I went to see my friend Rebecca singing at "Pizza on the Park". She was really great, it's easy to forget how talented your friends are.
Rebecca is seven and a half months pregnant ("fully fertilised" as she calls it) and she commented on how the baby jumps in he womb when she belts out the songs.
It struck me how difficult it must be to make sense of the world when you are still inside your mother. Let's ignore the problem of how babies even think without language, that already makes my head spin. But your whole world is this one tiny space and aside from a few noises and prods and pokes you must have no idea what's going on outside (if you have any concept of outside at all).
You're in your own world.This is your universe. You feel you understand it and the meaning of life (which is to be nice and warm and have food come in and waste taken out through a series of convenient tubes, though you try not to think about where the food comes from, or where the waste goes. There's nothing beyond this comfortable life) Towards the end of your stay (though you don't know it's going to end) you send out a few exploratory kicks, just to check for sure that the walls are solid (you're sure they are, but then part of you is beginning to wonder where the raunchy muffled version of "I just want to make love to you," is coning from). Your probes detect that the walls of your universe are solid (if elastic) and that you alone are the god-king of space. Possibly you theorise that the universe is a living entity (like the idiots who believe in Gaia think), but that's OK. That just makes you more important.
Then suddenly you are taken kicking and screaming out of your home to find a whole new confusing universe beyond those walls. It takes you decades to make any sense of it.
Then just when you think you realise what's going on, you die, and doubtless fanciful idiots would think that you take another journey beyond your limited universe to discover something even bigger and more unimaginable beyond.
I think it's certainly true that we have about as much idea of the world we are living in, as Becka's spawn does at the moment. But it doesn't follow that there's anything to follow our 70 year gestation on this earth.
What delights and disappointments await that tiny infant.
If nothing else, he or she is going to have the most brilliantly entertaining experience when its mum sings it nursery rhymes.
