Hungry, lonely and afraid

I could see a pale glimmer of light in the distance. My life of darkness was coming to an end, it seemed. Soon, things started moving and I was painfully and inexorably expulsed from my hiding place. They let my mother see me. I don’t think she was very impressed. I cried a lot. Eventually, the nurse took me away, and locked me in the linen cupboard so that my mother could rest.

I cried and cried. I screamed till I was blue in the face. I was tied up tightly in a shawl and couldn’t wriggle and kick. I writhed, ranted and raved. I never gave up hope. I fell asleep, still expecting to be saved. When they let me out it was too late, my relationship to the world had been laid down once and for all. I would go through life thus, a strident, unanswered demand for my needs to be met by someone outside myself. Anger at the lack of response. Determination to elicit a response by screaming louder, longer, to reach ears ever further away. I was persuaded that the fact that nobody answered my cries meant that nobody had heard them and that if nobody had heard them it was because everybody was too far away and I wasn’t screaming loud enough. Thus my future behaviour was programmed as a quest to hit a further spot, to be heard and elicit an answer from someone or something that was out of my reach, out of earshot, off limits. It was only a question of time, I would break through the silence barrier and touch the other, be heard, be perceived, and it or them would come running to fulfil my every whim.

The fact that nobody ever answered the demand did not allow me to call into question the legitimacy of my attitude. Obviously the world was at fault in this, it couldn’t have been brand-new, pristine, unspoilt, undegraded, perfect me. How can the behaviour of a new-born baby be considered in any sense wrong? I was my song, and my song was me, and it was loud and painful. It was full of longing, a lament, a cry from the soul that nothing could soften, since it hadn’t been answered at the right time and now never could be.

So much for the baby in me. It is still unconsoled. But it is no longer alone and no longer free to scream as much as it likes. Its future states came into contact with the reality principle in a variety of different ways. Each time, I suppose, the thwarted élans regressed to the cradle rat whose cries went unheard and therefore unmodulated. All in all, it was a felicitous event, for the being that grew never doubted for a moment that the point was to get a message across, and, never having succeeded, the will remained undiminished.

Reaching puberty, it wrote poetry that it likened to “a pathetic cryptic message for the Martians” – as indeed, in a way, it was. They never responded, either.