The baby was fussy all morning, and when he finally went to sleep, in the crook of his mother’s arm, after nursing we were scared to leave him alone in case the silence woke him up. I made carbonara downstairs, ate, and then went to lie beside him reading while Shelley took her portion.
As I re-positioned my leg, my knee popped loudly, startling the baby. He stretched his arms above his head and pawed at his face with the backs of his hands. These gestures were familiar to me from my own body. I had seen, too, him sneeze or yawn. I imagined for a moment, that I had given these things to him, but that transposition made a deeper truth clear.
My cat, who slept above us, on a table over the bed we had arranged on the floor, stretched and yawned. He sneezes. When we turn the lights on at night to change Felix’s diaper, he sprawls onto his stomach and covers his eyes with his paws, sulkily. These gestures, taught to us by no one, inherent in us, which you could have observed in my child minutes after he was born, belong to an unimaginably ancient process of which we are merely brief manifestations.
Human beings tie themselves into knots or grind themselves to featureless lumps, struggling to connect with something vast and ancient. We don’t stop to think that each time we yawn we are in contact with something profound and atavistic, something older than history, bigger than the merely human.