Twice Bathed

Yesterday Cosmico (='cosmic monkey' in Spanish) completed his first two-week tour of life. No more squint-eyed innocent: he's a veteran now, a hard-pooping, strong-sucking machine of a baby, versed in every dirty attention grabbing trick in the book. Gone the days of baffled parental wonder, the nervous questioning about what this boy might want: Cosmico lets us know, quickly, crudely, loudly. Like a young Obelix, his life is a poem to the limits of his world (drink, sleep, repose), and he takes his pleasures where he finds them, with all the careless indifference of a young legonaire. It seems inevitable: the rest of his life will be a series of scattered escapades in vague homage to the glories of his Youth, a handful of minor missions punctuated by long, lusterless evenings in VFW halls, swapping war stores with his brothers in arms.

But perhaps I am being alarmist. True, 'Mico has changed. If you don't believe me, take a look at Zoogle 1 , our first on-line gallery of baby shots. The album contains some 50 photos ranging from his first primal scream under the hospital heat lamp to the all important Fall of the Umbilical Chord, that symbolic scab that marks the beginning of legitimate ex-utero existence, and thus authentic entrance into a life of suffering and pain. And while it's true that he isn't exactly a shell-shocked, doobie-smoking shell of a man with a five o'clock shadow and a thousand yard stare, he is, well, different: his eyes open more, his cheeks have slimmed down, his cone-head has lost its point, and his legs are a lot fatter. It may be premature at this point to speak of his career as a prowler of drab community functions, a lurker in the Veterans of Fertile Wombs halls, but I'm nervous anyway.

The theory that you can't bathe twice in the same river was introduced by Heraclitus of Ephesus, a pre-Socratic Greek whose philosophy probably sprang from his attempt to justify his own hygenic predilections (one could ask why bathe at all then, if each bathe involves a different river, and by extension, unknown pirranah levels?) Ernesto Sabato, Argentine physicist-turned-writer who is one of my personal literary heros of the twentieth century, had this to say about Heraclitus' worldview:

"The problem is doubly irritating because not only does no one bathe twice in the same river, but the river itself bathes no one twice. Proof: the Amazon can't bathe Peter twice for the simple reason that there is nothing that can be designated with the proper name "Peter". In the best of cases this word refers to whatever has a few "peterish" features.... In truth, it’s strange that we consider a human being to be something inalterable and identical with himself through time, in spite of the fact that he grows, gets sick, learns philosophy, goes mad or loses an arm in the war."

I find it telling that Heraclitus, for whom the ox-cart was the Bullet Train and the diviner's stick the modern MRI, shares with Sabato, a man who understands physical processes at the level of the quanta, a common concern for the metaphysics of change. Science has not simplified their problem, nor has it provided answers. Of course the problem is really a pseudo-problem: unlike a real problem, it doesn't call for a solution. It seems, rather, to be just a nagging disquiet which Man the Organizer, Man as Cosme, would like to soothe. At stake is the issue of how to understand Identity when both we and our surroundings are constantly changing.

The modern intellectual landscape offers no shortage of technically prescriptive remedies. "Change is an illusion" was the basic platform of Paremenides, another pre-Socratic. He claimed that existence was static, uniform, and fixed, and that anyone who didn't understand this failed to grasp something essential about the nature of Being. Paremenides has his modern counterparts, of course, Leibnitz with his Monads, the principle of Conservation of Energy, many others. But these are ways to think, not ways to feel. These problem with such 'remedies' is that they soothe only the mind: they provide us with a logical structure within which to interpret our world, but not an emotional one.

As a parent what I want is to understand how to feel about the fact that the pictures of Cosmico taken two short weeks ago no longer correspond to the child I dandle in my arms today. And as an independent agent with my own set of intellectual and psychological demands, what I seek is a way to capture and celebrate my own changing sense of self within the setting of the more obvious changes in the body of my son. Perhaps, ultimately, that is the purpose of this blog: it is a way to reconcile engagement in my child's present with an archival honoring of his physical and emotional past. My hope is that even at one bath per river I can keep the acaros at bay.