My pregnant body has thrust me into a new relationship
with time and space: each moment slows and expands as
if I am walking underwater. Extra weight slows me down:
the blood, the baby and the ocean she swims in. My body
is working as it never has before growing another human:
two months ago she opened her eyes, she grew body hair,
she hiccupped; this month her nails will grow to the tips
of her fingers and toes. Eight months ago, she was a single
cell. That cell was singular for an instant; it divided
and multiplied into a cluster of cells, morphed into an
embryo the size of an apple seed; a couple of weeks later
she became a fetus resembling a potato on the ultra-sound
screen.
Every part of me responds to her becoming. I move along
Commercial Drive in a current of bodies and I am an octopus,
an organic contraption of kicking limbs: I'm not sure
where I begin or end, or whose foot belongs to whom. I
am both cell and world, swollen and ponderous at every
moment. The womb is the archetypal ocean: it pulls me
inward, closer to this new being, and fully alive in the
combined solitudes of dream and thought.
I've just moved to Vancouver and for the first time
since childhood, I'm absorbed in the details of my neighbourhood,
not only in the life which surrounds me-a leaf, an ant,
a stone-but the people and places which give a city meaning.
A reel of film unravels in my mind, projected onto the
future: this is our daughter stretching her little hands
to touch dirt for the first time; now she kneels in a
pile of birch leaves; here, by the landmark Grandview
Bowling Lanes, she points to a neon pin and asks, "What's
that?" For the time being, she's nesting in the womb thicket
and I'm discovering the world again.
Just a block away from the sky train station at Commercial
and Broadway, a new station is being built beneath an
overpass. I watch the builders work as the light moves
around them. Each morning, I veer from the current of
commuters to position myself at the railings. Steam rises
from the earth and the leaves from the nearby trees smell
rotten with their own decay. Seventy-five feet down an
old train track rusts its orange, oxidized steel into
puddles of rain. Fifty feet up from the ground, along
a shelf of earth held in by a concrete wall, yet another
passage way is built between these banks: a sky train
station to be called Commerical, a new stop on the Millennium
Line.
Standing here on the overpass, I am suspended between
the old and the new: the world is forever changed; the
world is exactly the same. Like all organic matter, the
city is reinvented again and again. How many trains crossed
the old tracks, the rusted ones down below? I can't can
help but feel my predecessor's history. Who travelled
here, and for how long? Imagine the power to see through
the present: as if our realities were diaphanous curtains
revealing layers of the past right down to the origin
of a thing: train tracks, a defunct wagon route, a dried
river empty of reeds. I wonder if cities lost forever,
like people, continue to live in us. Is the baby inside
me the sum of but one being, one time here on Earth?
***
The builders work in clusters. Some work alone with
their heads hung, setting long rods of rebar before the
concrete is poured. Each is marked by a neon x. The senior
staff gesticulate with their hands and nod their heads,
the kind of talk common to people who share skills or
knowledge. I can't hear a word they say above the screech
of industrial noise at twenty minutes past eight; instead
I watch the light shoot from the metal frames of their
glasses. Each man is made instantly brilliant by the sun,
and then absorbed by shadow, each man drowns in the details
of his work, oblivious to how he is erased and made real
again by the flat autumn light. There is something magnificent
about this though I can't say what it is.
It's amazing, the intelligence of the body. The last
ten of my twenty-seven years have passed quickly. I've
been oblivious to details, names, and faces unless I was
forced to pay attention. I have missed buses, appointments,
birthdays, due dates, family events, caused entirely by
my knack for daydreaming. I have broken bones-two wrists,
one arm, an ankle and two toes-by bumping into things
I failed to notice. I once drove out of a downtown parking
lot with the radio blasting. That afternoon I drove my
family's mini-van home with an accordion door.
Thirty-some weeks into pregnancy, I'm learning how to
look at the world again. The past is revealed in veins
articulating the skins of rainy buildings, in piles of
wet leaves. The material world is a matter of layers,
a series of signs, a map of dreams. Can I say that one
aspect of a city is truer than another?
***
There is a peculiar eros about bodies alive in the streets,
creating something as ordinary as a bridge or a road as
if by alchemy. I have never made a habit of stopping to
watch builders at work; though today, and the for several
days prior, I stop for a few minutes-sometimes more than
I can spare-and I watch each small gesture: the net of
light covering each head, the halt of steps as one considers
the next task: how shall I do this? And then the worker
plods on, in a daze of his own making. Does he picture
in his mind, perhaps, the final outcome? Does he work
piece by piece? Is he absent from the task at hand, dreaming
of another life miles away from the jackhammer rattling
his frame?
***
At the railing I'm absorbed into a gauntlet of onlookers.
I can't see most faces, only profiles; I count them by
horns of breath shot into the cold and their lunchbox
hands dangling over the rails. The only female standing
in a line of men over the age of fifty is instantly marked
by the angle of her protruding belly: that is me. The
sky is effusive overhead, white clouds burn themselves
into a sea of searing blue; the sky belongs in an Ansel
Adams photograph.
*
When the clock tower across the road reads 8:30, I walk
to the station, absorbed in a throng of buses and cars,
mothers with strollers, women and men on their way to
work. The escalator is a moveable convoy; I ride, hop
off, walk to the platform and sit down on a bench to rest
my lungs. A woman with bleached hair and marble-blue eyes
walks towards me, her boyfriend trailing, muttering to
the world.
"All my thoughts come at once. They come faster than
I can think them. It's like a tape played on fast forward."
She laughs at him as she stuffs spoonfuls of Fruit Loops
into her mouth. He takes the plastic container filled
with milk and cereal from her and laughs like a shy, goofy
kid. "These fruit loops are circles of thoughts just coming
at me. And I'm eating every last one." He sets down a
plastic grocery bag containing milk and Fruit Loops at
his feet. She falls into him as if falling into a deep
crevasse.
I board the sky train finally with only minutes to get
to the office, and I stand in a throng of people forced
to make room for my belly. It is morning and few people
speak. Those seated in neat rows by the windows are absorbed
in the world of their minds, their eyes closed or their
gaze fixed against communication. I wonder what worlds
we whiz past: dilapidated factories, rows of old tenements,
condominiums with glass walls. I notice there's an ad
asking passengers to give up their seats to people with
canes and pregnant women. Am I to ask them or do they
ask me? *
Attention is the basis of prayer, of any creative endeavour,
of any necessary skill. It has been written about in one
form or another in the sacred texts, from the Kabala to
the Old Testament. Meditation is the practice of cultivating
attention. The Buddhists say attention brings us to emptiness:
a state of reverence, a trained mind. Yet, for all its
ubiquitous involvement in centuries of thought, our culture
works against attention, as it works against thought.
This is no surprise: it's my own spiritual lesson.
**
The gypsies say that when a woman gives birth she enters
the underworld. Moments after birth, when the baby is
still a wet slither, the mother whispers a new and secret
name into the baby's ear so that the gods loosed upon
the world cannot steal its true identity. It takes days,
sometimes weeks, they say, to resurface.
Where is it a woman goes to when she births? A midwife
once said that birth is the ultimate practice of attention:
the woman turns into the dark fields to push the baby
out into its new life. She once witnessed a woman completely
entranced during the second phase of labour. On all fours
in the middle of her bed, she moved in concentric circles
moaning with the power of a banshee. "Where did you go?"
she asked her afterward. The woman looked at her for a
long time before she smiled and replied, "Into the pain."
***
These days my body finds its own silence. Fruit flies
swarm in wobbly loops around the days-old fruit peels
left in the office garbage. I swat my hands; they dart
into their nervous escape. Are they re-enacting their
own wild birth? If I line my eyelids with sugar will they
come?
**
The evening is made for listening, even to a structure
emptied of its workers: the station platform stands so
eerily still after so many machines pounding it into being.
It is just after suppertime and a few neighbours with
the same thirst for falling light walk for pleasure here.
I set my elbows on the railing. A man stands five feet
away, wrapped in his own thoughts. We acknowledge each
other with a nod of the head. After some time, he gestures,
he says, "Good evening."
It's amazing to witness the chaos of the living as the
chaos of a single moment: the cycles of life and death
appearing as holograms in the strange minutiae around
us. The awe for me is often found both in the witnessing
of the event itself and the sharing in it: the collective
response to world we live in. A man drops a spade into
earth; a sperm pierces the membrane of an egg. The world
begins again; the world ends.
