Arie Green

Fall 2002

Dearest Miri,

I’m sending you the first thoughts that came up following the “thing” you sent me.

“Open closed open. Before we are born,
everything is open in the universe without us.
For as long as we live,
everything is closed within us.
And when we die, everything is open again.
Open closed open. That’s all we are.

(By Yehuda Amichai, translated by Chana Bloch)

When no one was home to open the door for the delivery person, the package was left at my front door (just like in the fairytales when the stork leaves a baby on the front door). Shaked, my 12 year old son, encountered it first when he returned home and it filled him with both suspicion and curiosity that led him to open it and peel away its fist layer just to make sure it wasn’t a “hostile package” but a wrapped box which he hadn’t opened. “You got something in the mail” he said. When I first encountered the package I recoiled. I knew it contained an “object” as you had called it: “something” that had to pass through me in order to become a “someone”. Actually, the moment I agreed to have something placed at my doorstep it already became “something” that demanded of me to be “someone”. I didn’t want to open it yet because I knew that opening the box meant a welcoming in of sorts – that I’d have to introduce myself to “something” and welcome it in, because only then, through my reception, it would suddenly have a face of its own, a certain face.

I wasn’t emotionally available to offer myself up. I wasn’t I sure I wanted to yet. I overcame my curiosity and set it aside, still closed. Only after a week I peeled another layer and encountered a blunt, intimidating and upsetting caption on its exterior: “Miri’s Embryo Distribution.” A mechanical and commercial declaration that created a almost unbearable correlation between the noun “embryo” and the verb “distribution,” while Embryos have always been related (as far as I was concerned) to staying put, to coming into being inside something that combined both the inside and the outside world until it was ready to move outward but the movement was never mechanical, sweeping, as in distribution.

I opened the box. Compared with the blunt statement on its outside, on the inside a figure covered in a soft blanket of cells that looked like a honey bread lay there resting. And on top of it (on the inside of the box), were embedded a number of wooden rings that created a womb like effect that contained the age of the female embryo (yes, in my imagination it was a girl, a symbol of longing and yearning), her several past lives rolled into one. In the days that followed, the “something” became more of a “someone” – my secret longing for a daughter returned. So perhaps this “paternal adoption” in this case meant: making room inside for a fantasy about the possibility of another life. It’s the place where fatherhood starts to form itself from within a maternal experience, a maternal fantasy. It’s an open experience, an endless one compared to what might spring forth from it, as Yehuda Amichai wrote, but it’s also a very specific fantasy, for a daughter. When this open paternal experience is realized in some way, to a certain child it ends and begins at exactly the same moment. It end because from a completely open experience someone is created and born, it’s someone specific, and the endless open experience is concluded.  The French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, one of the prominent philosophers of the 20th century, tugs at the heart strings (at least mine) when he clearly describes the essence of fatherhood:

“Fatherhood is how one addresses the stranger, which is, although he is entirely different, is actually myself. It’s the relation of the self to the self, which is, still foreign to myself. In fact, my son isn’t just a product of my own making, like a poem or an object I designed with my own two hands, nor is he my property. Categorizing the notion of control or ownership cannot define my relationship towards the boy. Nor can causativeness or the term ownership cannot grasp the fact of fertility. I am not the owner of my child. In some respects I am my child…more over, my son is not an event that happens to me. Like for example, my sadness, tribulations or suffering. He is a certain type of me, he’s a human being. Eventually, his otherness is not of the alter-ego species. My paternity is not a form of sympathy that which helps me put myself in my son’s place. It is my own self-being that makes my son and me the same, not my sympathy. It is not according to causativeness by paternity that freedom is born and time passes…paternity isn’t the reimaging of a father in his son’s image and blending of the two into one. It is also the father’s external relation to his own son. It is a sort of pluralistic existence” (Ethics and the Infinite, page 60).

As mentioned above this is just a start, that’s it for now,

Arie Green