Something hardly deep and meaningful

Time is of the essence to try and think on important things. So, obviously, this will be the sketchy, half-formed, globulous sort of thoughts that I want desperately to fledge, but know that they will instead blurble in that amoebic goo of my repressed subconscious.

I have been reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard, and while from time to time her style and approach seem almost too forced--an unnatural seeking-out, as it were, of ways to view things, and a devotion to put them to paper and draw lines between them, no matter how nebulous, I confess that she is able to articulate through extended thought many things that I have tasted whispers of, have tried to articulate myself in too blunt and inelegant of language.

Today was another doctor's appointment. And I must say, I really regret that I will not be able to give birth ("give to light," how I love that Spanish phrasing) here. Nor will Dr Jinno be my OB/GYN throughout the full course of this strange adventure. I have a little photo album book that describes different months, which I received beginning the third month. In addition to little helpful hints about changes that will be taking place TO me, I also get a little marker describing the size of the Creature, the Symbiote. And because this is Japan, I also get an ultrasound picture every time I go, for next to nothing. I am ignorant of medical things to an extreme degree, so there two kinds. One is the "bottom-up" view during the standard cervical exam, which measures the length of the Creature, the other is the "tummy buzz" one. (Good thing I am not a physician, eh?) WELL. Today was the first tummy one, which produced a much more detailed image. Before, I could see the Creature's heartbeat. Today, I saw a tiny person with a tiny skeleton, dancing to music only It could hear. I heard its rapid hamster-heartbeat as if through loudspeakers. (I think the volume was up too loud.;p) It has a face, though no one could say a dancing see-through skeleton is "kawaii" by any means, seeing such a thing at all was shocking.

Some people become "pro-life" by becoming parent to their own tiny life. I don't know what I am. As this excellent article (linked to by B months ago) notes, the terms of the debate are all wrong, especially when viewed from a position of faith. I think I reject the terms of engangement. As Annie Dillard notes, nature is so exceedingly wasteful, a veritable flood of death- gruesome, incomprehensible-- that standing and looking closely at it can make one retreat back into the safe warm haven of human culture in horror. But I have this sensation that choosing this Creature was never in my hands. I could not have said to my belly "Be Thou Rife With Life; Bear Fruit," any more than I can tame my hair by demanding that it be straight, or force my feet to be one size smaller. I cannot by concentration split one cell, much less than can I coalesce a skeleton in miniature out of a secret knowledge. Do I have the courage to even bring this Creature into a world burgeoning with this overflow of life and death? "We are able to have children because our hope is in God, who makes it possible to do the absurd thing of having children. In a world of such terrible injustice, in a world of such terrible misery, in a world that may well be about the killing of our children, having children is an extraordinary act of faith and hope. But as Christians we can have a hope in God that urges us to welcome children. When that happens, it is an extraordinary testimony of faith." (Stanley Hauerwas)

Can I ask It... "Why do you dance, there, to a music your unformed ears cannot yet even hear?" There are tiny hands, there. No unformed flesh or knobs of putty dough, but hands in miniature, grasping and swimming and swishing in a tiny bound sea, performing acrobatics I cannot yet feel. What does that mean? That such a fragile, insignificant Thing should rejoice in unvoiced silence?

We human predators have no seeming compunction about exterminating one another, devouring the young of the enemy in smoke and fire. Why should there be any compunction about devouring our own young as an insect may, or a goldfish? For we DO, don't we? We tear into one another with our fangs and claws, and call it by names that are wrapped close in intellectual sounding titles that say nothing of their consequences. The whole world, as Dillard notes, a bloody altar.

Hope and grace, I suppose. And courage. And perhaps even blind, deaf rejoicing.