We become, as The Mother, a variable. An X to The Baby's Y. A verb to The Baby's noun. An abstract or category or cog in the formal situation, stuck in the syntax of relationship or in relationship's equation.
To be The Baby means to not fare much better --The Baby is never really a person itself, but rather the object of The Mother. The Baby is a thing to be cared for always, lacking many actions and also appearing to lack some agency except as it is expressed through need.
Note how in The erotics of the baby: "the feeling is mutual / (from) one container / to another".
What is The King? Well content, of course,
but not exactly: here also, one can be of one category (The Mother) or the other (The Baby) but we know something like a woman is more than only The Mother (we know this because wants to let her "freak flag fly," because she keeps a hand to herself while the other cares for The Baby.)
The Baby is more than its lack of specifics, too: we have all been the infant version of our person, and our infant version is temporary, helpless, speechless, and in our own memory, inert: a picture from a scrapbook, maybe, and a stage we've moved through. We can suppose The Baby would prefer to be himself, as well,
for to be a form is to be idealized, and also to be disappointing, like in The baby idealized his mother
when she was away.
When she returned he found it
difficult to integrate
his vision
with the reality
We can't really know much of anything about The Baby, can we? He doesn't talk. Most of what's about The Baby is a container filled with culture and projection. We imagine he idealizes us as we are so often also idealizing him, but The Baby is equally hard to keep a hold of:
"Today I dragged him screaming down the road, by the wrist / He wanted to go the other way."
This is the story of a very general kind of tragedy or romance, this tragedy or romance of categories: "I've had / my children and cannot / take that back. Buddhists call / it suffering."
