On Birth
Birth is not self-evident. At least, not our own. Of course, the fact that we were born, at some point in time, is not a legend, fable, or myth. If I am writing these lines, it is because, at some point, I was born. Furthermore, my mother’s stories also certify this event as a fact. Details about this essential event in one’s personal history—the degree of pain felt by the mother, the child’s weight at the time of the birth, the name of the hospital, and so on—make it concrete.
Photographs also certify birth. Once, I saw a picture of a baby taken by a father right after the delivery. The doctor was still holding the baby by his feet. Suspended in the air, the baby looked like a little turkey. Yet, newborns often look alike. Once they grow up and parents show them pictures of them right after their birth, children often still need to ask: “is this one me?” Despite plentiful evidence, our own births remain a mystery to us.
Birth is a fact for police officers and for bureaucrats at bank branches who confirm our identities through documents corroborated by birth certificates. For them, as for most people, it is preposterous to consider birth as something ambiguous. But for us—every human who has been born and who is yet to be born—birth is one of the known unknowns in one’s life.
Our lack of memories about our own birth faces other people’s facts, stories, and memories about it. This forgetfulness renders birth mysterious. Yet forgetfulness is the conditio sine qua non for memory itself. One of the mind’s distinctive capacities is not to remember everything. A mind that could remember everything would simply cease to function as a mind. In Jorge Luis Borges’s tale “Funes the Memorious,” Ireneo Funes never forgets anything he has seen, heard, or experienced, and, in consequence, he admits that his memory is like a “garbage heap.” Described by Borges as “the solitary and lucid spectator of a multiform, instantaneous and almost intolerably precise world,” Funes is incapable of thought, since, as the narrator says, to think is “to generalize, to make abstractions.” If this is true, there is probably something valuable in forgetting our own births. This forgetfulness, perhaps, reminds us that life is not, or at least not only, a fact, but also a question and a task.
Without this initial event there would be no other event. Even death, which remains far beyond our own imaginations and presents for us yet another known unknown, is subordinated to the event of birth. For death would simply not be without birth. Birth is the conditio sine qua non for death. It is commonly said that birth and death follow in an uninterrupted cycle, forming a circle without beginning and end. Yet if I think about death and birth from my own particular experience, I can only subordinate death to birth.
In an essay entitled Comprendere e Narrare, the Italian philosopher Emilio Garroni says, “the experience of death is late, hard to comprehend (actually never entirely comprehensible).” Garroni reminds us that until children reach the age of 4-6, they speak about death as something abstract, something that doesn’t apply to them. As soon as they start to understand that death is a fact of life, they can be overwhelmed with fear. Yet, as Garroni says, “before death, children must encounter the mystery of their own birth.” Perhaps Garroni is right. It is impossible to consider the incomprehensible certainty of death without having faced first the mystery of our own birth.
That birth is a mystery is something that Augustine already knew. “Perhaps you too are laughing at me,” Augustine says, “for what is it that I am trying to say, Lord, except that I do not know whence I came into this life that is but a dying, or rather, this dying state that leads to life? I do not know where I came from.” There is something indeterminate in birth since we can only know about it indirectly through parents, relatives, friends, and life itself. It is important to remember, however, that Augustine’s questions interrogate the divine origin of human beings. Where was I, Augustine asks, before being in my mother’s womb, if not in God? But for a person like me, who does not believe in the divine origin of human beings, it is impossible to understand the mystery of birth. Better put, it is impossible for me to define my own birth. I know nothing about my birth, aside from the fact that it happened. It is true, the awareness of our own origin is within others, it depends on them. Yet as much as birth certificates and stories might remind us of the exact and official time and date of our own births, we might feel like we have been thrown haphazardly into the world.
Donato Loia is a PhD Candidate in Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Texas at Austin, and the 2022-2023 Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Modern and Contemporary Art at the Blanton Museum of Art. His work has appeared in “Studies in Philosophy and Education’” “Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies”, “Religion and the Arts”, and “Mise-en-Scène: The Journal of Film and Visual Narration”, among other places.