The Spark

They say it happens in an instant. That there is this moment when it is not, and another when it is, and in between, a turn between the two. Perhaps that is true, but perhaps, too, it belies the complexity of an instant, because an instant seldom stands alone.

Let us take the case of Adam and Eve. These are pseudonyms, of course, used to protect the identities of everyone else. Adam is a young man, full of vigour and hopefulness and drive, and Eve is a young woman, ready to embrace life. Adam and Eve have a notion - mutually, we shall agree for this specific case - that they might enjoy one another in this moment of their lives. Maybe, they think, for all the moments of their lives, and they lay together in Eve’s bed and share piecemeal dreams of trips they might one day like to take and songs they feel in their souls and how they feel about the idea of a soul, and while they lay out the patchwork pieces to see if the quilt might work, while they imagine a life they might make, two hundred million sperm swim for one outside chance.

It is a mission doomed to fail, but we all must do what we must do, and each spermatozoon has nowhere else to be. They die, of course, in their millions. Dried out on the sheets, dissolved in acid, trapped in inlets and cul-de-sac’s and dead-end folds. No one stops to lend a hand or pull a brother to safety. It is a race to the finish, with no knowing whether the finish is even there.

On the right day, this day, deep inside Eve, let us imagine that the finish line has been prepared. The final obstacle is in place, and within, the prize. Eve has carried this ova, one of a million, almost all of her life. It has nestled in quiet sorority within Eve, within her own mother, just as the egg that made Eve once lay like the littlest matryoshka in the centre of Eve’s grandmother.

It drifts, this ova, like a queen on her pallet, passed along the ciliated passage that lead towards a throne room draped in royal red for her crowning. Hers, too, is an improbable mission. Just as no King can take the throne for himself, a Queen without a king will be pulled down with the drapery, expelled, another wasted effort. Eve may not mind, of course. Eve, after all, has dominion over herself. Or maybe she will. Maybe she longs to surrender to a monarch she has imagined loving. She has little say in the matter, not now. Now events must unfold, and we must move, if it is to be, from this moment, when it is not, to that moment, when it is. We must turn between the two.

There are then, two cells, both alike in dignity. Star-crossed, it may seem. And yet. And yet, and yet, and yet. We cannot say there is no struggle, that no-one dies in the end. And yet. One sperm, one among the mere hundred still remaining, altered irrevocably by his journey, frenzied like a berserker in battle, one sperm reaches the ova’s membrane and lets down his own walls first. He is not uncontested, of course, but he is the one. Someone has to be.

When they say there is chemistry, this is demonstrably a truth. But what is magic but chemistry and naivety mixed? What is a miracle but a meeting of improbabilities to form a possibility? There is a melting, a dissolving, a subsuming. A turn. Two haploids. One diploid. Life.

Eve won’t know, of course. Not yet. Maybe not ever. Maybe she will know for a while, and then she will know that it was, and now, again, is not. Adam may never know, even if it is and remains so. But let us imagine that he will. And if they know, Adam and Eve, they will pull the threads from their quilt and weave it in and give it substance, whether it is, or whether it was and isn’t again. And one day it won’t be. Whether close on this instant of becoming, or a century on from there, there will again be an instant. A moment that it is, and another when it is not, and in between, a turn between the two.

But of course, an instant seldom stands alone.