I
drink to separate my body from my soul.
—Oscar
Wilde
My Body, Myself
That Miss O' possessed a body as well as a mind was something that her students were surely loathe to admit. Once at the Giant supermarket in Dale City, Miss O' ran into one of her English students. He gaped and said, "Oh my God. You eat." He was truly thrown off balance by this revelation. I raised my eyebrows slightly and said, sweetly, "And I pee, too," and waved farewell as I headed off into the produce section.
As Miss O’s readers know, this
blogger woman lives primarily in her politically obsessed head, and what fills her
head then pours out onto an electronic page and is published when she hits
“publish,” and if her body is involved at all, it’s more or less limited to her
fingers and wrists and eyes. Oh, and the mouth/esophagus/stomach apparatus for
tea drinking; and I guess the heart and lungs for the air business; and the ol’ tushie and legs, to
say nothing of the inconvenience of popsicle toes because god forbid she get up and get some
socks to put on. And the bladder. Jesus the bladder. But what I mean is, it’s
about her thoughts rather than her sensations, the stuff of her blog.
Nothing physically occurs to you, either, probably, when you read these posts, once you
get over the first wave of nausea, anyway.
This week, though, your Miss O’ is
thinking seriously about the body. Mine, sure, but yours, too, and those over
there. These are not impure thoughts
I’m having, but neither are they free of filth. I have to preface this post by
saying that I kind of don’t really have a connection to my body as a thing. My body is here, I mean, but I
don’t really live in it. Oh, sure, I
learned to walk and run, I can pee and shit, and I got a period when I was in
sixth grade (boy, was my mom, Lynne, caught by surprise!); I get headaches and
colds and respiratory infections and suffer from IBS and broke my ankle in
college. The body has known the good and the bad: On the one hand, it’s
experienced arousal by human touch (do NOT tell my parents); on the other hand,
its pancreas doesn’t work as well as one would hope. But my body has never mattered to me. For example, I generally
go months on end without being physically held. (And lest you think I am
suffering, I can say honestly that if I am never touched again, I don’t think
I’ll notice.) Even as a teenager, when all the other girls were worrying about
their body images, their weight, the size of their breasts, I really did try to
pretend I cared about my body, but I’d get bored. “Yeah,” I’d say, by way of
commiseration. And then I’d go outside and roller skate smoothly up the
sidewalk.
But even the act of roller skating (or
playing tennis or kickball or tag) didn’t give me a sense of having a body
(until I’d fall on my ass or scrape my knees, or run too hard and too far and
get that stitch in my side). I do remember the sensation of vibrations that
rose up from the bottoms of my feet up to my head because of the friction of
rolling metal wheels on the concrete sidewalk, but I think I recall this only
because I associate it with the sounds
I had to endure in order to roll—and yet ears are part of the body, too. I must
have liked roller skating outside, because I did it well into high school, well
past the age when all my other friends were learning about fucking
making love by the light of a streetlamp in the backseats of cars, and learning
about how an altered state of mind induced by pot and booze could affect their
feelings as well as their fleshly organs.
I was kind of a backward kid,
developmentally, in case I need to spell this out, and I trace it now to my
lack of connection to my body. I tended to live in my imagination. It was
something I could take for granted, the having of a body, as we do, until we
can’t. Bruises, bumps, viruses, diseases—the discomforts and illnesses that can
befall a body remind us that we are only temporarily healthy. The death of a
body reminds us that we, too, are only temporarily here. However invincible one
may feel, however powerful, we need only experience the nonstop running of
mucus from our own noses to remind us how little power we really have on this
earth.
Virginia Woolf, my favorite writer,
lived very much in her body, terrified though she was of sex, which most adults
seem to believe is the primary reason to have a body (despite the examples of
Jesus and Jane Austen…and Miss O’). Woolf experienced her body primarily
through illness. One of her oddest and most satisfying essays is entitled, “On
Being Ill,” which takes as its subject the body. (A few years ago this essay
was published as a book unto itself, a very fancy volume indeed. That’s an
expensive way to read it, so if you can, buy it as part of a collection of
essays, because it will cost the same amount AND you will get all those other
marvelous essays to read.)
Here is the opening sentence:
“Considering
how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how
astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that
are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of
influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright
flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks
are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death
and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to
find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a
tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist’s arm-chair and confuse his
“Rinse the mouth—rinse the mouth” with the greeting of the Deity stooping from
the floor of Heaven to welcome us—when we think of this, as we are so
frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has
not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of
literature.”
—from “On Being Ill” by Virginia
Woolf, 1925, from The Moment and Other
Essays, page 9
Woolf goes on to talk about the absence
of the body in literature up to that
time, noting that for writers, “the body is a sheet of plain glass through
which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such
as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and non-existent.” She asserts
that in life, of course, the opposite it true: “All day, all night the body
intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the
warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within
can only gaze through the pane…” (page 10).
I reread this essay on Monday when
I was home from work with a cold. It got me thinking, Do writers today write about the body? And after a while I thought,
Do writers today write about anything
else? And by extension: Do readers
read about anything else? In fiction today, the big sellers—the Twilight vampire saga and the Fifty Shades of Grey pornography series
are surely body-centric. In nonfiction (which is not to say “fact-based”
writing), Bill O’Reilly, who appears as “author” on two bestselling books, Killing Kennedy and Killing Lincoln, is obsessed with the bodily assassination of two
presidents. While readers are buying these books and possibly even reading
them, the trouble is that, I suspect (based on my knowledge of the business of
publishing), none of these books are technically “authored,” which is to say
the chances are good that trained and dedicated writers did not, in fact, write
them. There are names on the covers, sure, but it’s not the same as being a writer,
or even the writer of that book.
In other words, bestselling writers
today would seem to be disembodied, even as their subjects are bodies. I find
this creepy. A very-much bodied writer once inscribed the following to me in
his book when I asked him to sign it: “I welcome you into the body of these
poems.” I have no doubt. And that was creepy, too. For me as a reader and lover
of words, I’m not asking for a denial of the body or a return to prudery, but
rather I suppose I am questioning the state of our spiritual lives as humans in light of all this body focus. We sort
of display the opposite of what Woolf was exploring. Mass killings of
children’s bodies, women’s vaginal ownership, and the fatherhood rights of
rapists fill the news. And between all the Facebook posts about weight loss,
lattes, gym experiences, and illnesses, to say nothing of the photos of
dinners, one may start to wonder if there is anything beyond the body human in our thoughts. I have started to notice
that our national and media obsessions with the body and its appearance, the
body and its longevity, the body and its reaction to pharmaceuticals, the body
and its artificial performance enhancements, and the body and how many extremes
it can endure are, well, they’re kinda, uh, boring.
I am bored.
In sum: We have bodies. They do
shit. They can experience shit. They shit. And I would add that what is done
unto the body heightens our awareness of having a body. (I read
somewhere—attributed as an African proverb—that if you think you are too small
to make a difference, try sleeping in a closed tent with a mosquito. I could
imagine saying this proverb using another, less political turn of phrase, maybe
as a meme using that Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka photo: Tell me more about your omnipotence, from the inside of a closed tent shared
with one mosquito.) But is the cash-bought improvement of the body, via
gyms or nutrition or drugs; or the cash-bought gratification of the body, via
drugs or porn or blood-sucking—is that really all we have to offer to the
literature of mankind right now? Is that
really all that readers want from literature? From life? Maybe we have lost a
sense of ourselves in our bodies, is what I’m saying.
Till Death Do Us Part
The
soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life. And the body is
born young and grows old. That is life’s tragedy.
—Oscar
Wilde
My editorial colleague, Dan
Shapiro, lost his father, Harvey, two weeks ago. The New York Times obituary alluded to the books and
reviews and other work he had done in his lifetime. These included editing the
New York Times Book Review, writing collections of poetry, as well has having the distinction of being the one to ask Martin
Luther King, Jr., to write what would become, “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
Not bad. Back at the job on Tuesday, Dan remarked, “When I was at his house, I
looked at the shelf of books my father had done, and I thought, ‘It’s nice
having a body of work to show for a life. That’s nice.’ It’s what I’d like to
have.”
A body of work to show for a life:
I mean, for all you are doing to keep your body working, to keep it handsome,
healthy, strong—if you are not keeping up your body in order to create work
that is of your heart and mind, and nourishing to your spirit—if you are not
doing that, I realized, you will have no legacy. Whatever you do for the body
now, that body will be so much dust in the end. And it got me thinking.
A body of work may or may not be
something that sits on a shelf.
I remember when all of my dad’s
brothers and sisters were still alive, all ten kids, and I was thinking the
other day of how only six are left now—that it’s happened, all this loss, over
a period of a few short years. The decline of their bodies (and the
disappearance of their place in the world) was hard for me to take in, partly
because I knew these uncles and aunts as raucous, earthy creatures, so present
were they for so long; but also, at the last reunion, I couldn’t quite believe
that they weren’t the adult powerhouses who were overseeing the kids and the
proceedings. My cousin, John, said to me, pointing to his children and their many young cousins, “You know, these kids are looking at
us the way we used to look at them,” and he gestured to a picnic table peopled
with decrepit, thick-waisted, nameless folks, vaguely known to be related
somehow to all of us, but now no longer capable of remembering stories of the world as
they once had known it—of remembering yesterday,
for that matter—so focused had they become on their infirmities. “We are becoming
the old guard,” John said, and I said, “But we don’t know anything.” And we
laughed. “I guess they didn’t, either.” (I look to my contemporaries, though,
and feel a little better: I was born in 1964, the same year as First Lady
Michelle Obama, and my personal First Comedian, Stephen Colbert. My generation
could do worse.) I remember looking around then, and then talking to John’s mom
about it later. I wrote this about it:
The morning after the big family
reunion, Aunt Mary stares at me
across the kitchen table as Uncle
Terry cooks breakfast.
“What’s the point?” she asks. “I mean,
you get up in the morning,
have some coffee, go to work, come
home, nothin’ on TV that night
so you make a kid. I looked around at
all those people and I realized,
half of this is my fault.” She pauses
as if to puff on the cigarette
she no longer smokes. “Let’s have
some bacon.”
For the old guard at any reunion:
We are their body of work. Us, and
bacon.
Every Body Loves Some Body
This week I got my friend Quinn to
go to Film Forum with me to see the French film, Amour. I’d seen the previews and was entranced by what I saw and
also scared to see the whole thing. I was not wrong: It’s not a film for the
faint of heart where ageing is concerned—not even sure anyone should see it,
and yet it’s a brilliant movie, astonishing for the way filmmaker Michael
Haneke holds a viewer in rapt attention for two hours of almost nothing happening,
except the ending of a life. Afterward, devastated and drained, I reflected on
what I’d experienced; I realized that the title, “Love,” is a spiritual idea,
really—tied to emotions and philosophy—but the movie’s subject is entirely
corporal. This is a film that is dedicated to the body: the body that eats, the
body that washes dishes, the body that plays piano, the body that listens to
the music, the body that reads, the body that travels to a concert, the body
that vacuums the rug, the body that has a stroke, the body that others must
lift, bed, feed, wash, and dress even as it declines. Love as a condition of the
body is the theme of this movie. Whatever the songs say or the poems
declare about love being heaven sent to the heart, love belongs to bodies. My
response to the movie was a physical response: I had to walk for a while
afterward. I found myself crying in the street. Once home in bed, I woke up
three times in the night and paced my apartment. Emotions drive such reactions,
yes, but it is the body that responds to the emotion, that feels the power of
it.
Last night I had dinner for the
first time at the home of my friends Anthony and DaRon. DaRon and I met when our
friend, Ryan (who also came to dinner), put us in a show together with a dozen
other actors, a dreadful teen tragedy from the 1980s called Alky about teen alcoholism, which we
performed at the People’s Improvisational Theater, the way sincere but badly-directed teen actors might perform it, and
so it was cruelly hilarious. DaRon and Anthony, who got married last year, gave
me a ride home one night when we realized we live in the same area of Queens. DaRon
is a singer and actor, and this requires him to be in peak condition in both
voice and body; Anthony is a visiting nurse who deals with myriad patients (and
their bodies) every day. I learned that Anthony’s first serious boyfriend died
of complications from AIDS, and Anthony has just finished a draft of a book
about it, 17 years after the fact. Among
other things, we all talked about grief, what happens to us in that process. We
had all known grief in recent years, over many things, not only deaths, and
then this led to us talking about what we were creating out of the grief—a
book, a show, a marriage, volunteer work—so many things were possible through
the use of our bodies as we have them now. And then we poured out brandy and
watched hilarious videos and cuddled with dogs. It did this body good.
So what will be my body of work?
What will be yours? And how to cope with the finish of the body we currently
possess? These are important questions, dammit, and I am asking them. Did I answer anything? No idea. I will doubtless return to these questions after I've heated up my homemade minestrone soup and had a little drop of the Tullamore Dew. You know—after I've nourished my body I often forget I have.
Surely there's a poem for this. (Whenever she was ill, Virginia Woolf craved poetry.) Possibly the best poem I know that
ties together the physical body and one’s body of work is Marge Piercy’s poem,
“To Be of Use.” (You can find it on The Writer’s Almanac online.) I’ve included
it before, but here it is again, because (sick or well) one really can’t read this poem too often.
Love, love.
Miss O’
To be of
use
by Marge
Piercy
The people I love
the best
jump into work
head first
without dallying
in the shallows
and swim off with
sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to
become natives of that element,
the black sleek
heads of seals
bouncing like
half submerged balls.
I love people who
harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like
water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the
mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has
to be done, again and again.
I want to be with
people who submerge
in the task, who
go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row
and pass the bags along,
who stand in the
line and haul in their places,
who are not
parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a
common rhythm
when the food
must come in or the fire be put out.
The work of the
world is common as mud.
Botched, it
smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing
worth doing well done
has a shape that
satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras
for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that
held corn, are put in museums
but you know they
were made to be used.
The pitcher cries
for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.
"To
be of use" by Marge Piercy from Circles on the Water. © Alfred A. Knopf.
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