What is loving for a mother?
FLASH, atoms inordinately swollen of a link, a vision, a thrill, of a yet unformed embryo, unnamable.
What is loving for a mother? The same thing as saying, as writing. Laughing. Impossible. A flash on the unnamable, a weaving to tear apart. A body finally ventures out of its shelter, risks it, under a veil of words. WORD, FLESH. From one to the other, eternally, fragmented visions, metaphors of the invisible.
Stretched tympanum tearing sound from deaf silence. Wind in the grass, the seagull’s distant cry, echoes of waves, of horns, of voices—or nothing? Or his own cries, my newborn, spasm of the syncopated void. I do not hear anything else, but the tympanum continues to transmit this soundful vertigo.
My body and … him/her. No connection. Nothing to do with each other. Right from the first moves, cries, steps, well before his personality became my opponent: the child, he or she, an other. That there is no sexual connection is a meager observation in front of this blinding flash, faced with the abyss between what was mine and what is now irremediably foreign. Try thinking this extraction, this abyss: hallucinating vertigo.
What connection between him and me? None, except this overflowing laughter where some soundful, subtle, fluid identity collapses or emerges, softly buoyed up by the waves.
Tenderness for both man and woman is often described as a desexualization of drive. Wouldn’t it also be the case for oviparous animals and mammals when, exhausted by the pleasures and pains of procreation, males and females give themselves over to caring for their newborn? I hold that human mothers—more than female cats and tigers—because they are endowed with language, succeed in sublimating their erotic or destructive drives by this very tenderness. And that they embrace their children (from newborns to grownups who still remain their children), throughout their lives, with this soothed tension, this waning anxiety, smiling and respectful, that makes the newborn the Premier Other.
Maternal reliance as a detotalized universe made up of heterogeneous strategies cannot be fixed in any type of monolithic representation, much less worshipped as a goddess. Surfacing of the visible before and after the separation of forms is the gesture and its trace that might perhaps be the most faithful apparent reality.
The prehistoric artist painted the movement of his drives by imitating his doubles, the bison and horses, running, but did not paint himself: nothing but gestures without “oneself,” graffiti, abstract and rough sketches, often completed by “negative or positive hands.” Only the female/maternal surfaces in the visible: a giant vulva included in or escaping from living animality gives birth to the visible. But this external inclusion and this internal exclusion do not “represent” maternal eroticism. Like a center of vibratory suspense,1 maternal eroticism can be perceived in the gesture of this trance, an archi-writing links the female sex and the beast.
The Greeks had glimpsed the problem in this representation of the maternal in imagining three Fates, who were none other than weavers cutting and joining Time and Chaos: the Spinner, the Allotter, the Cutter.
As for the Taoist Chinese civilization, it defines the maternal as movement itself, the flow, the “way,” also “without name,” prior to all entities and linking them all, a “process of emergence within the very body.” And calligraphy became an attempt to impose maternal eroticism by infiltrating it into the cultural fabric.
At the heart of our monotheistic tradition, the laugh of Sarah—Isaac’s mother—comes closest to maternal eroticism: between destiny (biological) that passes her by (therefore divine), since it is ordered by Yahweh, and her improbable fertility at ninety years of age, the princess of Abraham just laughs hesitantly with this nameless joy. Incredible and a no less certain reliance on the unthinkable: is it biological or divine?
FIGURE 2.1 Venus, painting from Chauvet cave, France.
FIGURE 2.2 The Fates (Moirai) (Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos), Greek goddesses of birth, fate, and life’s narrative. Image from the film Reliance by G. K. Galabov.
FIGURE 2.3 Xiwangmu, queen mother of the West, Eastern Han dynasty, stamping of a funerary brick, Chengdu Museum, Sichuan, China.
The Christian and in particular Catholic vision accustomed us to a harmonious nativity, “good news” bathed in tenderness and promise. Until this reversal of roles between mother and son, in which Christ himself is transformed into father-mother and holds Mary who has become a babe in arms—“daughter of her son, fixed goal of the Eternal Wisdom,” wrote Dante.2
FIGURE 2.4 Stamping from unknown provenance, Later Han dynasty (22–220), Paris, Guimet Museum. Laozi superimposed, Daodejing, chapter 25: “Something indistinct takes shape even before the Sky and the Earth. Silently, subtly, this thing develops and advances, it circulates undiminished. It can be considered as the mother of the world. As I don’t know its name, I call it the Way.”
Before the Italian painters made off with the sacra conversazione3 of the mother and her male baby to diminish its eroticism, the maternal in Western painting became the male artist’s maternal. The draped marbles, the innumerable Nativities, and the Assumptions of the Virgin attest to this.4
No one grasped better the catastrophic latency of maternal reliance than German expressionism (does this explain its being considered “degenerate” by the Nazis in 1937?), and in particular, the painter Max Beckmann (1884–1950) in his major works exploring his tragic conception of the world, in Birth (1937) and Death (1938).
Neither values nor religions, but deeper below them, it is maternal reliance that Beckmann’s Birth literally tears to pieces. His catastrophe spews a chaos of fragments on the canvas where the spectator can barely make out the remains of the three members of the Holy Family, broken up objects for improbable subjects in a squalid world. The progenitor of this hideous birth exhibits the horror of her power with a breast more obscene than erotic. Meanwhile, the second panel of the diptych, Death, is no longer a Pietà. Forgotten, the placid “Dormition” that had Mary move near her Son-and-Father without experiencing death. Surrounding a doleful, barely visible, mummy in the casket’s shadow, angels with trumpets of Jericho sound the new Apocalypse here. Far more than maternal death is the death of reliance itself that Beckmann lays bare.
FIGURE 2.5 Sarah, Abraham, and three angels (Gn 17, 1, 7), prayer for the blessing on the food after the Seder (Birkat Hamazone), Chantilly Haggada (fifteenth century), Chantilly, Condé Museum.
FIGURE 2.6 Sarai lost the letter Yod (the first “masculine” letter of the Hebrew alphabet) and in exchange received an H (symbol of fecundity, letter of the spirit of God; there are two Hs in the tetragrammaton YHVH) to become Sarah. Abram did not lose any letter and received an H to become Abraham.
The unidimensional humanity of last century has been replaced by today’s hyperconnected and rushed person who communicates in “tweets” and, whatever the risks of chaos and absence of truth in his virtual world, seems, nevertheless, to reject any supreme authority, whether political or spiritual.
British socialists are seeking a prototype specifically in maternal care to reinvent solidarity and restore the social bond itself. More amusingly, French women writers are remembering they are mothers, and the maternal is making its way into the woman’s novel.
If ethics means not avoiding the awkward and inevitable problematic of law but giving it body, language, and jouissance, then this ethic is herethical. It demands the participation of women, the mothers in them, and among them, women carrying the desire to reproduce, a stability in movement. Women available so that our speaking species who knows its mortality can bear death. Mothers. Their RELIANCE is this herethical ethic.
FIGURE 2.7 Madonna and Child, 1460–1464, Giovanni Bellini (circa 1430–1516), Correr Museum, Venice.
FIGURE 2.8 Birth, 1937, Max Beckmann, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin.
FIGURE 2.9 Death, 1938, Max Beckmann, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin.
Thus, the private side of moral laws: what makes the bonds, thinking, and thinking of death bearable—the herethical is a-death, is love … Eia Mater, fons amoris (Ah Mother, fount of love). Listen again to the Stabat Mater and to music, all music … it makes sense … until Anton Webern and Max Beckmann shatter reliance, devouring and precluding the need for goddesses. But without forgoing new languages, new reliances.