LIFE BEGINS WITH A DANCE

Ova:  ballerina

The first ceremony at the beginning of a new life is a dance in which the ovum, clothed in gauze tissues, spins in slow tour jete until she is met by a corps of danseurs, a beady little horde with whipping tails.   

(The Corps de Ballet from "Drake Lake.")

If this seems like fantasy, it is.  A more developed version is in a book:  Birthing Ourselves Into Being, by Baraka Bethany Elihu.

An animated medical version is at:    http://highered.mheducation.com/sites/0072507470/student_view0/chapter28/animation__maturation_of_the_follicle_and_oocyte.html

The sperm do their seeking dance in spite of knowing that there will be only one premier danseur who makes his final pas de deux with the prima donna.  Shazam!  Fertilization !!  Creation!!  A new blob!  A new story.

One celled ocean animals.

In what way is this a ceremony?  It is an event with a beginning, middle and end; it is focused on desire; it has meaning; it is a process that confirms something very old that will persist and sustain life for a long time in the future -- we hope.  It is patterned in a way that can be elaborated in acts today, maybe consciously and maybe unconsciously echoing this first dance.

Beginning with this little metaphor -- which is actual except for calling it an art form when it’s biology -- makes the point that each cell in the human body has its own “mind” and seeks its own ends in its own way.  Putting aside for now the knowledge that the first "creatures" developed from substances and potentials becoming patterns on the planet, and were "alive" in the moment they began to choose their own way.

We remember with molecules . . .  somehow.

An artist's version of a hippocampus, imaginary,

neither like the organ nor like the sea creature, both of which exist.

It appears to science that memory and intention originate and are preserved in cells, maybe individually and sometimes in organs, which are organized cells that can specialize, for instance, the hippocampi -- two little seahorses, one just above each ear.  (On the inside of the brain of course.)  When these little organs begin to fail, you will lose your memory.

When a memory is recalled, it doesn’t come whole, but rather is re-assembled from parts stored in cells all over the brain.  Responding to the connectome, the smells and colors and tastes come together into meaning.  We don’t know exactly how it works, but we do know that every time something is recalled, it is not perfectly re-assembled, but may include bits that don’t belong or drop out other bits that actually could be proven actual at the time.  Without knowing this recent understanding, when we enact familiar ceremonies we reassure ourselves of what is there and what we believe to be true.  Memories of repeated acts and sense memories help us be ourselves.

This is the most basic level of human function from which all the rest emerges over time.  It begins at conception.  From then on the cells are responding to the environment -- the inside of the mother through the interface of the placenta, and its flow of nutrients and hormones.  But then as the cells begin to organize into organs, awareness of movement, temperature, and sound expand the level of memory and interpretation.

The question of whether an embryo can feel pain is crucial but puzzling:  “The neural regions and pathways that are responsible for pain experience remain under debate but it is generally accepted that pain from physical trauma requires an intact pathway from the periphery, through the spinal cord, into the thalamus and on to regions of the cerebral cortex including the primary sensory cortex the insular cortex and the anterior cingulated cortex. Fetal pain is not possible before these necessary neural pathways and structures have developed.”  This is organ-detected pain, defined by the brain.  If there is no organ, no brain, it's not the same.

We already know that individual cells can move towards or away or be changed by outside forces.   One-celled creatures eat and shit. They go to light and avoid bad "smells."  Early fetuses suck their thumbs as soon as they have thumbs, have erections as soon as they have penises.

We seem to need to know when the baby is “human.”  “Quickening” is when the mother first feels the baby moving, usually about halfway through the pregnancy.  This is taken by some cultures as the entry of the soul into the baby.  They call it "ensoulment."  If the mother drinks too much coffee, the fetus will have the jitters.

Religion, politics, economics, individual circumstances, take over at this point or shortly before.  Technical forces enter into what happens.  The fact of a sonogram, the ability to do surgery on an embryo while it is still in the uterus, the capacity to assay the molecules in fluids in minute amounts so as to change them, the ability to analyze a genome for flaws so as to compensate for them -- all these things are in a vague way cultural ceremonies that reflect desire for survival, an invitation to a new being.  “Baby showers” are such a ceremony.

The baby ceremonies like baptism are only the beginning of a long trajectory of change with recognized points that seem important to the culture.  We are late understanding that a genome is a suite of potentials, like a great cathedral organ, not a script.  A person emerges from the moment of fertilization and begins a series of "births" and celebrations.  Even death does not end the liturgies of memory, the impact of the choices made.

As I write, the radio tells me about a tribal ceremony of “reburial” returning remains collected as bodies of American Indians to their tribes.  They have been in drawers in museums, waiting for study.  New strategies of analysis are always being devised, but the People are determined to put these bones back in the earth now.  There will be more song than dance, drums like heartbeats, making skeletons real for the moment.  A fantasy like the Dance of Conception, but less scientific and more the conviction that place and genome are important to the tribal community.

Old myths establish that one leaves life in a boat with a man named Charon to steer the person across the River Styx.  Perhaps before one comes to be alive, before that Dance of the Ovum, one arrives from a Blue Sea with a woman rowing hard.  Some choose not to come ashore.  Storybook artists depict unborn babies as having little wings, but it's plain from the sonograms that they really have fins.