Both my brain and my body felt very much like meat as I pedalled along the road. The same gelatinous matter. I could see what she meant.

The philosopher then said that she believed that even drawing a line between a body and its environment was wrong. She said there was no real line there. The human gut was a permeable membrane that exchanged matter with the world, taking it in, transferring it, expelling it. A human being couldn’t survive without a garden of gut bacteria obtained from the outside world, she said. So then, how could we draw a hard line between the person and their world? Where exactly was that line between the human being and the environment? And our lungs too, she said, our lungs exchanged gases, like a tree – stand next to a tree and you were exchanging gases with that tree. And our ears and eyes and brains too, processing waves of light and sound.

And suddenly, riding by myself along that lonely road, I felt part of things, part of the landscape as I moved through it, puffing. I breathed the cold air as I rode – cold air in, warm air out. I could feel it as I went, the temperature of my throat alternating: cold, warm, cold, warm. A crow was flying in the distance. Was it having the same experience of moving through air, and air moving through it, as I was? And then the philosopher was talking again about lines. Lines, and where we decide to draw them. A virus couldn’t live without a human cell, she was saying, so where was the line between the human being and the disease? Cancers and autoimmune diseases and genetic disorders only used human cells – there was no foreign body, no invading pathogen, no other kind of cell at all – so where was the line between the healthy human and the illness? And where was this ideal healthy body against which to draw an ‘unhealthy’ line? You could find it in medical journals everywhere, she said, but rarely in real life. And definitely not if the body standing before you had breasts and internal organs arranged to accommodate a uterus. Medicine was all about making decisions about where to draw lines. And those lines were always being revised. The healthy body, the one in all the medical journals, the one that every difference up until now had been measured against, was a male body.

And that mattered, the philosopher said. That mattered a lot. Especially when we try to engage medically with the pregnant body.

I screeched the bike to a stop. I sat in the gloam, my eyes taking in the moonlight reflecting off the road and the canola, as the philosopher spoke about the confusion medicine and society created for itself by trying to decide on the ‘oneness’ or the ‘twoness’ of the pregnant body. The biggest problem, as the philosopher saw it, was that we were way too fond of drawing lines between things. Body and mind – draw a line. Pregnant woman and foetus – draw a line. Sometimes, she said – most of the time – those lines are a useful shorthand, and provide a way forward in the very short term, like Descartes’ theory, but turn out, in the long run, to be detrimental, harmful and, most importantly, simply untrue. And if you think the field of medicine had it solved by ignoring the female body and just talking about male bodies, then you were forgetting the self-same trap it got itself into by thinking about the brain as something that was separate to the body but got carried around in it. Separating bodies and body parts, she said, was helpful right up until the point that it wasn’t.