigating the inner lives of other creatures, Kowalski argues, we are invariably deepening our own:
As [modern] shamans, we are allowed to examine enigmas like “What makes us human?” and “What makes life sacred?” We can ask not only about the mating behavior and survival strategies of other animals but whether they have souls and spirits like our own. The danger here is that we are often in over our heads. But at least we are swimming in deep water and out of the shallows. In searching for answers to such queries, I have found, we not only enrich our understanding of other creatures, we also gain insight into ourselves.
[…]
There is an inwardness in other living beings that awakens what is innermost in ourselves. I have often marveled, for instance, watching a flock of shore birds. On an invisible cue, they simultaneously rise off the beach and into the air, then turn and bank seawards in tight formation. They are so finely coordinated and attuned in their aeronautics it is as though they share a common thought, or even a group mind, guiding their ascent. At such moments, I feel there are depths of “inner space” in nature that can never be sounded. And it is out of those same depths, in me, that awe arises as I contemplate the synchronicity of their flight. To contain such depths is to participate in the realm of spirit.
We have invented no greater expression of our inwardness than music — the language of the soul, with its eternal translation between mathematics and mystery. We know that other animals partake of that language — each spring birds sing the world back to life, each summer cicadas serenade the sun with their living mandolin, and when we set out to tell the cosmos who we are, a whale song joined Bulgarian folk music and Bach on The Golden Record.
Birds, Kowalski observes, sing for reasons beyond the pragmatic — their song is “far from a mechanical performance” and “much more complex than a simple cry of self-assertion.” It is music, which is distinguished from noise by an organizing principle of creative intent, and creativity may be the purest evidence of soul. Kowalski writes:
Surprisingly, many birds are relatively insensitive to pitch. But the best singers employ all the elements of tone, interval, rhythm, theme, and variation in complex and highly pleasing combinations. And what is music if not the deliberate arrangement of sound in aesthetic patterns?
Greatly influenced by philosopher Martin Buber’s I-Thou model of relating, Kowalski admonishes against relying on our own frames of reference in assaying what other creatures are expressing and how it is being expressed:
The tempo of life is faster-paced for birds than for people. This is one of the reasons the individual notes in bird song are so short, sometimes distinguishable only with a spectrograph, and why the compositions of birds last a few seconds at most, compared to an hour or more for a human symphony. It is also why birds sing in the upper registers (just as the pitch on a phonograph record rises when played at high speed). To the birds, with a metabolism continually in allegro, human beings must appear to be lazy and dim-brained creatures indeed. Just as our music reflects the rhythm and intensity of our inner life, the music of birds expresses the flash and flutter of their nervous and high-strung existence.
Examining another subset of the creative impulse — visual art — Kowalski cites Desmond Morris’s famous 1950s studies, which found that non-human primates given pens and paints not only became adept at using them with “a distinct feel for symmetry and balance,” but developed individual styles of drawing. He considers what that indicates:
Art arises from a spiritual longing that all people share: to make our mark on the world and to spend our life energy in a work that rises above the mundane, adding grace to existence. We respond to the light of the world around us by giving expression to our own inner light, and when the two are on the same wavelength, the world seems more brilliant and finely focused.
Insisting that such spiritual longings do not belong to human beings alone, he cites an astonishing case study:
In 1982 Jerome Witkin, a professor of art at Syracuse University and a respected authority on abstract expressionism, was invited to view a collection of drawings by a “mystery artist.” The professor was busy at the time, preparing for a traveling exhibition. Nevertheless, he was sufficiently intrigued to accept the invitation.
“These drawings are very lyrical, very, very beautiful,” the professor said when he saw the portfolio. “They are so positive and affirmative and tense, the energy is so compact and controlled, it’s just incredible.”
“This piece is so graceful, so delicate,” he said of one drawing. “I can’t get most of my students to fill a page like this.”
Only after he had finished his professional evaluation did Witkin learn the identity of the artist: a fourteen-year-old, 8,400-pound Asian elephant named Siri who lived in Syracuse’s Burnet Park Zoo. Siri’s keeper, David Gucwa, had seen her tracing lines with sticks and stones in the dust of her cage. Against the wishes of the zoo’s superintendent, who scoffed at the notion of an artistic elephant, Gucwa had given her pads of paper and charcoal, permitting her to express herself more freely.
When Witkin showed Siri’s drawings to a colleague without context — an expert on children’s drawings charing the university’s art education department — she firmly concluded that they were not done by a child. Witkin himself readily likened them to the work of Willem de Kooning, wishing the painter himself could see Siri’s art.
It was this report of Siri that inspired May Sarton — one of my favorite poets and favorite thinkers — to reimagine these reckonings in a poem. (The footnote of credit in Sarton’s collection is how I discovered Kowalski’s book.)
THE ARTIST by May Sarton
The drawings were abstract,
Delicate,
Like Japanese calligraphy.
When the painter de Kooning
Was shown them, he said,
“Interesting.
Not done by a child, I think,
Or if so, an extraordinary child.”
“The artist is an elephant, Sir,
Named Siri.”
It had once come about
That the keeper noticed
Her sensitive trunk
Drawing designs in the dust.
After an argument
With the head of the zoo
Who laughed at him,
The keeper himself
Brought large sheets of paper
And boxes of charcoal
And laid them at Siri’s feet.
For an hour at a time
In happy concentration
The elephant created designs.
Like Japanese calligraphy.
What artist’s hand
As skillful
As that sensuous, sensitive trunk?
Elephant by Utagawa Yoshimori, 1863
Two decades after Iris Murdoch found psychological symmetry between art and morality, locating in both “an occasion for unselfing,” Kowlaski turns to the acts of selflessness and compassion that evince a moral faculty — that fundament of a soul. Pelicans and crows, he notes, have been known to care for blind comrades. Darwin himself reported of a band of monkeys coming to the aid of member seized by an eagle, at the risk of their own lives. But nothing renders such morally tinted actions more vivid and more moving than one nineteenth-century naturalist’s account of a misfire.
Working in an era when “collecting specimens” meant killing creatures, he aimed at a tern but only wounded the bird, which fell helplessly into the sea. Immediately, other terns began circling above “manifesting much apparent solicitude,” until two of them dove down toward their wounded comrade. They lifted him up, one at each wing, carried him several yards, and gently put him down before another two picked him up, and so the group took turns carrying him the entire distance to the shore. The naturalist was so moved by this display of compassion and solidarity that, although he was within shot of the rock on which the wounded tern had been rested, he couldn’t bring himself to finish what he had set out to do.
To witness such a scene is to be stilled with wonder and with humility — which, as Rachel Carson so poignantly wrote, “are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.” A generation after her, and well ahead of our still dawning awakening to the ecological and ethical dignity of other species, Kowalaski reflects:
If we are to keep our family homestead — third stone from the sun — safe for coming generations, we must awaken to a new respect for the family of life.
[…]
We are kin to, and must be kind to, all creation. Overcoming speciesism — the illusion of human superiority — will be the next step in our moral and spiritual evolution.
Art by Jackie Morris from The Lost Spells by Robert Macfarlane
To behold such a display of moral feeling with our own eyes is stirring enough, but to be witnessed back by another creature’s eyes is nothing short of a spiritual experience. In a passage that calls to mind Alan Lightman’s transcendent account of looking into the eyes of an osprey, Kowalski writes:
It is difficult to probe the inward awareness of another being. The realm of what one mystic called “the interior castle” is wholly private and wrapped in solitude. But when we look into another’s eyes — even into the eyes of an animal — we may find a small window into that inner sanctum, a window through which our souls can hail and greet one another.
[…]
The act of making eye contact with another being presupposes a conscious self behind either pair of peepers: I see you seeing me, and I am aware that you are aware that we are looking at each other.
Perhaps in the end it is not we who have the power to acknowledge or deny the souls of other creatures but other creatures who confer soul-ness upon us. Kowalski writes:
If by soul we mean our sense of self, our identity as particular persons, then our souls are interwoven with those of other living beings… We know ourselves as human, in part, through our relationships with the nonhuman world.
[…]
We are rather unsure of ourselves. What distinguishes our species may be this inward anxiety. While other animals may be endowed with special gifts—acute hearing, keen eyesight, incredible speed — human beings are nothing special. This is both a biological and a moral judgment. Lack of specialization makes us highly adaptable, but it also means we have no fixed form or definite identity. Without many inborn instincts to guide us, we as human beings need models for how to live. We need a sense of our own possibilities and limits, and we find them not only in the artificial rules and restraints imposed by human society but in the lessons for living suggested by biology and the earth itself. We are the younger siblings in life’s family — the perpetual neonates of the animal world. In a fundamental way we need other creatures to tell us who we are.
Out of this arises an urgency more than ethical, more than ecological, but existential — nothing less than examining what we are and why we are here at all:
What profit do we have if we gain the whole world and lose or forfeit our own souls? The human race may survive without the chimpanzees, orangutans, and other wild creatures who share the planet. But we will have attenuated the conditions that are necessary for our own “ensoulment”… And when we look into the mirror there will be less and less to love.
[…]
There is a glimmering of eternity about our lives. In the vastness of time and space, our lives are indeed small and ephemeral, yet not utterly insignificant. Our lives do matter. Because we care for one another and have feelings, because we can dream and imagine, because we are the kinds of creatures who make music and create art, we are not merely disconnected fragments of the universe but at some level reflect the beauty and splendor of the whole. And because all life shares in One Spirit, we can recognize this indwelling beauty in other creatures.
One of the most discomposing things about the sense of individuality is the knowledge that although there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives, there is but one way to come alive — through the bloody, sweaty flesh of another; the knowledge that your own flesh is made of someone else’s cells and genes, the fact of you a fractal.
While mothering can take many forms and can be done by many different kinds of people, the process of one organism generating another from the raw materials of its own being — a process known as matrescence — is as invariable as breathing, as inevitable to life as death. In blurring the biological boundary between the creature imparted and the one doing the imparting, matrescence is the ultimate refutation of the self, the ultimate affirmation that individuality is an illusion — a cocoon of ego to keep us from apprehending the plurality we are. The science behind it is so intricate and so defiant of our commonsense intuitions about the possible that it seems to partake of the miraculous. Nested within it are questions of profound and sweeping implications, questions relevant and deliriously fascinating even to those of us without the psychological impulse or biological ability to bear children, questions that touch on some of the most elemental experiences of being human: change, vulnerability, reciprocity, resilience, belonging.
English journalist Lucy Jones takes up these questions in Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood (public library), braiding together her own experience of originating new life, some revelatory scientific studies that undermine our basic assumptions about personhood and our most unquestioned political priorities, and some astonishing counterpoints to the illusion of individuality in the nonhuman world, from the maternity colonies of vampire bats to a species of tiny marine larvae that digest their own tail, brain, and nerve cord to become an unrecognizably different adult organism.
Recalling how her first pregnancy gave her a taste of this simultaneous dissolution and exponentiation of the self — the substance of which, as Borges so memorably observed, is time — Jones considers the infinities nested in any one life:
Time started to bend. I was carrying the future inside me. I would learn that I was also carrying the eggs, already within my baby’s womb, that could go on to partly form my potential grandchildren. My future grandchildren were in some way inside me, just as part of me spent time in the womb of my grandmother. I was carrying inside me a pool of amniotic fluid, which was once rivers, lakes and rain. I was carrying a third more blood, which was once soil and stars and lichen.[2] The baby was formed of the atoms of the earth, of the past and the future. Every atom in her body existed when the earth formed 4.5 billion years ago. She will live for many years, I hope, when I have returned to the ground. She will live on the earth when I am gone. Time bends.
Time brings space along with it, bending the universe itself toward the cosmic nativity story that is a human being. Jones recounts the postpartum awakening to a reality larger than herself, larger than her new baby, encompassing everything that ever was and ever will be, consonant with the deepest meaning of love as the act of unselfing:
Back at home with our daughter, just one day old, I found that our flat felt different, as if I’d stepped through a portal into a parallel universe, or onto the set of a film.
In my arms, a collection of trillions of atoms that had cycled through generations of ancient supernova explosions.
We were both so old, made from stars born billions of years ago.
We were both so new, she, breathing, outside me; I being made again in matrescence.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. I couldn’t sleep for the beauty of her. Little pink mouth. Doughball cheeks. Plant-stalk soft bones. Her astral holiness.
Body of my body, flesh of my flesh.
I heard the contraction and expansion of the universe bouncing into existence, new galaxies, axons, dendrites; cells and love, cells and love.
Art by Derek Dominic D’souza from Song of Two Worlds by physicist Alan Lightman
This altered state is not merely a psychological experience — it is a profoundly physiological one. Jones cites a series of landmark studies of the cellular exchange between mother and baby via the placenta, which found that maternal cells, actual entire cells, remain in the child’s body throughout life, while fetal cells can dwell in the mother’s brain decades after giving birth. The medical geneticist and neonatologist Diana Bianchi, who spearheaded the research, termed this phenomenon microchimerism, after the chimera from Greek mythology — creatures composed of different parts from multiple animals. Microchimerism is possible because humans have one of the most invasive placentas among animals, colonizing one hundred uterine vessels and arteries with thirty-two miles of capillaries that would span the whole of London if laid out along the Thames — an enmeshment impossible to extract without a trace.
Because matrescence is such a system-wide neurobiological reconfiguration, impacting everything from metabolism to memory, research has found the pregnant brain to be as plastic as the adolescent — a time in which “dynamic structural and functional changes take place that accompany fundamental behavioural adaptations.”
These processes are so powerful that alter the neural basis of the self, so powerful that they reach beyond the biological boundaries of the mother and into the behavioral adaptations of anyone involved in post-birth childcare, which is also part of matrescence — fathers, grandparents, caretakers of any kind for whom the newborn becomes a primary focus of attention. Drawing on a body of research, Jones writes:
Caregiving neural circuitry exists in both male and female brains. Early neuroscientific research on humans is now showing that caregiver brains experience significant plasticity, even without the experience of pregnancy. Hands-on caring shapes brain circuitry and causes other biological changes. In 2020, a groundbreaking study showed that having a baby changes a father’s brain anatomy.
Art by Alessandro Sanna from Crescendo by Paola Quintavalle — a picture-poem about the science of pregnancy.
This caretaking is essential for our survival, as infant individuals and as an adolescent species, in a way that it is not for most other creatures, for out of it arise the hallmarks of our humanity. Unlike the newborn giraffe calf, who can rise to her feet and walk within hours of birth, or the newly hatched turtle, who can take to the woods or the waves immediately, human are born utterly helpless, to be fed and bathed and gurgled at, remaining dependent for years as the 400 grams of rosy flesh grow in their bone cave to become a three-pound miracle coruscating with one hundred trillion synapses, ablaze with the capacities for the guillotine and the Goldberg Variations.
Jones writes:
To be a smart species — to be able to learn and read and write and draw and solve and build and invent and empathize and imagine — humans have to be born vulnerable. Few other species of animal on earth are as helpless and immature as human babies. The brains of other primates are much more developed at birth. Humans are one of the only mammals with brains that grow so significantly outside the womb. The benefit of this early helplessness is that it means the brain can adapt and rewire as the infant grows.
Given how fundamental matrescence is to the flourishing of the human species and the human animal, to systemically deprioritize and marginalize pregnancy and motherhood, as our society does, seems like plain self-sabotage. With an eye to the disproportionate precedence of mental illness in new mothers and the consistent findings that social support is the single most effective means of inoculating them against it, Jones quotes those unforgettable lines by Gwendolyn Brooks — we are each other’s harvest / we are each other’s business / we are each other’s magnitude and bond — and writes:
Increasingly, social isolation and loneliness are recognized as risk factors for mental and physical health problems and early mortality. Loneliness is as damaging for health as smoking up to fifteen cigarettes a day. Although we know that it can increase during transitional periods of life — for example, during adolescence, illness, bereavement, retirement — researchers have only recently started studying loneliness in the perinatal period. In the last decade or so, the first work has been published recognizing that women experiencing loneliness in pregnancy and new motherhood are more likely to suffer from mental illness. Studies suggest that loneliness also exacerbates symptoms of depression in fathers. The findings suggest serious fault lines in our society. It is striking that we’ve so forgotten our interdependence that we need scientists to prove to us that we need other people to survive.
This is precisely why matrescence, in all its plasticity and its revelation of interdependence, in being “a crucible in which the dross can be burned off and the wilder, more authentic self remains,” can serve as a recalibration of our collective priorities far beyond the mother’s experience of motherhood. Jones writes:
Times of transformation, whatever they might be, are opportunities to find new connectedness; to choose and consolidate the things that matter; to bring repressed selves out of the shadows into the light; to forgive; to grow layers of nacre, of resilience, of acceptance.
Emanating from the book is a reminder of what we so readily forget and are so steadily conditioned to forget: that we don’t have to accept the choices handed down to us by our culture as givens. Noting that “a culture can choose what it diminishes and what it grow,” Jones envisions a different choice:
We have to see the structures we’ve inherited in order to tear them down. So many women believe their struggles with matrescence are the result of their own weakness and moral failing. This is a lie and it inhibits honest talk and social change. The difficulties of modern matrescence in neoliberal Western societies are structural and systematic. Seeing the oppressive nature of the institution of motherhood for what it is, and acknowledging the failure of society to support care work, allows us to think critically. Talking makes the structures of discrimination more visible. It allows us to identify what must change.
From pregnancy, women need health professionals who will give them full and accurate information without ideology or misinformation. We want the facts about birth and postnatal recovery, about breastfeeding, about what happens to the brain and our psychological lives. We need to improve maternal mental healthcare by introducing screening for issues in pregnancy and far more investment so mothers can get specialist treatment quickly. We need a meaningful focus on tackling systemic inequalities in maternal health outcomes. We need new birth rituals that acknowledge the gravity of childbirth without obscuring the reality and risks.
The government must urgently invest in midwives, mental health practitioners and wider postpartum care to fix the maternity crisis. Not investing in maternal health is a political decision.
These choices are the placenta permeating the body politic, its tendrils touching every aspect of life — not just the life of mother and baby, not even the life of the society in which they exist, but life itself as a planetary phenomenon. Bridging matrescence and ecology into what she terms matroecology, Jones writes:
The experience — one we have all had — of being part of another has much to teach us about our relations with the earth, the psychic and corporeal reality of our interdependence and interconnectedness with other species.
We have all experienced this becoming-within-another who is both known and unknown, an “otherness-in-proximity.”
[…]
What kind of world could we imagine and create if, instead of pretending we were thrown into existence, as though by magic, we truly considered our vulnerable, intimate, tactile, entangled, animal origins?
These are not merely political or philosophical questions — they are profoundly personal. (“The shortest statement of philosophy I have,” Audre Lorde wrote from the center of a politically invigorated life, “is my living, or the word ‘I.’”) Jones is not merely theorizing matroecology — walking home hand in hand with her small child, she is feeling it in the marrow of her being:
Seeds break through pods around us; buds break open with the leaves they have been holding folded, grown by the sunlight of the previous summer; green beads flecking the hedgerows break open; red beads in the maple trees above break open. The moon is up, and it pulls the ocean back and forth: a spring tide, the biggest tide, transforming the coasts of this island, breaking apart shell and stone, fish and bone. Beneath us, the trees are talking, making plans, breaking through soil and sediment. Above us, stars are being born and others are dying. We walk through the cemetery where organisms are being born and others are dying and creatures are being eaten and others are eating. The continent we are on is moving (at the speed of a fingernail growing), and the round rock we are on is moving (tilted on its axis, spinning). Farther below, plates are crushing and stretching, magma is cooling and heating and leaking, rock is forming and changing. The ebb and flow, the ebb and the glow. The lilting earth, and we lilting, too, in our one flicker of consciousness in this incessant motion. We sit underneath the canopy of a beech tree, a mother tree, and rake the earth, the soft brown soil, and the broken beech mast casings, and the hard brown seeds, and the chunks of soft white chalk made from the skeletons of ancient creatures from the sea, lit by a tender light, and we breathe.
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