Womb-Tomb II: "Midnight Flute"

OPWC Ch.11 

–December 18, 2025, 10:01 pm to 10:42 pm

Gestational time measured in musical time: during Yasodhara’s pregnancy, Siddhartha plays his flute beneath the moonlight and listens to it echo in the ether around him. When she goes into labor, gender divisions sharpen; only the women can attend her, while Siddhartha sits outside the door anxiously and listens to the whole birthing process. YIKES. No wonder they only end up having one kid! Here’s the relevant passage, worth quoting at length: 

“With each passing moment, his anxiety increased. Yasodhara’s moans now followed one upon another, and he was beside himself. Her cries tore at his heart until it was impossible to sit still. He stood and paced the floor. At times [her] groans were so intense he could not quell his panic” (77). 

How refreshing: Yasodhara’s find a more receptive audience than Effie’s (see yesterday’s trilogy on Effie/Dreamgirls to catch that reference). Her moans, cries, groans are affective transfers that move from her laboring body to his, despite the wall separating them. The child tears through her, her cries tear through him. His body restless, agitated, jittery. To calm himself, he sits in a lotus position and tries to “take hold of his mind and heart” (77). Unable to hold Yasodhara from behind the wall, he takes hold of his mind and heart through meditation, calming himself so that he has the capacity to later calm her. He meditates while she moans; liminality enters. The veil lifts. Her cries stop and he looks up from his meditation: she delivered a boy, which Siddhartha decides (apparently without any input from Yasodhara needed?) to name him Rahula. Rahula = FETTER. The child is a chain, I called that one a mile away.

Barely one paragraph after the split-screen birth scene, as Siddhartha holds his infant son, his mind returns to the funeral of the dead child that he attended with Yasodhara a few months earlier, during her pregnancy. Recalling the deathbed: “all signs of life had vanished, and the child’s skin was pale and waxen, its body no more than skin and bones. The child’s mother knelt beside the bed wiping her tears and then crying again” (77-8). The passage is long and elaborate, describing the deathbed scene, followed by a ritualized cleansing in the nearby river, and culminating in cremation—a double purification ritual. As the boy’s body goes up in flames, Siddhartha thinks, “Child, O Child, where now do you return?” (78). He hands Rahula back to Yasodhara and sits alone as shadows gather around him. As I noted in the last chapter, the text structurally links the death of the one child with the birth of another. The link is sequential but not directly causal. We are not explicitly told: “Rahula is the reincarnation of the dead child Yasodhara was grieving during her pregnancy.” But the inference remains open. Womb and tomb: mutually reinforcing, reciprocal flows? Or is meditation the third space that makes these flows—from womb to tomb and back again—possible? 

More will follow tomorrow. The GPT dialogue is in progress, but it may not be quite where I want it tonight. I realize that annotations would make it even more entertaining—and a helpful guide to ChatGPT gaslighting, more broadly. Casual Friday, is kind of the vibe I’m going for. 

Until then, 

Dianna