The Capacity to Begin
on decreation, natality and other bloody things
I finished the third essay of my Immunity as Metaphor series on Oct. 30 and, though I was not surprised to find death at the very bottom of immune-defense discourses, I felt bruised. The next day, an image dropped into my mind from the summer, an image of an orange-yellow hardback being opened and inscribed in black Sharpie: To life.
As Rachel Wiseman signed the book on parenthood ambivalence she wrote with Anastasia Berg at a launch event in June, I had high hopes What Are Children For? would make space for the mystical-material aspect of motherhood. How a body doubles and splits, how both the doubling and the rending might generate something new.
After all, Berg and Wiseman are editors at my favorite Chicago lit mag The Point, which published in 2020 an essay by Dasha Filippova titled “Annihilation,” which concerns the grotesque jouissance of motherhood and is practically a religious text to me.
The essay circles Alex Garland’s 2018 film of the same name, in which a group of women scientists venture into the Shimmer, where “the conventional sense of time disappears and they are beguiled by a beautiful, wild nature—a nature that seems to penetrate their bodies.” Filippova notes that a consensus exists among her new-mother friends that Annihilation is about the postpartum experience.1
“My transition to motherhood had been accompanied by physical changes that made me identify with almost anything in the genre of sci-fi horror,” she writes. “But simultaneously with all this scary body shit, there was a strange feeling of the numinous—a communion with the sacred. The boundary between my skin and the world was evaporating before my eyes.”
For the cadre of writers producing écriture féminine like Filippova, the bodily border-walk of childbirth is the entrance to other, non-physical transformations. In the conclusion of What Are Children For?, Berg challenges the argument that becoming a parent is essentially transformative, which ambivalent could-be parents seem to either fear or desire: “A friend warned I would not be able to think for months after the birth; but I replied to work emails from the hospital bed. They didn’t make less sense, they didn’t seem any less important. The only thing standing in my way was the restricted use of my arms.”2
Berg’s conclusion mentions the Filippova essay as if to personally scold me for expecting some kind of grotesque apotheosis in the maternal function: “In Filippova’s telling, the postpartum experience—the corporeal dissolution, the self-forgetting—was as much something to long for as to dread. But inching my way toward birth, I felt neither fear nor yearning.” When I finished What Are Children For? I realized that my answer to the book’s question is, at least for now, inappropriately solipsistic.
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I was glad for the splash of cold water. It woke me up to the reality that what I’m yearning for is communion with the sacred, simply put, if such a thing can be put simply. I woke up and yearned and didn’t write anything coherent for two months. I was followed my certain turns of phrase but when I turned to face them they were gone.
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I think of Simone Weil and the female mystic saint tradition, in which ecstatic unions with god followed the total dissolution of the self. In Weil’s writings on decreation she suggests the destruction of the self makes a space for god to enter into: “We possess nothing in the world—a mere chance can strip us of everything—except the power to say ‘I’. That is what we have to give to God—in other words, to destroy. There is absolutely no other free act which it is given us to accomplish—only the destruction of the ‘I’.”3
To Weil, the annihilation of the self is an offering, an act of free will. For Julia Kristeva, the self is established by annihilation, by the breakdown of the distinction between subject and object—caused by the sight of a corpse that was once a loved one, for example—and the resulting abjection. The horrified reaction to the threatened breakdown of signification, illustrated in Kristeva’s “Powers of Horror” by the tasting of spoiled milk, forces the self to regard itself objectively, which confirms the existence of the primal, pre-symbolic “I”:
“Along with sight-clouding dizziness, nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who proffer it. […] ‘I’ do not want to listen, ‘I’ do not assimilate it, ‘I’ expel it. But since the food is not an ‘other’ for ‘me,’ who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which ‘I’ claim to establish myself. [...] During that course in which ‘I’ become, I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit.”4
The violence of abjection “preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be.” Similar to Weil’s notion of decreation, Kristeva’s abjection points to the generative power of undoing, of separation, a painful but temporary ordeal that recalls birth—our own birth.
What I want—I realize now—is to leap out of myself and turn and grip her by the neck for one shaking second and then come back. I know nothing would be different after this second, nothing except everything, having been both the motion of the sword and the pain of the cut. Would the arm’s length of space be empty?
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Both gestate and ingest are related to the archaic gest, a “famous deed or exploit,” more commonly a “story of great deeds or tale of adventure.” The noun is the neuter plural of the Latin gestus, past participle of gerere, “to carry on, wage, perform,” which stems from the same root as agere, “to set in motion, drive forward, do, perform.”5
One of the pro-natalist arguments presented in What Are Children For? concerns the goodness of continuity: That there is potential and optimism in the carrying forward of one’s family and the human project on earth. Naturally, I was distracted by the optimism of discontinuity.
Berg recalls: “A woman I had met at a prenatal clinic who was about to give birth to her third child told me the pain of the contractions was like this: ‘You go up, give God a high five, and come back down.’”
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In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt argues that what distinguishes human beings from other animals is the “capacity to begin,” by which she means the capacity to leave behind the status quo and imagine something new. Animals are mere participants in the cycles of nature, she argues, while humans are born as individuals whose lives can be told as stories, full of action and decision, with beginnings and ends. This natality is a political force insofar as it is the source of the human capacity to act freely:
“It is in the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before. This character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings. […] The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable. And this again is possible only because each man is unique, so that with each birth something uniquely new comes into the world.”6
Arendt’s concept of natality suggests that every human birth is a revolution rather than a reform. After all, being born is the only unexpected and unknown thing that ever happens to us. The moment we are born, we are separate from everything that came before us, full of the potential of discontinuity.
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“Intelligence is ongoing, individual adaptability. Adaptations that an intelligent species may make in a single generation, other species make over many generations of selective breeding and selective dying.”
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower
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“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks
“I get that the new world is struggling to be born but can we get an epidural or something.”
Social media post of unknown provenance
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“Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end.
It flung them like stones.
These unhappy agents found that what had already been found in abundance on Earth—a nightmare of meaninglessness without end. The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.
Outwardness lost, at last, its imagined attractions.
Only inwardness remained to be explored.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Sirens of Titan
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“The beauty of the world is the mouth of a labyrinth. The unwary individual who on entering takes a few steps is soon unable to find the opening. Worn out, with nothing to eat or drink, in the dark, separated from his dear ones, and from everything he loves and is accustomed to, he walks on without knowing anything or hoping anything, incapable even of discovering whether he is really going forward or merely turning round on the same spot. But this affliction is as nothing compared with the danger threatening him. For if he does not lose courage, if he goes on walking, it is absolutely certain that he will finally arrive at the center of the labyrinth. And there God is waiting to eat him. Later he will go out again, but he will be changed, he will have become different, after being eaten and digested by God.”
Simone Weil, Waiting for God
Filippova, Dasha. “Annihilation.” The Point Magazine, October 30, 2020. https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/annihilation/#.
Berg, Anastasia, and Rachel Wiseman. What are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, an imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 2024.
Weil, Simone, Janet Soskic, and Malcom Muggeridge. Waiting for God. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2021.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.
“Gest (n.).” Etymology. Accessed January 17, 2025. https://www.etymonline.com/word/gest.
Arendt, Hannah, and Margaret Canovan. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Gorgeous!!!!!