By Thomas Calandra
"Have you ever seen a human heart? It looks like a fist wrapped in blood." - Larry the Doctor
“To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body.” – Christopher Hitchens
Indeed the most romantic and beautiful part about the above passage from the late Christopher Hitchens’ memoir, is not the metaphor of one’s own heart beating within the body of their children, but that it really isn’t -so to speak- a metaphor at all. Every inch, engine and topography of your flesh, bone and brain are chiseled by sculptor proteins working off the blueprints of genes, which were engraved by the chaotic confluence of randomly distributed parcels of your parents' genetic tributaries. In a very real sense, there is a chance that the heart waltzing inside the body of your child is that of your own.
Genes are the ideas of nature. And ideas are intangible and without rivalry: one does not lose an idea by sharing it with someone; one does not lose a poem when reciting it to an audience; one does not lose their rights by others attaining them. The algorithm that designed your heart, is that which forged your child’s heart -their bloody fist of love- to materialize: an identical mold, fashioned out of the same atoms, casted out of the same fauna, consummated by the same quintessence of dust that brought your crimson muscle to be. “If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that,” declared Shylock. Yet, it is not revenge you seek like Shakespeare’s Venetian villain, but that of immortality, to whom your children are your only chance.
However, I have the heart of someone else’s child inside my body.
On December 3rd, 2016, the dying heart I was born with, was exhumed out of my chest, and replaced by an alive heart that another person died having. I know nothing about this person other than they were sixteen years old, and that I am now running around with their parent’s heart inside my body. I am the living, breathing occlusion to their only glimpse at immortality. An explanation of divine will to my donor’s parents would not only be absolutely false, but unimaginably callous and cruel. Instead, the truth of living amongst the vacant-minded winds of amoral randomness, would be the only consolation.
One can’t not think of Kahlil Gibran in these circumstances, who writes:
“Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.”
Gibran can be excused for being incorrect about children coming “through you, but not from you,” because he was writing 30 years before James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA was a double helix polymer; thus finding “the secret to life,” as they declared walking into a pub on the afternoon of their breakthrough. The Lebanese poet was wise to say that our children have thoughts of their own, (as any parent knows) and that our children are the citizens of future, which is an Athens we can never inhabit. Though, it is true that aggregate aspects of your essence will be that which constructs your newborn's soul, (a soul that is really a material spirit, made from the embers of a billions of cosmic bonfires) it is, however, hubris and solipsism to believe that your child is your path to eternity, and equivalent to believing that you are merely a surrogate for your great grandmother’s existence. Which of course you are, but not ONLY her. There is a library of souls within you, with each one only a silver of the storm of stardust it previously was, all in order to reveal what’s left of themselves as the eye of the hurricane you confuse yourself of being.
The opposing side of the coin of the “terrible beauty” in Hitchens' “limitations of self,” (where seeing his heart inside his playful children) is a lesson I myself am terrified to learn. To me, it would be a nightmare to realize the heart I was born with was struggling to beat in someone else’s body. I would petition every agent of capricious chaos and celestial madness in the cosmos that my child be pulled from non-existence and into this world, not with the heart imprinted on my anatomical printing press, but instead be given the fist wrapped in blood, currently entombed in my humble vessel. It is because of my donor I can write this. It is because of my donor I can say this. It is because of my donor that you can read this. It is only fair that I wish a piece of them is what rises future tides, even if it is in vain.
One should find comfort, not in an eternal life of surrogacy, but in a long goodbye out of existence. Because -in proper Darwinian fashion- it is not yourself whom you should wish immortality upon, but that of your children. There are many things we yearn to bequeath to our progeny: love, affection, as much safety as we can, rules, (even if they are there to question) enough resources to teach the importance of charity, and most crucially, a lifetime of our heartbeats in order to provide them with all these things. None of which should be our permanency, because we have to make room for the dynamically different and distinctive entities our children will become despite what ingredients we unknowingly furnish the recipe with. The goal should be to dissolve away, like ice in hot tea. Not in order to hitch a ride with everlasting, but to lose definition in the warm embrace of physical and existential truancy. Not because we wish to be enveloped by forever, but because the tea is non-existence; it is our absence. Which is much needed for our terrible beauty of the future.
