topic/having-a-body

Ironically, those of us who most believe in physical, operational eloquence are the very ones most cut off from the body. To build the working thing that is a program, we perform "labor" that is sedentary to the point of near immobility, and we must give ourselves up almost entirely to language. Believers in the functional, nonverbal worth of things, we live in a world where waving one's arms accomplishes nothing, and where we must write, write, write in odd programming languages and email. Software engineering is an oxymoron. We are engineers but we don't build anything in the physical sense of the word. We think. We type. It's all grammar.

Cut off from real working things, we construct a substitute object: the program. We treat it as if it could be specified like machinery and assembled out of standard parts. We say we "engineered" it; when we put the pieces of code together, we call it "a build." And, cut off from the real body, we construct a substitute body: ourselves online. We treat it as if it were our actual self, our real life. Over time, it does indeed become our life.

[...] She always blushed in advance at the idea that she was going to blush. She often longed to feel free and easy about her body, the way most of the women around her did. She had even invented a special course in self-persuasion: she would repeat to herself that at birth every human being received one out of the millions of available bodies, as one would receive an allotted room out of the millions of rooms in an enormous hotel; that consequently the body was fortuitous and impersonal, only a ready-made, borrowed thing. She would repeat this to herself in different ways, but she could never manage to feel it. This mind-body dualism was alien to her. She was too much at one with her body; that is why she always felt such anxiety about it.

6/3/42

I am too familiar to myself—too old—and rather boring. The avenues of varied goals are closing up. And wherever, even, I commence the long pull anew, I shall have with me the same teeth with the same fillings, the same aches on rainy days, the same wrinkles in my forehead. Is this some chance unfortunate combination of elements in me? In my body? In my brain? This scar upon my finger, this birthmark on my arm—should they have been elsewhere, perhaps half an inch? How would another carry them, and how notice them or how forget them? I feel my grave about my shoulders, the light grows dim never to rise again, my breath is feeble and disinterested. Oh, but I shall live so much longer! And there will be moments, whole weeks, whole years when there will be no grave and no mold-smell. But intervals there will be, too, when I, regaining energy meted by the dry crabbed hand of sleep, of food, of intercourse, will see as though my eyes turned inward to reality, the hollow-orbed face of death, the flaking skin like medieval painted saints, and know then that life is one long business of dying.

'[...] People who live alone have no responsibility in the evenings. One fears a number of things--that one's body could vanish, that human beings may really be what they appear to be at twilight, that one might not be allowed to walk without a stick, that it might be a good idea to go to church and pray at the top of one's voice in order to be looked at and acquire a body.'

[...] When I came in and sat down and looked round I realized it was a Roman church, full of plaster statues and bad art, realistic art. I hated the statues, the crucifix, all the emphasis on the human body. I was trying to escape from the human body and all it needed. I thought I could believe in some kind of a God that bore no relation to ourselves, something vague, amorphous, cosmic, to which I had promised something and which had given me something in return - stretching out of the vague into the concrete human life, like a powerful vapour moving among the chairs and walls. One day I too would become part of that vapour - I would escape myself for ever. And then I came into that dark church in Park Road and saw the bodies standing around me on all the altars - the hideous plaster statues with their complacent faces, and I remembered that they believed in the resurrection of the body, the body I wanted destroyed for ever. I had done so much injury with this body. How could I want to preserve any of it for eternity, and suddenly I remembered a phrase of Richard's - about human beings inventing doctrines to satisfy their desires, and I thought how wrong he is. If I were to invent a doctrine it would be that the body was never born again, that it rotted with last year's vermin. It's strange how the human mind swings back and forth, from one extreme to another. Does truth lie at some point of the pendulum's swing, at a point where it never rests, not in the dull perpendicular mean where it dangles in the end like a windless flag, but at an angle, nearer one extreme than another? If only a miracle could stop the pendulum at an angle of sixty degrees, one would believe the truth was there. Well, the pendulum swung today and I thought, instead of my own body, of Maurice's. I thought of certain lines life had put on his face as personal as a line of his writing: I thought of a new scar on his shoulder that wouldn't have been there if once he hadn't tried to protect another man's body from a falling wall. [...]

[...] He is now 'in a free state', but ends his tale like this: 'All that my freedom has brought me is the knowledge that I have a face and have a body, that I must feed this body and clothe this body for a certain number of years. Then it will be over.'

It's been going on like this for two weeks now, since the moment I arrived in Paris. Robert was waiting for me at the Gare des Invalides. He didn't see me right away. He was pacing the sidewalk with the little steps of an old man, and suddenly I thought, 'He's old!' He smiled at me; his eyes were as young as ever, but his face was beginning to crumble; it will go on crumbling until the day it decomposes. Since then, I haven't stopped thinking: 'He's good for ten or fifteen years, twenty years, perhaps. Twenty years is so little time! And then he'll die. He'll die before me.' There are nights when I awaken with a start and say to myself, 'He'll die before me.' He was talking with Henri this morning, they were saying they would have to start all over again, that one always started all over again, that one can't do otherwise; they were making plans, they were arguing. And I was looking at his teeth; it's the only constant thing in a body - the teeth, where the skeleton bares itself. I was looking at Robert's skeleton and I was saying to myself, 'He's waiting for his hour? The hour would come. We're allowed to linger a while, some more, some less, but none of us are ever spared. I shall see Robert stretched out on a bed, his skin waxen, a false smile on his lips; I'll be alone before his body. What lies, those peaceful monuments of stone sleeping side by side in their crypts, and those couples entwined on their funeral urns! They can mix our ashes together as much as they want to, but they won't unite our deaths. For twenty years, I believed we were living together; but no, each of us is alone, imprisoned in his body, with his arteries hardening under his withering skin, with his liver, his kidneys, wearing out and his blood turning pale, with his death which ripens noiselessly inside him and which separates him from everyone else.

You know—I almost do want it to be true. The permission to just fuck around and live alone forever and never need anyone else’s company in particular, and for that never to seem lacking. But maybe it’s the fact that the body decays that makes this kind of intimacy important.

So that someone finds you if you have a stroke? So that someone’s there to clean up your vomit after the chemo?

Yeah, I guess so.

But if that’s the role, then it seems like the selection process is asking all the wrong questions. Or it’s like—people fall in love for reasons that are nice at the time and totally useless a year later.