Bookmarker tag: topic/having-a-body (21 notes)

Eyes the broad-shouldered faceless character that symbolizes Men's Room, does Sternberg, and struggles with himself. He's needed a bowel movement for hours, and since the LordAloft 7:10 lifted things have gotten critical. He tried, back at O'Hare. But he was unable to, because he was afraid to, afraid that Mark, who has the look of someone who never just has to, might enter the rest room and see Sternberg's shoes under a stall door and know that he, Sternberg, was having a bowel movement in the stall, infer that Sternberg had bowels, and thus organs, and thus a body. Like many Americans of his generation in this awkwardest of post-Imperial decades, an age suspended between exhaustion and replenishment, between input too ordinary to process and input too intense to bear, Sternberg is deeply ambivalent about being embodied; an informing fear that, were he really just an organism, he'd be nothing more than an ism of his organs.

[...] Ironically, a good part of his anticorporeal stance (it was his idea to call having a body Corporeal Punishment) derives from his non_fatal flaw, the skin trouble, the skin trouble itself deriving from a weekend years past, just before a cattle call for a Wisk spot he didn't get, a weekend of solo camping and getting-into-collar-soiled-character, with a tent, in the Berkshires, West of Boston, during which he'd contracted a mild spatter of poison sumac, and had purchased a discount generic brand of poison-sumac medicine he curses now and forever (like most terse-labeled generics the product was untrustworthy, turned out in fact to be medicine for the _sumac, not the sufferer therefrom, but if the label says MEDICINE FOR POISON SUMAC what the fuck are you going to think, standing there?) that had set his face, neck, chest and back aflame: pulsing, cystic, volcanic, allergic, clotted, almost sacredly scarred. The sumac is so bad it hurts--which of course is a constant reminder that it's there, on his body--and it won't go away, no sooner healed by brand-name antitoxin than reinfected. The whole thing's just pretty loathsome, and you can bet Sternberg loathes it. He's unhappy, but in that comparatively neat and easy way of those who are at least pretty sure they know why they're unhappy, and what to curse, now and forever.

Cause it's only dark, generally, back there in his eye's guts. Sometimes a spidery system of synaptic color, if he tries to move the bad eye too quickly. But usually nothing. But it'll heal, anyway. It'll come around. It's all in his head, he knows. Youthful-rebellion injury. Mrs. Sternberg warned from day one that the boy that does a forbidden thing, such as like for example crosses his eyes just to hurt a mother: that boy finds they stay like that. Well-known fact. Look it up in whatever resources orthodox mothers with lapsed sons access. Like early to bed: it's the sleep before dark that's most important. Like don't cry: you're better than whoever laughs at you. Like try this lotion, for sumac.

Here's the fresh sumac cyst, though, here, boy, between his eyes. It's darkened richly since the last cyst-check in O'Hare, matured from that tomato pink to the same plum shade as the airport lounge. The mirror does not lie.

Your average deformity sufferer has a love-hate thing with mirrors: you need to see how things are progressing, but you also hate it that they're progressing. Sternberg's not at all sure he likes the idea of sharing a mirror with a whole lot of actors. He's not sure he wants to rent a bureaucratic car and head West without sleep or soap for a Funhouse the brochure says is carefully designed utilizing mostly systems of mirrors. A crowded, mirrored place ... Sternberg ponders the idea as the automatic sink fills gurgling to his slit of the emergency drain at its rim. This sumac cyst between is eyes feels fucking alive, man. Pulses painfully with the squeak of his head's blood. The cyst is beginning to show a little bit of white at the acme. Not good. Clear evidence of white blood cells, which implies blood cells, and so a bloodstream. From there it doesn't take genius to figure out that you've got a body. A bit of white at an infected cyst's cap is pretty much embodiedness embodied. No way he's messing with the fucker, though. It would just love to be messed with. Would feed on it. And the stage after plum is eggplant, big and dusky and curved, like a new organ in itself, to be an ism of.

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.

The human beauty we're talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings' reconciliation with the fact of having a body.

'[...] 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.'

[...] 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.'

I got used to it, in a way, being this sack of skin full of problems, because having a body doesn't give you the right to have one that works correctly. Having a body doesn't seem to give you any rights at all.

When I got home, I went to my room and took a single plastic-wrapped bandage from the drawer. I am normal, I thought. I have a body like anyone else. Then I scratched my arm open until it bled, just a faint spot of blood, widening into a droplet. I counted to three and afterward opened the bandage, placed it carefully over my arm, and disposed of the plastic wrap.

Was it not good? I said.

Can we talk?

You used to like it, didn't you?

Can I ask you something? he said. Do you want me to leave her?

I looked at him then. He looked tired, and I could see that he hated everything I was doing to him. My body felt completely disposable, like a placeholder for something more valuable. I fantasized about taking it apart and lining my limbs up side by side to compare them.

No, I said. I don't want that.

I don't know what to do. I've been feeling fucking awful about it. You seem so upset with me and I don't know how I can make you happy.

Well, maybe we shouldn't see each other any more.

Yeah, he said. Okay. I guess you're probably right.

[...] It would be no novel observation to remark that getting a tattoo is very painful, although it is a peculiar quality of pain that it never really gets old. All bodily pain begins with shock at the audacity of physical trespass, a kind of astonishment at the frankly unbelievable insinuation that one is not, in fact, the center of the universe. [...]

In truth, I was collecting pains, pinning them like insects to the corkboard of my brain, scribbling little labels below. Together I hoped they might testify to a deeper metamorphosis than the mere rearrangement of flesh [...]

Recently I met a man on a bike outside a produce shop, around the same age as my husband and visibly fatigued, sweat dripping down his ashen face. He asked the owner of the shop for a glass of water, and she acted as if she hadn’t understood, though it’s the same word in Portuguese as it is in Spanish: água. I bought a bottle from the fridge and asked him his name. He looked up when he heard me speak. Jesús was his name, he had been in Boa Vista for six days, and the only money he’d made was twenty reais (around $5) for mowing someone’s lawn. Another migrant had lent him a bike so he could look for work. I told him it was dangerous to be out at midday. It was over 100 degrees, and the streets were deserted. He would do any kind of job, he went on, he only wanted to send his mother food for her to eat. That’s how he said it, comida para ella comer. I went to the car to get some groceries. His face tightened as he looked into the plastic bag, not from disappointment but because he clearly despised himself; his need for water, his need to eat. He took my hand, squeezed it gently, and got back on the bike.

I teach a creative writing class at the immigrant aid center inside the university. In a recent class I asked my students to write down a memory, any memory, using all five senses. A 15-year-old girl stood up to share hers.

“My happiest memory,” she began, “is waking up in my bed . . .”

Then she was crying too hard to continue.

Who I am is certainly part of how I look and vice versa. I want to know where I begin and end, what size I am, and what suits me. People who say the body is unimportant floor me. How can they believe that? I don't want to be a disembodied brain floating in a glass jar in a sci-fi movie, and I don't believe I'll ever be a disembodied spirit floating ethereally about. I am not "in" this body, I am this body. Waist or no waist.

But all the same, there's something about me that doesn't change, hasn't changed, through all the remkarkable, exciting, alarming, and disappointing transformations my body has gone through. There is a person who isn't only what she looks like, and to find her and know her I have to look through, look in, look deep. Not only in space, but in time.

I am not lost until I lose my memory.

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.

The question stayed with me - Do you have to go to the bathroom and eat to be alive? - because it seemed to me that Breazeal's intent was to cite the most basic acts required by human bodily existence, and then see them as ridiculous, even humiliating.

But after a while I cam eto the conclusion: Maybe yes. Given the amount of time living creatures devote to food and its attendant states - food! the stuff that sustains us - I decided that, yes, there might be something crucial about the necessities of eating and eliminating that defines us. How much of our state of being is dependent upon being hungry, having eaten, being full, shitting. Hunger! Our word for everything from nourishment to passionate desire. Satisfied! Meaning everything from well fed to sexually fulfilled to mentally soothed. Shit! Our word for human waste and an expletive of impatience. THe more I thought about it, the more I decided that huge swaths of existence would be impenetrable - indescribable, unprogrammable, utterly unable to be represented - to a creature that did not eat or shit.

In this sense, artificial-life researchers are as body-loathing as any medieval theologian. They seek to separate the "principles" of life and sentience - the spirit - from the dirty muck from which it sprang. As Breazeal put it, they envision "a set of animate qualities that have nothing to do with reproduction and going to the bathroom," as if these messy experiences of alimentation and birth, these deepest biological imperatives - stay alive, eat, create others who will stay alive - were not the foundation, indeed, the source, of intelligence; as if intelligence were not simply one of the many strategies that evolved to serve the creatural striving for life. If sentience doesn't come from the body's desire to live [...], where else would it come from? To believe that sentience can arise from anywhere else - machines, software, things with no fear of death - is to believe, ipso facto, in the separability of mind and matter, flesh and spirit, body and soul.

I’LL ADMIT IT, the first time I saw two women boxers collapse into each other’s arms after a bout at a recreational boxing show, I thought, isn’t that just like women? But then I saw two men do it ten minutes later, same smiles, same sighs. There are two elemental life functions that we humans think about alternately too little and too much: eating and sex. Men traditionally have had a third, fighting, and it gives them their perspective on the other two. In a woman who has taken on the third, you see a change in attitude that can take many forms. She stops snacking. She stops “dieting.” She forgets to eat. She eats pasta at midnight. She wears sweatpants—a lot. She stops dating. She kisses her biceps. She picks up a man at the gym for a one-night stand; he’s a nice guy, she’ll see him back at the gym Saturday, probably. She comes out of the closet. She gets manhandled by her trainer every day and doesn’t give it a thought. She feels after her first spar the same way she felt after the first time she had sex—inarticulately emotional, disappointed, empty, cynical, with a strange new sense of alignment. Anxious to do it, discover it, again. Now there is a vital third engagement with life, a way to feel one’s body consume and be consumed, to know and be one’s physical self, to excite and exhaust, to touch and be touched, to unleash her power.

Hefty reminders of corporeal nature. I’m always amazed by how successfully we do in fact banish all that from daily discourse. We all have our little dramas in the bathroom most days. Something’s not quite right. You can see the way a certain bit is going. And we’ve all got our back pains and our knee aches and so on, and yet people can spend the whole day together and it’s never mentioned—everyone’s got their little cargo of health anxieties, their little cargo of entropy.

LOSING FAITH IN GOD in the 21st century is an anachronistic experience. You end up contending with the kinds of things the West dealt with more than a hundred years ago: materialism, the end of history, the death of the soul. During the early years of my faithlessness, I read a lot of existentialist novels, filling their margins with empathetic exclamation points. “It seems to me sometimes that I do not really exist, but I merely imagine I exist,” muses the protagonist of André Gide’s The Counterfeiters. “The thing that I have the greatest difficulty in believing in, is my own reality.” When I think back on that period of my life, what I recall most viscerally is an unnamable sense of dread — an anxiety that would appear without warning and expressed itself most frequently on the landscape of my body. There were days I woke in a panic, certain that I’d lost some essential part of myself in the fume of a blackout, and would work my fingers across my nose, my lips, my eyebrows, and my ears until I assured myself that everything was intact. My body had become strange to me; it seemed insubstantial. I went out of my way to avoid subway grates because I believed I could slip through them. One morning, on the train home from work, I became convinced that my flesh was melting into the seat.

At the time, I would have insisted that my rituals of self-abuse — drinking, pills, the impulse to put my body in danger in ways I now know were deliberate — were merely efforts to escape; that I was contending, however clumsily, with the overwhelming despair at the absence of God. But at least one piece of that despair came from the knowledge that my body was no longer a sacred vessel; that it was not a temple of the holy spirit, formed in the image of God and intended to carry me into eternity; that my body was matter, and any harm I did to it was only aiding the unstoppable process of entropy for which it was destined. To confront this reality after believing otherwise is to experience perhaps the deepest sense of loss we are capable of as humans. It’s not just about coming to terms with the fact that you will die. It has something to do with suspecting there is no difference between your human flesh and the plastic seat of the train. It has to do with the inability to watch your reflection appear and vanish in a window without coming to believe you are identical with it.

The problems had started in the factory where you worked [...] one afternoon we got a call from the factory informing us that something heavy had fallen on you. Your back was mangled, crushed. They told us it would be several years before you could walk again, before you could even walk.

The first weeks you stayed completely in bed, without moving. You’d lost the ability to speak. All you could do was scream. It was the pain. It woke you and made you scream in the night. Your body could no longer bear its own existence. Every movement, even the tiniest shift, woke up the ravaged muscles. You were aware of your body only in pain, through pain.

Then your speech returned. At first you could only ask for food or drink, then over time you began to use longer sentences, to express your desires, your cravings, your fits of anger. Your speech didn’t replace your pain. Let’s be clear. The pain never went away.

Along with the freedom and the space, that is a blessing you would have received from the feral way that children among us lived: seeing blood every day on a kitten’s neck, a father’s hand, the ground beneath a slaughtered hog hanging from a hook. Knowing in your own bones how fragile and fleeting a body is.

Allow me to apologize for my self-absorption. My virus
is your virus, ours is a virulent commonwealth.
We breed them together, refine them, borrow them
from friends and strangers, camels and bats,
as my body fights its infection the global corpus
combats our latest invader—retrovirus, ebolavirus, coronavirus—
we are besieged, we sicken, we counterattack, we die.
But illness leads you inward, away from the tribe,
the clan, the calculus of multitudes
vs. singletons that constitutes American thought.
Interiority is a mode of social distancing.
Here, in the hospital, I am me, alone, a being
frightened of its own mechanical failings,
like a bystander trapped in a broken elevator.
I feel, to myself, like a construct, a built thing, a city
in which I encounter my own bacterial hordes as strangers
passing silently through a maze of narrow alleys.
I watch my heart pulsing and I do not think,
That is me, there beats my engine,
I think, Ah, skillful machine, as if it were an iPhone.
I feel the body’s otherness all around me.
I compose the urgent letter in its envelope,
I carry the scepter in its keep.
It is a prison and a vehicle of emancipation, a strong horse.
My legs trot and canter, my hair grows unlicensed,
my lungs expand and contract automatically.
I am me, alone, but how do I happen
to be here? What am I
if not my body?
Who am I if not that it?
The doctors tell me the many ways I might die
but not how I come to be alive,
existence is a fever of unknown origin,
a pandemonium of desires—
I want to live, I want to breathe, I want
to see as vividly as Vermeer and as broadly as a common fly
and as encyclopedically as the mantis shrimp
though I cannot understand why
it would need to differentiate ten million colors
or how anyone could measure its ability to do so—
the Ishihara test?—simple questionnaires?
I want my heart to shake its defiant fist at the sky forever.
I want my soul to swell with sorrow as with joy.
Most of all, with a desperation that embarrasses me,
as if I had been jailed a decade, I want to go home.

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.