So twice major characters fall in love with people who are essentially, if not biologically, their children. And twice the ambiguity of paternity enables a radical shift of power: once it elevates Genji, via his secret son, and once it diminishes Genji, via his secretly not-son. That first shift is a revenge against inheritance, the second shift is a revenge upon that revenge. It is a wise child that knows its own father, goes the saying. And a wise mother who makes use of the mystery. The novel ends in midsentence, and no one really knows if the final words are those of Lady Murasaki, or if the last chapters were written not by Murasaki herself but instead, after her death, by her daughter.
A modern anxiety
Paternal ambiguity is age-old. Maternal ambiguity is pretty new. Of course babies could be switched, and stories of changelings were useful ways of understanding strange children, but still, carrying a child in one’s body meant that even the most magical thoughts were alloyed with maternal certainty. In vitro fertilization has altered this.
Or, at least, I found myself, starting when the baby was about eleven days old, and then for months afterward, thinking in detail through the following problem: If it turned out I had carried someone else’s child, what should I do? (The doctor had seemed a hasty, careless type.) What would constitute ethical behavior? Would it be wrong to flee the country with the baby, in order to stay together? We were already so in love — wasn’t love its own validity? If I gave the baby over to her “real” mother, was I allowed to stay in touch, or was I required to let her go entirely? It was so obvious what the right thing to do was, and so obvious, also, that I would not do it. This was distressing even though I also knew that I would never be so called upon.
One could argue that this is a straightforward prefiguration of the difficulties of allowing a child to grow up and away. Or that it’s evidence that even with insufficient sleep and no free time, a certain kind of mind will find its way toward an excess of immaterial quandaries. Or maybe I was just working through my problematic inability to hand the child over to another caretaker, even for just a few hours.
Things that one was misleadingly told were a big part of having a baby
Diapers. Changing them. Bottles. Cleaning them. Wraps. Baths. Sleeplessness. Cheerios. All these things exist, but rise to consciousness about as often as the apartment’s electricity does.
Babies in art
Babies in art mostly look nothing like babies in life. This is especially true of the baby Jesus, but also of babies more broadly, and this is true even, and maybe most noticeably, in paintings and sculptures that are, apart from the oddly depicted babies, realistic. Often babies are depicted with the proportions of small adults: their limbs are relatively longer than baby limbs, and their heads are not as relatively large as baby heads; in real life babies have heads so large, and arms so short, that they can’t reach their arms beyond their heads. But one almost never sees this in a museum. I am told, also, that a major problem through the centuries for artists depicting the baby Jesus has been the question of what to do about the Lord’s penis.
Recently, though, the baby and I saw several realistic paintings of babies. One of these was by the seventeenth-century artist Jan Steen, who is most famous for his paintings of chaotic, messy households — households as they really were, one imagines. Also we saw a Jan de Bray painting titled The Adoration of the Shepherds, which depicted the infant Jesus looking like a real infant; Adoration was hung near Still Life with Strawberries by Adriaen Coorte. All the paintings were in the same room, which had, as the focal point of the gallery, a very large painting of a cow, by Paulus Potter. It had been radical at the time, the gallery copy noted, for a simple cow to be the subject of such attentive portraiture.
So there was a moment, in Dutch painting, when the problem of how to depict babies was solved by having them appear as they in fact are. But I think I’ve discovered a more pervasive and enduring realistic depiction of babies, though not in depictions of actual babies but instead in depictions of the virgin Mary. I had often wondered about the distinctive tilt of Mary’s head in so many paintings and sculptures. It’s a very particular, recognizable tilt, and you see it again and again, across time and geography. The tilt is usually coincident with Mary holding but not necessarily looking at the baby Jesus. In iconography, I imagine, the tilt has its own prescribed meaning. But that’s an insufficient explanation of the tilt, of why it came to be, of why it makes sense. It’s not a tilt I’ve ever observed in women in real life. But after I held my young baby again and again and again and again and again, I very clearly recognized the angle of the tilt of Mary’s head; it is the tilt of the head of babies who are just beginning to develop the strength of their neck muscles. When I hold my baby, she holds her head at that exact same angle.
Video games
You love to touch metal, running over subway gratings, sidewalk cellar doors, manhole covers… you get very frustrated if you are denied the chance to run over these metals. I now understand Donkey Kong.
Orange
When the puma was about four months old, exiting the feline state and just beginning to move toward the sloth state, it was regularly cold enough outside that she traveled nearly everywhere in a bright-orange full-body puffy snowsuit. She looked especially helpless and magnificent in it. The snowsuit had been a gift, purchased for her from an online company devoted to baby things; the company’s website also had, as its main marketing color, the same orange, a variety one might describe as safety orange, or avalanche-gear orange. Most objects on the website were available in pink, blue, and then also orange, or, sometimes, only orange.
Meanwhile, the snowsuit. On an elevator, a woman joked that she wanted to trade outfits with the baby. At a meeting with an editor, the editor said of the snowsuit: What brand is that, do they also make coats for adults? The coat elicited positive comments at a rate commensurate with that of positive comments about the baby herself, who had just begun to smile. Actually, in truth, there were more comments about the coat than about the baby. I myself found the coat/snowsuit magically beautiful too, I confess, even as I don’t particularly love the color orange, but somehow in the case of the coat/snowsuit, it was the orangeness specifically that was compelling. It felt talismanic. How it comes to be that one year we are drawn to safety orange, another year to emerald green, another to heather gray, is inevitably difficult to untangle. But occasionally the influence can be persuasively traced: for example the brief emerald trend of a few years back I attribute specifically to a run of emerald Cornell t-shirts that said, in contrasting white, Ithaca is Gorges; they glittered briefly across the city; other emerald-colored items followed; then the green disappeared. The brief return, one spring, of skirts shorter in the front than in the back followed the release of a Diane Keaton memoir which included a photo of her in such a skirt; that old-fashioned cut of skirt returned for a few months and then, like a desert bloom, was again gone and likely won’t be seen again for decades.