AutoBioPhilosophy: An intimate story of what it means to be human. Robert Smith Rowland
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A few weeks later, Simone went back to the doctor for a scan. This time I accompanied her. Given we were in France, where eating rare red meat was the norm, he warned us about toxoplasmosis, a blood disease carried by undercooked food, and the dangers it held for pregnant women. Simone and I later laughed at how typically French the whole thing was. Other than that, all was routine. The doctor performed the scan. To me, the fuzzy black and white image was as indecipherable as a galaxy. The foetus lay inches beneath the skin yet seemed as remote as an astronaut blurred by cosmic sleet. When we asked about the gender, the doctor suavely replied, ‘À mon avis, c’est une fille.’ ‘In my opinion, it’s a girl.’ Sweet Pea was frolicking like a seahorse in her amniotic bath.
Secret motives
The pregnancy came out of the blue. We hadn’t planned it, we were using contraception and, for the purposes of bringing up baby, our circumstances were far from ideal. Simone was on a fixed-term contract; I was on no contract at all. Neither of us had a home or a job in the UK to go back to. We’d been together a few short months, and were a long way from committing to each other as life partners. My desire to start a family was zero. To the extent that I had plans, they were as self-oriented as any twenty-one-year-old’s plans would be. What’s more, the model of fatherhood that I held in my mind was shaped by my own father, Colin. If that was what fatherhood looked like, then thanks but no thanks.
So there were more than a few enemies that the pregnancy needed to defeat. On paper, it shouldn’t have won. But despite all those forces lined up in opposition, maybe a part of me wanted what shouldn’t have happened to happen – to say nothing of Simone’s own unconscious motives. Was I surreptitiously on the lookout for a chance to become the father whom I wished I had had? It was more than not wanting to be his son. That agenda I was already enacting. On my eighteenth birthday I had declared that I would no longer address my father as ‘Daddy’ (so babyish!), but by his first name, ‘Colin’. It felt awkward but I was militant – in the way that a young boy is militant when he runs away from home with a knapsack and a bag of crisps.
Was I now going one step further, by wresting the role of father from Daddy? I did take the first opportunity available: conception occurred within hours of being dropped off from the coach. It was as if I had seen a way to reinstate the figure of thrusting fatherhood which, with Colin’s demise, had been swiped away. I was young and healthy, with all my life ahead. If he couldn’t do it, then I would. Rather than observing his position as if through binoculars, I would commandeer it. I would lift from Colin the burden of being a father himself, freeing him to slay his own demons and return to vigour.
Who knows. Beneath our stated intentions, the layers ladder down like strata on a cliff face. I would group these layers into four, as in the triangle below:
1 We all have a top layer of selfish interests. I was concerned that my own life should go well, without having a baby to worry about.
2 At the next layer down, I was heeding an unconscious call to repair the damage in my family system (hence the ‘systemic’ label). This I would do by pumping life back into the punctured figure of the father, substituting myself for Colin.
3 Beneath layer two sits that level of motivation which keeps us in line with our society’s expectations. Largely without thinking, we will adopt prevailing norms, seeking not to stand out. It takes effort to be different: fitting in is so much easier. Hence the dominance of that nuclear family. On our arrival in France, the government was just launching an initiative to drive up the birth rate. Billboards displayed pictures of cherubic babies, accompanied by cheeky captions inviting the population to go forth and multiply.
4 At the deepest level, our motivations are bestowed on us by the species as a whole. The species is fixated on its own survival. We need life to go on, even if not all of us will serve as its agents.
The further down the triangle we go, the less conscious our motivations become. That doesn’t mean they lose power. On the contrary, we find ourselves subject to increasingly puissant forces. By the time we touch the ground floor that marks the species level, we are unlikely to be aware of any ‘motivation’ at all. Few of us will have children for the sake of preserving the species. But the fact that our minds won’t register the needs of the species – except in an abstract way – doesn’t mean that our bodies aren’t teeming with those needs. That’s the life force at work. Whatever else we might be, we are vehicles of life and its indefatigable drive to keep driving. Some of us create children; none of us created life. Although we can suppress life through contraception, abortion, and even acts of killing, we are only holding back a force that is stronger than we are.
Up to a point, this force fits with what the nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer refers to as ‘will’. For Schopenhauer, ‘will’ is a striving in all things – animal, plant and mineral – to continue being themselves. It has an invisible but surging energy. Schopenhauer doesn’t focus on the transferring of this presence from one generation to the next, yet the quality of ‘will’ that he describes seems close to what I mean by ‘life force’. It is that which compels all things to be what they are. It also stops them, for as long as they exist, from becoming nothing. Human beings are no less subject to this law than are the animal and plant kingdoms, and even the realm of the inanimate. If my guiding question for this book is ‘What does it mean to be a human being?’, then one answer is that human beings, like everything else, are saturated with will.
The future of the past
Each one of us represents a bet placed by the species in the interests of multiplying itself. Not all the bets will come off: that’s what makes them bets. And yet every one of us is living proof of a bet that did. We leave behind a cloud of countless lives that never came to be, like a trillion soap bubbles popping in the air. We, the few, got life. They, the many, did not. For as long as we are alive, we keep life itself alive. That is perhaps the deepest vocation that we can follow. Without our lives to bear it like a flame, human life itself would expire. Say we achieve little success personally; or fail to love our family as much as we could; or make a negligible contribution to society. Nevertheless we will have kept life alive, and that is not nothing.
As far as furthering the human race is concerned, the brute fact is that those of us without children represent an end-stop. But we can look down the telescope the other way. To be here implies having come from somewhere. The life force has flowed into everyone, regardless of whether it flows out into the next generation. We are ancestral creatures one and all. Typically, we will look back as far as our grandparents or great-grandparents; we will hold three or four generations in mind. Our ancestors are active in us from roughly a hundred years back. They animate our memories even if they no longer move in the world. They enjoy an afterlife during which their name, whenever it is recalled, will swivel like a weathervane in the minds of those who survive them. In this sense, our ancestors don’t finally die until the fourth or fifth generation after them has arrived.
That sounds like a stretch, although in ancestral terms it’s nary a dot on the timeline. Our ancestors extend back for hundreds if not thousands of generations. There isn’t one of us who is not descended from real people who lived in the eighteenth century, the eleventh, the fifth. We have hind-parents from the time of Muhammad, Jesus, Buddha, the Pharaohs, the builders of Stonehenge and before. Hind-parents are people who lived at the same time as those iconic figures, and who placed their children on a serpentine line that eventually found its way to us. Before they were people, they were apes; before they were apes, they were birds; before they were birds, they were fish; and so on, back to the flickering origin of life itself. Thanks to the DNA that was passed down, we hold that line in our bodies. We are the past from which we have come.
The majority that do have children are prolonging the being of their remotest ancestors. It works like an ancient yeast, this thing called ‘being’, a germ with the miraculous power of regeneration. Not that this wonder-culture is any vaccine against