benfridge • read

"The Holocaust was a consequence of a death drive that ran deep through Western societies, one that had propelled humanity into a fruitless, barren place… Locked in their own privacy, flying into their inner selves, they had lost faith in their ability to transform their worlds and to create new, plural realities through their actions and their speech…" "From the time we are born, we are being shaped by birth… Study birth always; it takes an entire lifetime to learn how to give birth or to come to terms with our having been born… The great philosophers are those who practice being born and birthing… Keep birth daily before your eyes… Birth is evidence of our freedom... The fundamental purpose of art is to process the strange, painful, and miraculous experience of childbirth…" "Although humans may have been created out of nothingness, the fact that they were made at all paradoxically negates all forms of nothingness. “Once called into existence,” Arendt writes, summarizing Augustine, “human life cannot turn into nothingness.”" "Birth and the miracle of our creative beginnings are what indelibly shape us and prove our capacity to creatively act in the world." "Birth confounds the binary. It is an experience of neither mastery nor powerlessness; it confronts us with our embodied, earthly creativity, with what we can control and with what we simply cannot control…" "Birth breaks down most of the dualisms humans use to structure reality: man/woman, mind/body, thought/experience, destruction/creation, self/other, creator/created, birth/death. In challenging those binaries, birth can be an act of nonconforming, and motherhood an expression of alterity. Therein lies the difficulty of talking about birth today: birth is both the norm and its transgression."