“The best luck,” Meiling said. “So interesting! Nothing else uses all of you.”
-Ursula K. Le Guin, “Paradises Lost”
I have been pregnant five times. I have two children, and I hope to have more.
Pregnancy is not always enjoyable. It is uncomfortable, inconvenient, and often tragic. It is nevertheless relentlessly, consumingly interesting. What experience could be more strange than two humans in one body? As a baby develops, the mother must divide her self-understanding, create another self, and then turn to reconstruct who she herself is. It is a process that prompts questions of singleness and plurality, change and stability.
More than two thousand years ago, Presocratic thinkers found themselves engrossed in these same questions. To be sure, the Presocratics may seem out of place in the domain of pregnancy. Even today, narratives of maternal life are often kept separate from intellectual endeavors; motherhood is presented as an obstacle to writing and analysis, or as a subject that resists such treatment. But this separation of maternity from the intellectual is, in my opinion, prudish. The pregnant mind, like the body, is hungry for material to construct both mother and child. The refashioning of the self that must occur during and after pregnancy benefits from careful, articulate thinking.
As far as we can tell from fragments and testimonia, the Presocratics were more interested in embryology than pregnancy. Their thoughts dwelled more on growth itself than on the work of growing. They were not, in what remains to us, concerned with women’s experiences. Yet there is an essential connection between their work and the experience of pregnancy: the Presocratics, in their theories about causes, materials, and existence, were essentially speculating in a very sophisticated way about a world which was largely unexplained and the place of the human in that world. Much of pregnancy is involved in this same speculation: about the world inside you, about labor, about the baby, and about the parent you will be.
Just as pregnancy can show us new uses for the Presocratics, so too these thinkers can help us understand what is so metaphysically fascinating about pregnancy.
One and Two
“Presocratic philosophers” is a messy category. Most did not call themselves philosophers, and not all actually pre-date Socrates. It is a large and varied group. But I was writing my dissertation on Parmenides and Heraclitus during my first three pregnancies, and continuing to think about them in my next two, so the thoughts that grew with my children primarily concern these two.
The first time I was pregnant, in the early summer of 2019, I walked to and from the university library, thinking about Parmenides and Plato’s Phaedo. Parmenides, as he sets out the logical requirements for existence, tells us that “what-is is unborn and undying, whole, unique, unmoving, and endless, and it was not ever in the past, nor will be, since it is now, at once, entire, one, and whole” (B8.7-11). What did this mean for me, I wondered, since now I was pregnant? Were there two of us who were somehow whole, unique, and entire, and yet occupying the same space? I did not feel less real by virtue of division, and so I imagined a second complete cosmos, a spherical and indivisible existence, located just between my hipbones.
And yet, despite Parmenides’ insistence on the singularity of existence, there were still two of us. So I thought about the Phaedo, in which Socrates confesses, “I will not even allow myself to say that where one is added to one either the one to which it is added or the one that is added becomes two, or that the one added and the one to which it is added become two because of the addition of the one to the other… Nor can I any longer be persuaded that when one thing is divided, this division is the cause of its becoming two, for just now the cause of becoming two was the opposite” (Plato, Ph. 97a-b). Socrates has run up against some fundamental difficulties in understanding the world. How do you actually get two from one? When do one thing and another become two? How can it be that unification and division, which are opposites, both produce two?
These were problems I delighted in with no interest in solving, for restating them was restating the lovely fact that I was pregnant. Had I become two by the addition of another person? Or was I two because I had divided myself and so produced someone new? I was pleasurably unsure whether I was still one person at all, or whether I myself had become two, both separated and still temporarily united within one body. I indulged in the kind of exultant counting and recounting that I have since seen in a young child who has learned numbers for the first time: one and two, one and two.
In the end, it was only me, as the the life that was growing was displaced, and so could never be born to exist without me. In another time and place, I would have died from this ectopic pregnancy, alone and holding my husband’s hand. Instead, I lost the ability to walk, and then to see, and then surgeons cut out the embryo along with part of my left ovary, and I woke up asking if I was still pregnant.
What Is and What Is Not
Where does existence come from? Parmenides asks, “How and from what would it have grown? I will not allow you to say “from what is not”, nor to think it. For it is not sayable or thinkable that what-is is not… Thus it is necessary for it to be entirely or not at all” (B8.11-16). What exists must come from what is already existing. Nothing can grow from nothing, and there is no blending between what is something and what is nothing. Those who have trouble distinguishing existence from non-existence, those who muddle the categories together, Parmenides describes in scathing terms, as “two-headed. For ignorance in their breasts guides their wandering mind, and they are carried about, both deaf and blind, dumbfounded, indiscriminate tribes, who think to be and not to be are the same and not the same, and the path of them all is back-turning.” (B6)
One must be vigilant after an ectopic pregnancy not to allow anything to come from what-is-not: for no growth to continue from that little death. Even after surgery, a small part can remain. It can be dogged in its hold on existence. So you must go and give your blood for testing until your elbows and your forearms and the backs of your hands are purple, and they give you a cancer drug to blight it. And you feel that you also are wandering, two-headed, on a path that confuses being and not being, for existence really is trying to come from what-is-not, and if it did, it would drag you back there with it. And you think that maybe that would be worth it, because then you’d have something like a baby.
The next pregnancy slipped in and out of existence in the way that so many do, with only a few weeks of imagining and a few hours of pain. I could not be philosophical about it for some time.
Later, however, I thought about it as a fragment. All of our Presocratics survive in fragments, as quotations and paraphrases that have survived though repeated copying to the current day. A fragmentary piece of text is able, by virtue of its lack of context and its partiality, to mean differently than it would in a complete text. When fragments are reordered, they can suggesting new meanings of a possible whole to the reader, as if one were rearranging only a few pieces of a puzzle to guess at the picture they might have made.
So too with fragmentary pregnancies: their abrupt endings color our interpretation of the unfinished whole. With a fragment of a text, however, one reconstructs after the fact the imaginary whole that once existed. We invent—with more or less scholarly rigor and justification—the original argument and its implications. When one is pregnant, on the other hand, all the imaginative work takes place before the fragmentary nature of the pregnancy becomes clear. Even though so many early pregnancies are lost, it is almost impossible not to think of future birthdays, to begin browsing baby clothes, or even, most recklessly, to buy a crib that is on sale. Miscarriage ends this imaginative work, and the pregnancy’s meaning changes entirely: these were not the first weeks of a child, they were a loss.
Early in my third pregnancy, I was uneasily unsure if I was one who was two or two who were one; but mostly I was sick, and the sickness itself had the significance of a message portending an arrival from another place: there is a traveler coming, eagerly awaited, a one to come and be two with you. You want to be sicker, since this will make the message clearer. As time went on and I became less sick, I began to feel small tappings, like a single kernel of popcorn, or a woodpecker assessing a new tree. This might have been someone, but it might also have been the everyday business of the stomach, or my own imagination creating something I wanted very badly to be real. And then one night as I lay down for bed, she leapt inside me like a golden fish, and I knew that there were two of us together.
An Expansion Rich and Strange
This part of pregnancy, the second trimester, is very companionable. No matter what you do, whether it is taking a walk, sleeping, or going to a job interview, you are never alone. You two are doing it together. This is usually when one starts to feel physically better and gets the urge to clean everything. This is also when I began to think of Heraclitus. “Heraclitus anyway says this: that everything flows and nothing remains, and comparing the things that exist to the flow of a river, he says that you would not step into the same river twice” (A6, Crat. 402a). This is not, actually, what Heraclitus said, but a loose quotation from Plato. Of the versions of this saying that survive, however, it’s the best known, and the easiest to remember: you can’t go into the same river twice. This is because, on the one hand, a river is changing water, and so it’s different at each moment. But you too are different at each moment: breathing in and out, thinking different thoughts. So the same self likewise never approaches the river again.
When you read this fragment, do you imagine yourself as the person going into the water? Pregnancy let me see, for the first time, that I was also the river. The baby is the one immersed in water, so the mother must be the river itself. The baby grows each day, now with eyes that can see light, now with lungs that are practicing the motion of breathing; always changing, always building a new self to present to the river. The mother is the river, not merely a system of constant change within stable river banks, but a river in flood, overflowing her normal boundaries and expanding into new curves and currents in the landscape. Everything about her body is rich and strange: her hair shines, her gums bleed, mysteriously. Plato’s contemporary Cratylus supposedly improved the Heraclitean saying by observing that one cannot go into the same river even once: if both we and the river are always changing, then “same” is a word without meaning (Arist., Metaph. Γ 1010a15). As river, the mother is both the locus of change for the baby and an example of change herself. She is not now, nor was she, nor will she ever be the same, though the waters may recede to their previous bounds.
And you become so large, so amazingly large! The speed and extravagance of your growth is a little frightening. The belly is a whole globe, a circumference round and rich with the world inside of it. “On the circumference of a circle,” Heraclitus says, “the beginning and the end are the same” (B103). This is trivially true, as indeed many of Heraclitus’s sayings are, but it feels significant when, near the end of pregnancy, you begin to suspect that you have become a little too circular. It feels reassuring when you consider that Heraclitus’ circle might be the circle of the year and hope that by the end, you might go back to looking and feeling as you did in the beginning.
After birth, it is hard to go back to being just one person. I think this is why so many new mothers dream that they have misplaced the baby, or that the baby is back inside of them: because it is lonely and frightening to be one and not to feel the other with you. I dreamed that I had gone to visit family for the weekend and had forgotten the baby in my apartment. You are definitely two now, each one a whole and separate person, but your two-ness depends on the continued safety of the baby. If the baby is lost, the mother will become the most terrible one of all. This was what I thought when I held my oldest daughter for the first time: that I could not be just one again. Later, I noticed that the tips of her ears were crumpled like my mother’s, and that she had extraordinarily defined arms for a newborn. But when I first held her, I thought, nothing can happen to this baby now: I have invested too much. She is too costly to lose.
Heraclitus writes: “This cosmos, the same for all, neither a god nor human made it, but it was always and is and will be: ever-living fire, kindled and quenched in equal measures.” (B30)
Breastfeeding means growing and shrinking, balancing supply and demand, a fire kindled in some places and extinguished in others. It makes it clear that the two of you are so dependent on each other that you are, in a way, one creature with two bodies, whereas once you were two creatures in a single body. But the important thing is that you do not have to be completely separate yet. You may sit in a warm and private darkness of the early morning, feeding the baby and hearing her little grunts, and think of ever-living fire, kindled in some places and extinguished in others. Maybe you kindle it and pass it to her, where she consumes its energy. Or maybe she is the kindling fire and I, as I grow older, am going out.
That is the way it should be, I think. I light a fire and see it spread out bright before me, to kindle new fires beyond the limits of my own experience. Like the words a man wrote thousands of years ago, like a line of mothers who shared their bodies for a brief, fascinating time.
