*
Soul and Body rush to get ready for dinner. Body comes in from the pantry with a white dogbowl, full, only partially full.
*
Set it "DOWN*, the dog tries to say. Set it down *NOW*.
*
I love you, Soul wants to say, but the words won't come out. Body is stiff as she or he moves 'round the room. Hurt pride, feeling unloved.
*
Must we go to the same restaurant, again and again? Soul asks. (Inside, saying to himself or herself, gotta be nicer, why can't I, why can't I?)
*
Body (stiff and formal, at least for a Body): I go to the same restaurant every time because I'm *loyal*. And that's why I'm still with you, don't you get it? Don't knock something that is like a benefit. Assuming that --- assuming that ---
Places the white dogbowl smack in the center of the blue placemat on the floor. Food gets eaten. Quickly, quickly, the food gets eaten. Then the dog races around the room.
*
I may have eaten but I'm hungry.
*
A closet slamming, a sound of an ignition. They are gone and the dog is alone. That is, never alone because God is here. Dog chews a box of kleenex and jumps onto the couch, making all the cushions bounce. Nose to window, lace curtain dachsund.
God says solitude is good. Dog wants to be worshipful but cannot believe solitude is good. God, I ask you over and over not to let the humans leave the house!
Soul and Body have like left him, the most soulful guy in the house. Why am I rejected again and again?
*
Mopes. Prays. Gets closer to God. The dog waits and waits for the 2 hunters to get home and
tend
to
him
NOW
And this concludes the meditations for the month of July. August will be about the theme of getting well. Bye now.
Go with God (whoever you are).
*
Thursday, July 29, 2004
Tuesday, July 27, 2004
Story: A flight (Part 3 of 3)
*
“Either the Soul argues with the Body from a position of moral superiority or it shares guilt with the Body (and often deserves more blame).” Michel-Andre Bossy on medieval debates between body and soul
*
Sometimes Body would wake up, open the curtain, step into the sunlight and stand motionless for an hour. He was so grateful for his existence, although he didn’t know why. Didn’t know why to be grateful. Didn’t know why he existed. An ignorance within grace, more or less cupped.
Meanwhile his wife seemed to be withering like an unwatered plant, though she was as beautiful as ever. He loved all the aspects of her that he understood but they seemed to grow constantly smaller. Now she began talking so fast that no one could understand her. She would come home with her power clothes in disarray and the smell of strangers on her fingers and her neck, and yet – and yet she didn’t have the secretive glow of a woman who was cheating on her husband. Whatever she was doing with those strangers might be anything you like but not fun.
Her movements in the front yard were brittle and strangely cautious like those of a frail dowager. It was odd that as the two seemed to move into separation it was the Soul that became mechanical while the Body continued to live with that slow, grounded organic manner that banished the thought of machinery. It was odd – and it wrung one’s heart.
*
Their counselor suggested a shared vacation, something new. The 2 of them sat in the airport surrounded by mismatched luggage. Sarah got up and paced around, then said suddenly, See you in 10 short minutes. Then she was gone. Emil began to wonder (the first time? not the first time) whether she was addicted to some drug.
He watched her go into the airport’s Platonic Lounge, reserved for high-fliers, the preferred travellers. No doubt mere bodies were not allowed, only elites, only souls. A half hour passed, almost an hour, then the flight was announced. He stood awkwardly over the luggage, picked up some of hers, looking ridiculous, evoking laughter from nearby children. Oh yes, his weight was ballooning again. Stress. Then a kindly stranger in a flowered shirt offered to watch his stuff. But when he ran into the Lounge, no one was there that he recognized as his own or remotely related. She was gone. Then another hour passed, then two, then three. Paralyzed desolate hours too heavy for a timepiece to hold. Had she gotten on their plane without him? How could she have done that without the boarding pass he held?
*
It seemed to be a day or 2 later that he finally reached home. He threw himself onto the couch and began to bawl, silly Body, doing just the kind of thing she most despised but then of course she wasn’t there to be disgusted and that was why he was bawling. At some hazy point he noticed the message light flashing on the phone, pressed the button. A completely unfamiliar voice began to lecture him about inner peace. “Remember we dissolve into nothingness at the very edge of what we are, so dig deeply into what you now are. Quickly before it disintegrates.” What nonsense, the Body said to himself. the wisdom is within disintegration, not somewhere squirreled away off to the side. This was one thing a Body always knew.
*
One also knew that the worst human rejection held hope embedded like an arrow sticking out of its side and pointing outward. Because denial is a word God rarely uses. It’s a human word, we humans practically eat up our rejection, it’s like our bread and butter. We think it gives us a license to sin. But God sees this and us differently.
A few hours later the doorbell rang and a co-worker stood at the door holding Sarah and glowering. Hey, did you forget something? Or maybe somebody?
His wife looked like a giant worn-out doll with a crude parody of a woman’s features painted on her face. The nose, the cheeks, the eyes were all emptied out. Whatever drug she’d taken, it was busy demanding payment.
Then the 2 of them sat awkwardly on the couch drinking tea, looking more like the fragments of a misfired blind date than members of a seasoned marriage. Maybe it was good for them to admit they didn’t know each other. At least Soul didn’t look like a zombie. She was once again recognizable.
*
All right, stop it, she said.
Stop what? he asked.
*
I mean I will stop it if I only know what.
*
Stop smirking at me and floating those thought balloons in my face. I know I don’t deserve you. I keep trying to die and failing – and you always take me back. You’re acting like family and it’s embarrassing. Your forgiveness seems to diminish me.
*
Right but I can’t help it, it’s my makeup, Body said. It’s not like I even want to live with you, honey, although I do, but it’s something more. I love you but I don’t want to, it’s deeper than that. We’re *married*, what can I do? When you go off on your jags, I’m not even here, I don’t even exist.
So it’s like I have to ask you this favor: don’t keep taking my own self away. Let’s be this thing we are, let’s be it for real, because I’m not sure we basically have a choice, except maybe to die. Now I can see the disdain in your eyes, you think I’m stupid, just a Body. But if what I’m saying is stupid, my love, then take it for what it is. Because I *am* stupid and I know that well. But go ahead and come back anyway.
End of Part 3 of 3.
*
“Either the Soul argues with the Body from a position of moral superiority or it shares guilt with the Body (and often deserves more blame).” Michel-Andre Bossy on medieval debates between body and soul
*
Sometimes Body would wake up, open the curtain, step into the sunlight and stand motionless for an hour. He was so grateful for his existence, although he didn’t know why. Didn’t know why to be grateful. Didn’t know why he existed. An ignorance within grace, more or less cupped.
Meanwhile his wife seemed to be withering like an unwatered plant, though she was as beautiful as ever. He loved all the aspects of her that he understood but they seemed to grow constantly smaller. Now she began talking so fast that no one could understand her. She would come home with her power clothes in disarray and the smell of strangers on her fingers and her neck, and yet – and yet she didn’t have the secretive glow of a woman who was cheating on her husband. Whatever she was doing with those strangers might be anything you like but not fun.
Her movements in the front yard were brittle and strangely cautious like those of a frail dowager. It was odd that as the two seemed to move into separation it was the Soul that became mechanical while the Body continued to live with that slow, grounded organic manner that banished the thought of machinery. It was odd – and it wrung one’s heart.
*
Their counselor suggested a shared vacation, something new. The 2 of them sat in the airport surrounded by mismatched luggage. Sarah got up and paced around, then said suddenly, See you in 10 short minutes. Then she was gone. Emil began to wonder (the first time? not the first time) whether she was addicted to some drug.
He watched her go into the airport’s Platonic Lounge, reserved for high-fliers, the preferred travellers. No doubt mere bodies were not allowed, only elites, only souls. A half hour passed, almost an hour, then the flight was announced. He stood awkwardly over the luggage, picked up some of hers, looking ridiculous, evoking laughter from nearby children. Oh yes, his weight was ballooning again. Stress. Then a kindly stranger in a flowered shirt offered to watch his stuff. But when he ran into the Lounge, no one was there that he recognized as his own or remotely related. She was gone. Then another hour passed, then two, then three. Paralyzed desolate hours too heavy for a timepiece to hold. Had she gotten on their plane without him? How could she have done that without the boarding pass he held?
*
It seemed to be a day or 2 later that he finally reached home. He threw himself onto the couch and began to bawl, silly Body, doing just the kind of thing she most despised but then of course she wasn’t there to be disgusted and that was why he was bawling. At some hazy point he noticed the message light flashing on the phone, pressed the button. A completely unfamiliar voice began to lecture him about inner peace. “Remember we dissolve into nothingness at the very edge of what we are, so dig deeply into what you now are. Quickly before it disintegrates.” What nonsense, the Body said to himself. the wisdom is within disintegration, not somewhere squirreled away off to the side. This was one thing a Body always knew.
*
One also knew that the worst human rejection held hope embedded like an arrow sticking out of its side and pointing outward. Because denial is a word God rarely uses. It’s a human word, we humans practically eat up our rejection, it’s like our bread and butter. We think it gives us a license to sin. But God sees this and us differently.
A few hours later the doorbell rang and a co-worker stood at the door holding Sarah and glowering. Hey, did you forget something? Or maybe somebody?
His wife looked like a giant worn-out doll with a crude parody of a woman’s features painted on her face. The nose, the cheeks, the eyes were all emptied out. Whatever drug she’d taken, it was busy demanding payment.
Then the 2 of them sat awkwardly on the couch drinking tea, looking more like the fragments of a misfired blind date than members of a seasoned marriage. Maybe it was good for them to admit they didn’t know each other. At least Soul didn’t look like a zombie. She was once again recognizable.
*
All right, stop it, she said.
Stop what? he asked.
*
I mean I will stop it if I only know what.
*
Stop smirking at me and floating those thought balloons in my face. I know I don’t deserve you. I keep trying to die and failing – and you always take me back. You’re acting like family and it’s embarrassing. Your forgiveness seems to diminish me.
*
Right but I can’t help it, it’s my makeup, Body said. It’s not like I even want to live with you, honey, although I do, but it’s something more. I love you but I don’t want to, it’s deeper than that. We’re *married*, what can I do? When you go off on your jags, I’m not even here, I don’t even exist.
So it’s like I have to ask you this favor: don’t keep taking my own self away. Let’s be this thing we are, let’s be it for real, because I’m not sure we basically have a choice, except maybe to die. Now I can see the disdain in your eyes, you think I’m stupid, just a Body. But if what I’m saying is stupid, my love, then take it for what it is. Because I *am* stupid and I know that well. But go ahead and come back anyway.
End of Part 3 of 3.
*
Monday, July 26, 2004
Poem: Little donkey
[Hey, don't think of the Messiah riding into Jerusalem, think of Balaam on his poor mistreated very clever ass!]
*
Poor body little donkey
always has a soul
on her back that is heavy
and unwilling and unfaithful.
This soul wishes to be saved
from the body’s thrashings
and cries like David
for a set of wings.
But a body isn’t
like snake skin—
not a garment
to take off & put on.
Her nerves connect
to whatever transcendence
a soul can expect
to experience
and without her soul can have
no hope now or to come
of touching the hem of
this bliss he excludes her from.
*
*
Poor body little donkey
always has a soul
on her back that is heavy
and unwilling and unfaithful.
This soul wishes to be saved
from the body’s thrashings
and cries like David
for a set of wings.
But a body isn’t
like snake skin—
not a garment
to take off & put on.
Her nerves connect
to whatever transcendence
a soul can expect
to experience
and without her soul can have
no hope now or to come
of touching the hem of
this bliss he excludes her from.
*
Friday, July 23, 2004
Story: A flight (Part 2 of 3)
*
He had always been more Body than Soul, which meant: always in the grip of something bigger than himself. Even before the explicit conversion, he had always known of the “higher power” and the wider sense of intentionality. It was always higher and wider than his own never very impressive self.
Getting related to it was something else though. That was hard and that was continuous.
*
There was all the bed wetting when he was a child. He did not have any control over it. The parenting books in his mother’s closet suggested that he was doing this to punish or get back at his parents. So feeling bad was compounded with guilt. What is wrong with this little kid? his father would ask. Emil would try to hide in a corner. His mother seemed to be running the washing maching constantly.
Then in some amazing process the bedwetting stopped literally overnight. Emil said to himself: Look, I’m getting better. Meanwhile the Body, his Body, which was himself, had as if backed away to make space for new challenges, new lessons in control or lack of control. And soon enough puberty shook his body like a storm.
*
His mother, a beautiful woman, filled with hope, stood somewhere behind him, trying to face the storm by his side but that wasn’t possible. In America, the boy must go it alone.
*
As if to remind him how little control he had over it, Emil’s body bobbed between the state of being overweight and borderline obese. It was another thing one was obscurely blamed for – although many of us who do not even eat that much find our bodies overflowing into space, demonstrating a fleshly generosity that our spirit does not feel or does not want to feel.
*
His father in effect joined the gang of kids teasing him at school. Find him a diet that will get rid of some of that blubber. But doesn’t cause bed wetting!
*
Is it appropriate to hate your body when your body is who you are?
In the Andrew Marvell poem they read at school, a bright truth broke thru the cracks in the enamel:
BODY
“O, who shall me deliver whole,
From bonds of this tyrannic soul?
Which, stretched upright, impales me so,
That mine own precipice I go….”
*
Go that extra lap! Transcend yourself! his father said.
By the time he met and fell in love with Sarah, his soulful workaholic wife, Emil had tortured his body into trimness, fitness – the illusion of health perhaps. He became something that was considered desirable by all but himself, the little truth-teller inside that health could not fool. That obese weight of his hovered just outside of visibility, ready to manifest itself and become real, waiting for the appropriate occasion, such as the death of a loved one.
*
Meanwhile God was patient, as always, and waited for Body to inch closer in his humility. There are truths you can conceive in faith that you would never have been able even to own, to admit for your own, in your former state. These are the “bad” truths, the depressing truths that you find you can tolerate only insofar as God places them within a context of infinite love. Without that love even their truth seems to shrivel. So Emil, the gorgeous hunk, watched himself grieving after his mother’s dead and saw an ugly unlovable kid with urine stains rising to the surface of the mirror. The older kids kicked him around the playing field. And now he turned to God and said: I am still that kid. In myself, aside from whatever you have done, nothing has changed. And yet, truth be told, his newly found honesty even in itself represented a change.
Part 3 of the story to come.
He had always been more Body than Soul, which meant: always in the grip of something bigger than himself. Even before the explicit conversion, he had always known of the “higher power” and the wider sense of intentionality. It was always higher and wider than his own never very impressive self.
Getting related to it was something else though. That was hard and that was continuous.
*
There was all the bed wetting when he was a child. He did not have any control over it. The parenting books in his mother’s closet suggested that he was doing this to punish or get back at his parents. So feeling bad was compounded with guilt. What is wrong with this little kid? his father would ask. Emil would try to hide in a corner. His mother seemed to be running the washing maching constantly.
Then in some amazing process the bedwetting stopped literally overnight. Emil said to himself: Look, I’m getting better. Meanwhile the Body, his Body, which was himself, had as if backed away to make space for new challenges, new lessons in control or lack of control. And soon enough puberty shook his body like a storm.
*
His mother, a beautiful woman, filled with hope, stood somewhere behind him, trying to face the storm by his side but that wasn’t possible. In America, the boy must go it alone.
*
As if to remind him how little control he had over it, Emil’s body bobbed between the state of being overweight and borderline obese. It was another thing one was obscurely blamed for – although many of us who do not even eat that much find our bodies overflowing into space, demonstrating a fleshly generosity that our spirit does not feel or does not want to feel.
*
His father in effect joined the gang of kids teasing him at school. Find him a diet that will get rid of some of that blubber. But doesn’t cause bed wetting!
*
Is it appropriate to hate your body when your body is who you are?
In the Andrew Marvell poem they read at school, a bright truth broke thru the cracks in the enamel:
BODY
“O, who shall me deliver whole,
From bonds of this tyrannic soul?
Which, stretched upright, impales me so,
That mine own precipice I go….”
*
Go that extra lap! Transcend yourself! his father said.
By the time he met and fell in love with Sarah, his soulful workaholic wife, Emil had tortured his body into trimness, fitness – the illusion of health perhaps. He became something that was considered desirable by all but himself, the little truth-teller inside that health could not fool. That obese weight of his hovered just outside of visibility, ready to manifest itself and become real, waiting for the appropriate occasion, such as the death of a loved one.
*
Meanwhile God was patient, as always, and waited for Body to inch closer in his humility. There are truths you can conceive in faith that you would never have been able even to own, to admit for your own, in your former state. These are the “bad” truths, the depressing truths that you find you can tolerate only insofar as God places them within a context of infinite love. Without that love even their truth seems to shrivel. So Emil, the gorgeous hunk, watched himself grieving after his mother’s dead and saw an ugly unlovable kid with urine stains rising to the surface of the mirror. The older kids kicked him around the playing field. And now he turned to God and said: I am still that kid. In myself, aside from whatever you have done, nothing has changed. And yet, truth be told, his newly found honesty even in itself represented a change.
Part 3 of the story to come.
Wednesday, July 21, 2004
Story: A flight (Part 1 of 3)
*
In their marriage the role of Soul was played by the wife, the role of Body by the husband. It’s like an experiment, we are going to be so free, the wife said. But had circumstances changed? Was this something new? Was it like when producers took some tired all-white musical and recast it with black actors, something different that was in fact the same?
*
You got different answers depending on who you asked.
*
Body had lots of different jobs, but mostly he taught ESL in the barrio, backbreaking work really, no health benefits, etc. Well the students didn’t have them either. In any case, Soul was the real breadwinner of the 2 what with her terrific management jobs and the constant travelling. She was proud of what she’d accomplished in that arena but only in that arena, otherwise a certain feeling of emptiness that one shared whenever one was with her. There had been a child, there had been cancer and a death that neither of the parents had really gotten over. They hadn’t gotten over each other either, how different they really were.
*
This difference, this constant nagging difference. Well, it might be a healing sort of thing, a sort of symbiosis but it also might be an unbridgeable rift. Or it might seem to be, at most hours of the day, simultaneously both at once.
*
In his sorrow, Emil drew even closer to his church. Alas Sarah had lost patience with its very demand for patience. I am absolutely through with trusting God, she said. The husband’s heart turned over when she said that. Of course he said nothing but merely let his grief double. And conversely his own patience with his own grief, his acceptance of sorrow, made the wife’s own heart twist with non-acceptance. So that their relationship was like a mirror that reversed the meanings as well as the images. No loving God takes a child away, Sarah insisted but Emil would then answer: He just has, and just did so.
*
Do not deny your own eyes, your own heart.
Serious problems. She grew thin as a rail. She wouldn’t touch the food he cooked. She drank her meals out of little cans, secretly poured half the contents out.
The missing child was making her work twice as hard. She became a Republican, he became a Democrat. They no longer even argued about why.
Part 2 of the story will talk about Emil.
*
In their marriage the role of Soul was played by the wife, the role of Body by the husband. It’s like an experiment, we are going to be so free, the wife said. But had circumstances changed? Was this something new? Was it like when producers took some tired all-white musical and recast it with black actors, something different that was in fact the same?
*
You got different answers depending on who you asked.
*
Body had lots of different jobs, but mostly he taught ESL in the barrio, backbreaking work really, no health benefits, etc. Well the students didn’t have them either. In any case, Soul was the real breadwinner of the 2 what with her terrific management jobs and the constant travelling. She was proud of what she’d accomplished in that arena but only in that arena, otherwise a certain feeling of emptiness that one shared whenever one was with her. There had been a child, there had been cancer and a death that neither of the parents had really gotten over. They hadn’t gotten over each other either, how different they really were.
*
This difference, this constant nagging difference. Well, it might be a healing sort of thing, a sort of symbiosis but it also might be an unbridgeable rift. Or it might seem to be, at most hours of the day, simultaneously both at once.
*
In his sorrow, Emil drew even closer to his church. Alas Sarah had lost patience with its very demand for patience. I am absolutely through with trusting God, she said. The husband’s heart turned over when she said that. Of course he said nothing but merely let his grief double. And conversely his own patience with his own grief, his acceptance of sorrow, made the wife’s own heart twist with non-acceptance. So that their relationship was like a mirror that reversed the meanings as well as the images. No loving God takes a child away, Sarah insisted but Emil would then answer: He just has, and just did so.
*
Do not deny your own eyes, your own heart.
Serious problems. She grew thin as a rail. She wouldn’t touch the food he cooked. She drank her meals out of little cans, secretly poured half the contents out.
The missing child was making her work twice as hard. She became a Republican, he became a Democrat. They no longer even argued about why.
Part 2 of the story will talk about Emil.
*
Tuesday, July 20, 2004
Story: More than counseling, please!!
*
As they wandered thru the weird office complex, looking for their new marriage counselor’s office, Body and Soul argued like emblems in a medieval debate poem, sometimes even exchanging positions in their fight to be vindicated and made to feel somehow all right once again.
So one of them was talking: You complain that I lead you astray, that I’m sensual. You say I make you eat too much and drink too much. But how can you play the victim with such constancy? You’re the one who lifts the bottle to your mouth, you’re certainly helping with the lifting. Over and over, I might add. The point is that I’m not the one doing it. I’m just sitting there suffering all the stuff that you do without being able to stop *any* of it.
And the the other party snapped back with an angry response. I get so tired of that passivity of yours and that obsession with playing the role of victim. If you think I’m going off balance, why don’t you advise me instead of just watching with that smirk on your face? You know I’m always trying to better myself. Why not help instead of always rushing to prepare some new critique?
On it went for block after block.
And then Body said: You are always oozing thru my sinews like a poison and yet I can never *find* you, you’re so gaseous and ethereal. It’s like an illness.
And then Soul said: But look at you, you’re so heavy, you’re like a suit of rusted armor! I try to walk on the path that leads to God, but you won’t even move.
On and on the dispute continuted, moving always over the same ground like a child’s toy train – a repetition for which Soul blamed Body and Body blamed Soul. Then they passed a suite of Law Offices and Soul stopped in his “tracks”. That’s it, he said. We don’t need counseling, we need a divorce. I’m ready to float off into space without you.
That’s when Body got down on her knees, right on the hot pavement, making a scene as she so often did. Please don’t even consider divorce, she begged. And she began to cry most noisily.
Of course she knew full well that she was nothing wihtout her partner. But the same was true in reverse for him. And he, poor thing, he didn’t seem to know.
*
As they wandered thru the weird office complex, looking for their new marriage counselor’s office, Body and Soul argued like emblems in a medieval debate poem, sometimes even exchanging positions in their fight to be vindicated and made to feel somehow all right once again.
So one of them was talking: You complain that I lead you astray, that I’m sensual. You say I make you eat too much and drink too much. But how can you play the victim with such constancy? You’re the one who lifts the bottle to your mouth, you’re certainly helping with the lifting. Over and over, I might add. The point is that I’m not the one doing it. I’m just sitting there suffering all the stuff that you do without being able to stop *any* of it.
And the the other party snapped back with an angry response. I get so tired of that passivity of yours and that obsession with playing the role of victim. If you think I’m going off balance, why don’t you advise me instead of just watching with that smirk on your face? You know I’m always trying to better myself. Why not help instead of always rushing to prepare some new critique?
On it went for block after block.
And then Body said: You are always oozing thru my sinews like a poison and yet I can never *find* you, you’re so gaseous and ethereal. It’s like an illness.
And then Soul said: But look at you, you’re so heavy, you’re like a suit of rusted armor! I try to walk on the path that leads to God, but you won’t even move.
On and on the dispute continuted, moving always over the same ground like a child’s toy train – a repetition for which Soul blamed Body and Body blamed Soul. Then they passed a suite of Law Offices and Soul stopped in his “tracks”. That’s it, he said. We don’t need counseling, we need a divorce. I’m ready to float off into space without you.
That’s when Body got down on her knees, right on the hot pavement, making a scene as she so often did. Please don’t even consider divorce, she begged. And she began to cry most noisily.
Of course she knew full well that she was nothing wihtout her partner. But the same was true in reverse for him. And he, poor thing, he didn’t seem to know.
*
Friday, July 16, 2004
Story fragment: The good/bad marriage
*
Body was the one who always felt like grounded being, who always knew *where* she was who she was. Soul was the one who felt like a virtual particle, free-floating, unattached except to aspirations. But the aspirations were always changing and in response so was he.
The issue churning them was that God had made the marriage and hadn't been kidding. No one night stand. On the contrary!
So now... one has to ask, what shape is the marriage in? "Can this marriage be saved"?
Soul says: No, it's completely over.
Body says: It's clear we're bonded forever.
The counselor looks at the shape the two of them make across the table. His mouth hangs open. Can they both be right? Can they both be wrong?
*
Body was the one who always felt like grounded being, who always knew *where* she was who she was. Soul was the one who felt like a virtual particle, free-floating, unattached except to aspirations. But the aspirations were always changing and in response so was he.
The issue churning them was that God had made the marriage and hadn't been kidding. No one night stand. On the contrary!
So now... one has to ask, what shape is the marriage in? "Can this marriage be saved"?
Soul says: No, it's completely over.
Body says: It's clear we're bonded forever.
The counselor looks at the shape the two of them make across the table. His mouth hangs open. Can they both be right? Can they both be wrong?
*
Philosophy: More on Sentience in things
*
It was not, she reflected, that one could cut open a teddy bear and find, embedded in the bear, a miniature hippocampus built of cloth. Sentience in the world was not like that.
It was not that the stuffed animal’s eyes filled with tears when he sat in the presence of one’s sorrow.
Sentience was not so localized, not so easy to find. And that was the issue really.
If the human were really part of the animal world, as the naturalists liked to insist, that meant that the mysteries – the irreducibles of the spirit – could not just be isolated in the human head and then bullied and besieged in their isolated place. Sentience was God’s doing and it surfaced in the world even where no human head was present.
The encounter between a child and a little animal was suffused with feeling. Not merely the child. Not merely the animal. The encounter itself. At least this was what she, the mother, had encountered.
This was the mysterious treasure that Body kept safe in her scented sandalwood box, knowing all the time that it could not be kept in a box.
It was not, she reflected, that one could cut open a teddy bear and find, embedded in the bear, a miniature hippocampus built of cloth. Sentience in the world was not like that.
It was not that the stuffed animal’s eyes filled with tears when he sat in the presence of one’s sorrow.
Sentience was not so localized, not so easy to find. And that was the issue really.
If the human were really part of the animal world, as the naturalists liked to insist, that meant that the mysteries – the irreducibles of the spirit – could not just be isolated in the human head and then bullied and besieged in their isolated place. Sentience was God’s doing and it surfaced in the world even where no human head was present.
The encounter between a child and a little animal was suffused with feeling. Not merely the child. Not merely the animal. The encounter itself. At least this was what she, the mother, had encountered.
This was the mysterious treasure that Body kept safe in her scented sandalwood box, knowing all the time that it could not be kept in a box.
Wednesday, July 14, 2004
Poem: Saturday hawk and retriever
*
(Written 10 years ago almost to the day while jogging Stanford foothills. Does it make sense? Not sure.)
A hawk tilts to puncture
the blue
air
and passes through
to be the denizen
of all that I don’t see.
Then a retriever in the sun
takes on the colors of the
stunned
weeds she splashes
and
crushes,
padding at the barely sensed
edge of things she rubs against.
*
(Written 10 years ago almost to the day while jogging Stanford foothills. Does it make sense? Not sure.)
A hawk tilts to puncture
the blue
air
and passes through
to be the denizen
of all that I don’t see.
Then a retriever in the sun
takes on the colors of the
stunned
weeds she splashes
and
crushes,
padding at the barely sensed
edge of things she rubs against.
*
Philosophy: An argument for sentience in matter
*
Christians tend to fight the idea that the human mind can be reduced to a slab of meat but should they do so? Should they fight so hard for the autonomy and self-directedness of the mind? Isn't that really a rather Pelagian stand?
What about the alternate idea that the mind is a physical process to which something mysterious and exterior has been applied? Shall we say that its existence has been touched with the breath of God? That creativity is as applied from the outside? Would Luther balk at that idea?
Those who study the brain find nothing in its structure that isn't physical, though in so doing they do leave a certain something unexlained.
*
So mind would be a very special inlet of body, one that has been pinched with a divine touch whose credit it (the mind) has arrogated to itself. Sheer Body is pushed out of the room, Soul (or a version of it) promotes itself as the author of its own riches -- of its own being, really. The myth begins that extension is dead. This despite the fact that when a body dies the mind can no longer be found. In this scenario, from the Christian point of view, it is the mind and not the body that is in a state of sin.
*
What about the Body in her exclusion? There she waits in the midst of the other "dead" things: the fields with fresh asphalt running through them, the animals grazing and waiting for what they don't know and what they know they don't know.
If extension is dead, nothing stops that death from seizing the mind in its hidden condition of extension. On the other hand, if something truly living has swept the mind like a chord, then nothing stops that life from touching the world of things as well. The poet looks at the world and not only feels it looking back but in fact already looking and long having looked, looking as from a long time ago.
Poetry is a place (not mere words) and that place is living insofar as it too has been swept, in some subtle way, by that ever so soft divine breath, that "applied from outside", that gives the mind its feeling of power. And Soul knows all this but when he reflects on it he grows very scared.
*
The sense of being having broken into the words and now breaking their fragments into tiny haunted speakers, that feeling is what gave Heidegger's philosophy both its power and its maddening imprecision. Now California trembles slightly. The hawk moving over the yellow weeds will sweep the sky with deep feeling. Is my mind to be the force applying the feeling from outside? Oh please, look again.
*
Christians tend to fight the idea that the human mind can be reduced to a slab of meat but should they do so? Should they fight so hard for the autonomy and self-directedness of the mind? Isn't that really a rather Pelagian stand?
What about the alternate idea that the mind is a physical process to which something mysterious and exterior has been applied? Shall we say that its existence has been touched with the breath of God? That creativity is as applied from the outside? Would Luther balk at that idea?
Those who study the brain find nothing in its structure that isn't physical, though in so doing they do leave a certain something unexlained.
*
So mind would be a very special inlet of body, one that has been pinched with a divine touch whose credit it (the mind) has arrogated to itself. Sheer Body is pushed out of the room, Soul (or a version of it) promotes itself as the author of its own riches -- of its own being, really. The myth begins that extension is dead. This despite the fact that when a body dies the mind can no longer be found. In this scenario, from the Christian point of view, it is the mind and not the body that is in a state of sin.
*
What about the Body in her exclusion? There she waits in the midst of the other "dead" things: the fields with fresh asphalt running through them, the animals grazing and waiting for what they don't know and what they know they don't know.
If extension is dead, nothing stops that death from seizing the mind in its hidden condition of extension. On the other hand, if something truly living has swept the mind like a chord, then nothing stops that life from touching the world of things as well. The poet looks at the world and not only feels it looking back but in fact already looking and long having looked, looking as from a long time ago.
Poetry is a place (not mere words) and that place is living insofar as it too has been swept, in some subtle way, by that ever so soft divine breath, that "applied from outside", that gives the mind its feeling of power. And Soul knows all this but when he reflects on it he grows very scared.
*
The sense of being having broken into the words and now breaking their fragments into tiny haunted speakers, that feeling is what gave Heidegger's philosophy both its power and its maddening imprecision. Now California trembles slightly. The hawk moving over the yellow weeds will sweep the sky with deep feeling. Is my mind to be the force applying the feeling from outside? Oh please, look again.
*
Tuesday, July 13, 2004
Story: A relative visiting
*
When Soul made one of his rare visits the family gathered to welcome him but with a certain reserve, based on their earlier dealings with him. The visits always followed the same pattern. He would have brought a suitcase of presents for the kids but it was always lost at the station. So much for that. He would effusively embrace the teenagers but couldn't remember their names, not even the first letter of their names. The smaller kids would barely remember him because the visits were so rare. They looked at their parents, thinking: Do I know this person? How am I supposed to react?
There would then be a meal with lots of varied food but it would turn out that Soul was on an ultra low-carb diet that was almost a fast. He touched his plate, that was all.
People started a conversation on politics then quickly stopped it. America didn't think alike anymore. It wasn't safe to talk freely.
After dinner the children quickly got into that hectic flush of activity that meant either there'd be tears soon or a sudden collapse into exhaustion. The odd thing was that Soul had the same hectic look all the time. Now he began to describe his latest string of investments and the elders turned silently to look at each other. They knew a plea for funds would soon be coming.
It was said that Grandmom had squandered the funds for her grandkids' college, diverting them onto this ne'er-do-well with the killer smile.
But even she got a bit tense when she saw him cozy up to Janelle. For the rest of that evening one of the adults would always stay in the room. They were careful that way, at least when they could be.
Soul was artistic, it was one of the attractive things about him. He borrowed Junior's new guitar, sat by the bookshelf and started in. Uncle said it was a worship song that didn't mention God. The adults stirred in their seats. Janelle sat next to the visitor, not quite touching. The look in her face was "Soulful". The song seemed to be 2 chords back and forth, on and on, very haunting but it didn't ever want to finish. Its effect was like a trance that you went into but had trouble coming out of. Since the adults all had to work the next morning they were having trouble staying awake. Soul always pushed his visits to the breaking point. They were always like a test.
Finally Janelle's mom leaned over to whisper to Body: I can't even keep my eyes open but look, I'm a bit worried about Janelle. She's still too young to see the big picture, you know.
Body didn't skip a beat. Don't worry, honey, she said. I know this guy. We're kind of bound together in a way. He's not going to do anything except probably crash on the sofa in a minute or 2. I promise I'll get him settled somehow.
In the morning he'll wake up and say: What am I doing here? Then he'll be off maybe even before breakfast. And you all will be so glad he's gone but at the same time you'll feel that something's missing from your life. Someting vital, some wonderful strange and pointless thing. It may not be a good thing in itself but it's really good the way it stirs you up. That's when you'll really have to watch Janelle. Because I promise you: she'll get depressed.
*
When Soul made one of his rare visits the family gathered to welcome him but with a certain reserve, based on their earlier dealings with him. The visits always followed the same pattern. He would have brought a suitcase of presents for the kids but it was always lost at the station. So much for that. He would effusively embrace the teenagers but couldn't remember their names, not even the first letter of their names. The smaller kids would barely remember him because the visits were so rare. They looked at their parents, thinking: Do I know this person? How am I supposed to react?
There would then be a meal with lots of varied food but it would turn out that Soul was on an ultra low-carb diet that was almost a fast. He touched his plate, that was all.
People started a conversation on politics then quickly stopped it. America didn't think alike anymore. It wasn't safe to talk freely.
After dinner the children quickly got into that hectic flush of activity that meant either there'd be tears soon or a sudden collapse into exhaustion. The odd thing was that Soul had the same hectic look all the time. Now he began to describe his latest string of investments and the elders turned silently to look at each other. They knew a plea for funds would soon be coming.
It was said that Grandmom had squandered the funds for her grandkids' college, diverting them onto this ne'er-do-well with the killer smile.
But even she got a bit tense when she saw him cozy up to Janelle. For the rest of that evening one of the adults would always stay in the room. They were careful that way, at least when they could be.
Soul was artistic, it was one of the attractive things about him. He borrowed Junior's new guitar, sat by the bookshelf and started in. Uncle said it was a worship song that didn't mention God. The adults stirred in their seats. Janelle sat next to the visitor, not quite touching. The look in her face was "Soulful". The song seemed to be 2 chords back and forth, on and on, very haunting but it didn't ever want to finish. Its effect was like a trance that you went into but had trouble coming out of. Since the adults all had to work the next morning they were having trouble staying awake. Soul always pushed his visits to the breaking point. They were always like a test.
Finally Janelle's mom leaned over to whisper to Body: I can't even keep my eyes open but look, I'm a bit worried about Janelle. She's still too young to see the big picture, you know.
Body didn't skip a beat. Don't worry, honey, she said. I know this guy. We're kind of bound together in a way. He's not going to do anything except probably crash on the sofa in a minute or 2. I promise I'll get him settled somehow.
In the morning he'll wake up and say: What am I doing here? Then he'll be off maybe even before breakfast. And you all will be so glad he's gone but at the same time you'll feel that something's missing from your life. Someting vital, some wonderful strange and pointless thing. It may not be a good thing in itself but it's really good the way it stirs you up. That's when you'll really have to watch Janelle. Because I promise you: she'll get depressed.
*
Monday, July 12, 2004
Story: Crabs in a bucket (from Ice-cube)
*
Body dreamed that she had become the crabs in the bucket, not even one of the individual crabs, not the bucket, but the whole complex. They climbed on each other and ate each other's flesh, the way crabs do, so that it was in a sense a single creature living out a nightmare.
The way the man put it -- he was a man of wisdom, at least in this case, and speaking about his own neighborhood -- if you wanted to help the other crabs get out of the bucket, first you had to get out yourself, you couldn't even be just close to getting out yourself because, if you looked back, somebody else would pull you back to the bottom. So the most altruistic, the most Christian thing you could do was, first, get yourself out. Body prayed for discernment -- what do I do now, daddy? -- and the answer seemed to be: First look to yourself.
So now she was one of them, a piece of darkness climbing out and the others were pulling her back into the bucket. Standing in the world of freedom, Soul looked down on Body and held his nose: Look how low you've fallen! And if she'd let him, and if he'd been able to make himself touch her, he might well have put her back in the bucket where he felt she belonged. But she kept herself out of his reach, a cunning little Body, practiced in the art of survival. Because you couldn't help others if you yourself were torn in pieces.
And so gently, moving with a lopsided grace and too many legs, she moved back toward the container, trying to figure out what she could do about her brothers and sisters still trapped in there.
*
Body dreamed that she had become the crabs in the bucket, not even one of the individual crabs, not the bucket, but the whole complex. They climbed on each other and ate each other's flesh, the way crabs do, so that it was in a sense a single creature living out a nightmare.
The way the man put it -- he was a man of wisdom, at least in this case, and speaking about his own neighborhood -- if you wanted to help the other crabs get out of the bucket, first you had to get out yourself, you couldn't even be just close to getting out yourself because, if you looked back, somebody else would pull you back to the bottom. So the most altruistic, the most Christian thing you could do was, first, get yourself out. Body prayed for discernment -- what do I do now, daddy? -- and the answer seemed to be: First look to yourself.
So now she was one of them, a piece of darkness climbing out and the others were pulling her back into the bucket. Standing in the world of freedom, Soul looked down on Body and held his nose: Look how low you've fallen! And if she'd let him, and if he'd been able to make himself touch her, he might well have put her back in the bucket where he felt she belonged. But she kept herself out of his reach, a cunning little Body, practiced in the art of survival. Because you couldn't help others if you yourself were torn in pieces.
And so gently, moving with a lopsided grace and too many legs, she moved back toward the container, trying to figure out what she could do about her brothers and sisters still trapped in there.
*
Sunday, July 11, 2004
Body discerning
*
It's Body, not Soul, that seeks discernment. Who asks: What is it you want me to do? Not only asks but maybe waits to hear an answer.
And the answer she receives is not a streamlined plan of action. The quick how-to is a delusion that Soul has and that Body does not have.
So the answer she receives is not streamlined. It is very quiet. Initially, all the answer she gets is this: You are asking the right question. With large amounts of time and patience, you will surely receive the answer for the question you hurriedly ask.
One thing Body knows how to do is wait. What else is it she does all day long? What other place does she have to go besides the big bare yard called waiting?
*
It's Body, not Soul, that seeks discernment. Who asks: What is it you want me to do? Not only asks but maybe waits to hear an answer.
And the answer she receives is not a streamlined plan of action. The quick how-to is a delusion that Soul has and that Body does not have.
So the answer she receives is not streamlined. It is very quiet. Initially, all the answer she gets is this: You are asking the right question. With large amounts of time and patience, you will surely receive the answer for the question you hurriedly ask.
One thing Body knows how to do is wait. What else is it she does all day long? What other place does she have to go besides the big bare yard called waiting?
*
The body's second worst curse
*
Faith is of the body. When a child is stillborn a father becomes sad but only the mother fully understands what she has passed into the hands of God.
*
From what is perhaps the second worst curse in the Psalms as translated by a woman, Philip Sidney's sister (Psalm 58)
[As to my enemies...]
So make them melt as the dishowsed snaile
Or as the Embrio, whose vitall band
Breakes er it holdes, and formlesse eyes do faile
To see the sun, though brought to lightfull land.
*
Can anyone truly wish such a terrible outcome to any being? Or is it that the body really knows that all her curses, like her creations, are passed through God's hands and transformed before they happen? {So the body is more speaking about herself than judging her enemy? So that even the bloody Babylonian baby in Psalm 137 becomes understandable, bearable?)
137 is the worst of the curses.
*
Faith is of the body. When a child is stillborn a father becomes sad but only the mother fully understands what she has passed into the hands of God.
*
From what is perhaps the second worst curse in the Psalms as translated by a woman, Philip Sidney's sister (Psalm 58)
[As to my enemies...]
So make them melt as the dishowsed snaile
Or as the Embrio, whose vitall band
Breakes er it holdes, and formlesse eyes do faile
To see the sun, though brought to lightfull land.
*
Can anyone truly wish such a terrible outcome to any being? Or is it that the body really knows that all her curses, like her creations, are passed through God's hands and transformed before they happen? {So the body is more speaking about herself than judging her enemy? So that even the bloody Babylonian baby in Psalm 137 becomes understandable, bearable?)
137 is the worst of the curses.
*
Friday, July 09, 2004
Quasi Story: Not there, but not not there
*
A man stands at the window trying to pull the string of the curtain but his hands are full of his other task, which interrupted a third task still that he can't even remember. His body stands at the window tangled up in his soul. The window won't open, the sky is concealed.
*
A stranger walks down the street talking into a cell phone to a hidden person -- is there another person at the other end? The oddity is, the man isn't here, he's on the phone, but he isn't there either, he's walking the street talking to someone he can't see, whose gestures he can't read. Actually he isn't anywhere exactly. Are you listening to me? the voice says. Are you listening to me? The man's own body behind him somewhere, tapping at a window that refuses to make a sound. Let me out so I can walk with God again! Hang up the phone!
*
Neither listening nor not listening, neither seeing nor not, neither there nor away, but actually all this "not" is an illusion. What is present is presence not absence. If the man is scandalized by his own body and denies its presence, it's still there -- but where is he? Where am I?
*
Alissa racing down the road to pick up her kid, cursing the other cars, cursing the red lights. We all have shells on our bodies here, as if we have chosen to be estranged. No, she thinks, it's not a choice, it's just life. But that could be your best friend in the car ahead that you're cursing, but it's not your friend, it's her car with her inside. Like a cage with an angry prisoner? Our lives are on display but hidden, the road is in charge. And now she passes quickly, coming within an inch of dinging the other car and she looks inside, it's her minister glowering at her. The car is as powerful as a drug in its ability to change people without their even knowing. Now soul (wearing its wet virus the devil) has conspired to put the community in this angry proximity without any way for our bodies to mediate and magnetize us into the larger body Paul says that we are. Yes Alissa says, but I tell you it's necessary. Look at me, I have no choice. And around them the fumes rise to the heavens, they too are in a hurry.
*
A man stands at the window trying to pull the string of the curtain but his hands are full of his other task, which interrupted a third task still that he can't even remember. His body stands at the window tangled up in his soul. The window won't open, the sky is concealed.
*
A stranger walks down the street talking into a cell phone to a hidden person -- is there another person at the other end? The oddity is, the man isn't here, he's on the phone, but he isn't there either, he's walking the street talking to someone he can't see, whose gestures he can't read. Actually he isn't anywhere exactly. Are you listening to me? the voice says. Are you listening to me? The man's own body behind him somewhere, tapping at a window that refuses to make a sound. Let me out so I can walk with God again! Hang up the phone!
*
Neither listening nor not listening, neither seeing nor not, neither there nor away, but actually all this "not" is an illusion. What is present is presence not absence. If the man is scandalized by his own body and denies its presence, it's still there -- but where is he? Where am I?
*
Alissa racing down the road to pick up her kid, cursing the other cars, cursing the red lights. We all have shells on our bodies here, as if we have chosen to be estranged. No, she thinks, it's not a choice, it's just life. But that could be your best friend in the car ahead that you're cursing, but it's not your friend, it's her car with her inside. Like a cage with an angry prisoner? Our lives are on display but hidden, the road is in charge. And now she passes quickly, coming within an inch of dinging the other car and she looks inside, it's her minister glowering at her. The car is as powerful as a drug in its ability to change people without their even knowing. Now soul (wearing its wet virus the devil) has conspired to put the community in this angry proximity without any way for our bodies to mediate and magnetize us into the larger body Paul says that we are. Yes Alissa says, but I tell you it's necessary. Look at me, I have no choice. And around them the fumes rise to the heavens, they too are in a hurry.
*
Thursday, July 08, 2004
The days and nights of the Body
*
Body sits curled in her dogbed, waiting for help from someone. Body stands in his corral, hoping to be noticed and fed. Body lies sleepless in his swamp of a bed, trying to remember the words of a comforting Psalm. Body kneels composed at her master's feet, contemplating, listening, and taking "the better part".
*
Body sits curled in her dogbed, waiting for help from someone. Body stands in his corral, hoping to be noticed and fed. Body lies sleepless in his swamp of a bed, trying to remember the words of a comforting Psalm. Body kneels composed at her master's feet, contemplating, listening, and taking "the better part".
*
Wrong
*
One aspect of Body's humble and not so attractive being is that she doesn't draw praise from anyone. There is just something about the way she moves that calls out your abuse. She's so slow. And you can't make yourself value her or say anything nice to her, even when she really isn't doing anything wrong. No, she doesn't have to do anything wrong really, she just is wrong to start with, there's something kind of wrong about her and she knows it. She doesn't fit in socially, that dumb old clumsy body. I want to be a Christian, she says, even though she doesn't know how. I don't know how. I want to be better than I am. Well, people suppose that maybe Jesus will take notice of her and lead her where it is she needs to go. It's universally agreed that she won't get there on her own.
*
One aspect of Body's humble and not so attractive being is that she doesn't draw praise from anyone. There is just something about the way she moves that calls out your abuse. She's so slow. And you can't make yourself value her or say anything nice to her, even when she really isn't doing anything wrong. No, she doesn't have to do anything wrong really, she just is wrong to start with, there's something kind of wrong about her and she knows it. She doesn't fit in socially, that dumb old clumsy body. I want to be a Christian, she says, even though she doesn't know how. I don't know how. I want to be better than I am. Well, people suppose that maybe Jesus will take notice of her and lead her where it is she needs to go. It's universally agreed that she won't get there on her own.
*
Trying to try
The Body says: well, I want to be a Christian. She doesn't say: Thank God, I'm a Christian, because in fact she isn't one and she knows she isn't. Steady faith is just a dream she has. The point is she's going to try, keep trying, to get herself aligned with what she dreams, but she's not going to assume she's succeeded. She can't take that risk. Assumptions of blessedness are for someone else, someone better. she doesn't have time for them, because all her time is taken up with trying to achieve a valid faith and maybe not doing all that well.
Wednesday, July 07, 2004
Story: Body as conscience
*
As I wandered through the smelly wilderness of puberty there was a young woman who always accompanied me, one who was passive and shy to fit the feminine stereotypes of the time. She was my Body. Like the typical foolish knight in an allegory, I neglected her and found her very unattractive, not stylish, not fashionable, awkward and coarse, not someone I wanted to be with. She accepted this -- what choice did she have? She stuck with me and, as a perverse response, I considered her to be the fool, not myself.
When she got sick, I ignored her. Her complaints got on my nerves. I tried to do whatever she didn't want.
I remember the first time I stood outside a pickup bar, wanting to go in but unable. There was an unwanted freezing in my chest and hands, cold sweatmarks on the forehead, a sudden inability to move. Who was responsible for that? It was my Body, thrashing inside me and saying: Oh sir, please don't go in there. It will hurt me badly, it will hurt you.
When I ignored her, what did she do? She just got old and grew very tired and resigned, the way Bodies do.
*
As I wandered through the smelly wilderness of puberty there was a young woman who always accompanied me, one who was passive and shy to fit the feminine stereotypes of the time. She was my Body. Like the typical foolish knight in an allegory, I neglected her and found her very unattractive, not stylish, not fashionable, awkward and coarse, not someone I wanted to be with. She accepted this -- what choice did she have? She stuck with me and, as a perverse response, I considered her to be the fool, not myself.
When she got sick, I ignored her. Her complaints got on my nerves. I tried to do whatever she didn't want.
I remember the first time I stood outside a pickup bar, wanting to go in but unable. There was an unwanted freezing in my chest and hands, cold sweatmarks on the forehead, a sudden inability to move. Who was responsible for that? It was my Body, thrashing inside me and saying: Oh sir, please don't go in there. It will hurt me badly, it will hurt you.
When I ignored her, what did she do? She just got old and grew very tired and resigned, the way Bodies do.
*
Tuesday, July 06, 2004
The complexity of being simple
*
Oh Body, you want so little out of life. You want to live without pain and yet you know that you can't, so you want at least to settle for manageable pain but do not even get that. So you accept what you receive, whether or not it is acceptable. This is not a choice you make, it's just what you always do.
You just want to live peacefully and then dissolve.
You try to stay out of the shadow of Soul's treacherous structures for "doing good for all mankind". You were not put on earth to do good but to be good if only you could be, if only Soul would let you. But his schemes require a Body to do the work and take the fall. And you do not have a way to say no.
Saying no is not a Body thing but a Soul thing. So you just put up with whatever it is and continue being a Body -- aging, falling apart, then dying. You never wanted more than that anyway -- maybe a bit of God's warmth, that's all. Aside from that, dying is okay, you don't mind. What you mind is the shame that Soul always makes you feel for being your clumsy self, being open about yourself and disappointing everyone by having nothing more to be honest about but yourself. A foolish boring person. A body after all.
But it doesn't seem fair always to be kicked and scorned for nothing more than always being what you are. As though there was a choice about that. As though you could want to be another person without first being another person, instead of yourself. And everybody says: Poor thing!
*
Oh Body, you want so little out of life. You want to live without pain and yet you know that you can't, so you want at least to settle for manageable pain but do not even get that. So you accept what you receive, whether or not it is acceptable. This is not a choice you make, it's just what you always do.
You just want to live peacefully and then dissolve.
You try to stay out of the shadow of Soul's treacherous structures for "doing good for all mankind". You were not put on earth to do good but to be good if only you could be, if only Soul would let you. But his schemes require a Body to do the work and take the fall. And you do not have a way to say no.
Saying no is not a Body thing but a Soul thing. So you just put up with whatever it is and continue being a Body -- aging, falling apart, then dying. You never wanted more than that anyway -- maybe a bit of God's warmth, that's all. Aside from that, dying is okay, you don't mind. What you mind is the shame that Soul always makes you feel for being your clumsy self, being open about yourself and disappointing everyone by having nothing more to be honest about but yourself. A foolish boring person. A body after all.
But it doesn't seem fair always to be kicked and scorned for nothing more than always being what you are. As though there was a choice about that. As though you could want to be another person without first being another person, instead of yourself. And everybody says: Poor thing!
*
Monday, July 05, 2004
Story: A problem swallowing
*
When his father grew old it became very difficult for him to swallow -- this was the result of many strokes piled onto each other like waves. The strokes crashed upon the bewildered family and made a piece of God's mercy from one point of view.
The son had also begun to experience some minor problems swallowing. Looking at his father, he was able to see his own future, in a way. Only his father was an infinitely more worthy person than himself.
One evening at a restaurant his father -- all right, my father -- began to disgorge the food he had been eating. He couldn't control the process. The family was embarrassed but cleaned up with the help of the server, who was a French woman with problems of her own.
It didn't leave any permanent damage -- not to the other customers, not to the family, not to the victim, whose body had begun to fold itself back into God's hands and was losing any control over itself. It was no longer the victim's body, not fully. It seems to me that a body as a body doesn't sin, and there was no wrongdoing in throwing up some lettuce with an overly exotic dressing. The fault, if you want to call something a fault, was in the embarrassment and shame that the others felt. But why feel ashamed when a body does what it is called by God to do, namely to decay and grow mellow, ripe for falling? Isn't the harvest day coming? Does one really want to approach that day with shame and non-acceptance?
So it was the haughty soul, the one that favors fancy restaurants, that was at fault. If anyone was truly at fault. But maybe it is time to cut even the soul some slack. It behaves as though it knows everything but really knows nothing.
*
When his father grew old it became very difficult for him to swallow -- this was the result of many strokes piled onto each other like waves. The strokes crashed upon the bewildered family and made a piece of God's mercy from one point of view.
The son had also begun to experience some minor problems swallowing. Looking at his father, he was able to see his own future, in a way. Only his father was an infinitely more worthy person than himself.
One evening at a restaurant his father -- all right, my father -- began to disgorge the food he had been eating. He couldn't control the process. The family was embarrassed but cleaned up with the help of the server, who was a French woman with problems of her own.
It didn't leave any permanent damage -- not to the other customers, not to the family, not to the victim, whose body had begun to fold itself back into God's hands and was losing any control over itself. It was no longer the victim's body, not fully. It seems to me that a body as a body doesn't sin, and there was no wrongdoing in throwing up some lettuce with an overly exotic dressing. The fault, if you want to call something a fault, was in the embarrassment and shame that the others felt. But why feel ashamed when a body does what it is called by God to do, namely to decay and grow mellow, ripe for falling? Isn't the harvest day coming? Does one really want to approach that day with shame and non-acceptance?
So it was the haughty soul, the one that favors fancy restaurants, that was at fault. If anyone was truly at fault. But maybe it is time to cut even the soul some slack. It behaves as though it knows everything but really knows nothing.
*
Sunday, July 04, 2004
Philosophy: that the soul not the body is demonic
*
I would like to offer a sort of proof that the part of the human being that is in league with the devil is the soul and not the body. But first, since few people even believe in the devil today, I have to explain why his "existence" is important even to cool intellectuals -- in other words, why we need him to explain what is wrong with us.
If you say that the entity the devil doesn't exist -- as a separate entity (with horns and tail, etc) I would agree but describe him in a different way. The devil is pure intentionality, he isn't an entity at all on his own. He is like a virus that can only exist in a state of invading a host. The host that the devil invades is the human will. Outside the human will he is nothing. Inside it (in control of it) he is devastating and can send millions of people to a gas chamber. So he doesn't exist on his own but he does exist in tandem with the person he invades. And the reason he is important is that we need to offload at least some of our wrong behavior to something external to us, but the "environment" (an abusive upbringing) or "genetics" are not good enough. Environment and genetics lack intentionality so can't be used to explain evil, which is intentional to the heart.
In order to explain evil we need a force or figure who contains intentionality. This is what the devil supplies for our theories. He continues not to exist in himself but all too vividly in our hearts all the same.
So, now given the existence or quasi-existence of this vile figure, the devil, as an explanation of things we do that we can't explain or justify and that just aren't part of us, I would go on to emphasize that the devil is pure intention and is in league with the soul. The body would have nothing to do with him and is busy warding off physical viruses, not the spiritual kind.
So the body is the devil's victim, not his ally. The one who is infected with evil is not the body but the soul.
*
*
I would like to offer a sort of proof that the part of the human being that is in league with the devil is the soul and not the body. But first, since few people even believe in the devil today, I have to explain why his "existence" is important even to cool intellectuals -- in other words, why we need him to explain what is wrong with us.
If you say that the entity the devil doesn't exist -- as a separate entity (with horns and tail, etc) I would agree but describe him in a different way. The devil is pure intentionality, he isn't an entity at all on his own. He is like a virus that can only exist in a state of invading a host. The host that the devil invades is the human will. Outside the human will he is nothing. Inside it (in control of it) he is devastating and can send millions of people to a gas chamber. So he doesn't exist on his own but he does exist in tandem with the person he invades. And the reason he is important is that we need to offload at least some of our wrong behavior to something external to us, but the "environment" (an abusive upbringing) or "genetics" are not good enough. Environment and genetics lack intentionality so can't be used to explain evil, which is intentional to the heart.
In order to explain evil we need a force or figure who contains intentionality. This is what the devil supplies for our theories. He continues not to exist in himself but all too vividly in our hearts all the same.
So, now given the existence or quasi-existence of this vile figure, the devil, as an explanation of things we do that we can't explain or justify and that just aren't part of us, I would go on to emphasize that the devil is pure intention and is in league with the soul. The body would have nothing to do with him and is busy warding off physical viruses, not the spiritual kind.
So the body is the devil's victim, not his ally. The one who is infected with evil is not the body but the soul.
*
*
Saturday, July 03, 2004
A class war
*
It's really a class war between soul and body, it's as though the mind-body divide is a set of train tracks. Soul lives on the right side of the tracks, body lives on the wrong side and will never get a chance to move. Body gets no respect. Soul is educated, high class, a practiced tourist, with credit cards and clever ways to get through customs. Body is just luggage or gets left behind or even hidden.
Soul has been to college, body's pure working class, worried about getting laid off and missing payments. The problems all come her way. Body is the one who always gets sick whenever soul is too self-absorbed to come out of the rain. Then soul talks his way out of paying the medical bills. He's a deadbeat dad, too busy with Plato and new tech gadgets. He's all excited about the emerging church, visionary stuff, and he hopes that when church gets its act together body will just get booted out. Soul is smart enough to claim he's really earthy but his earth is all in the head or on the screen or somewhere inside.
The soul-body divide doesn't even exist, as the body knows (she may not be a genius but she knows enough to know that). But it is in the interest of the soul to make the divide as real as he can, because all of the prestige is on his side of the divide. The thing is that if he doesn't play fair, the unfairness may snap in his face, when justice finally comes to earth.
*
It's really a class war between soul and body, it's as though the mind-body divide is a set of train tracks. Soul lives on the right side of the tracks, body lives on the wrong side and will never get a chance to move. Body gets no respect. Soul is educated, high class, a practiced tourist, with credit cards and clever ways to get through customs. Body is just luggage or gets left behind or even hidden.
Soul has been to college, body's pure working class, worried about getting laid off and missing payments. The problems all come her way. Body is the one who always gets sick whenever soul is too self-absorbed to come out of the rain. Then soul talks his way out of paying the medical bills. He's a deadbeat dad, too busy with Plato and new tech gadgets. He's all excited about the emerging church, visionary stuff, and he hopes that when church gets its act together body will just get booted out. Soul is smart enough to claim he's really earthy but his earth is all in the head or on the screen or somewhere inside.
The soul-body divide doesn't even exist, as the body knows (she may not be a genius but she knows enough to know that). But it is in the interest of the soul to make the divide as real as he can, because all of the prestige is on his side of the divide. The thing is that if he doesn't play fair, the unfairness may snap in his face, when justice finally comes to earth.
*
She is better (but despised)
*
The body is maybe a better Christian than the soul. At least she knows what she can do and especially what she can't do. She knows her place. If that sounds despicable to you, for someone to know her place and be so humble and abject, well, the body is often despised. The ones who live for pleasure treat her the worst.
Whenever the body commits sins she does so sobbing, kicking, against her will. Instigated by someone else. The soul was always the ringleader who got away. The soul is the one who imagines God doesn't see.
The body knows better but she can't speak. Her only language is pain but she gets roughed up when she uses that language. The body cries out Please don't continue doing that, you are hurting me, but the soul, wrapped in its dreams and its transcendence, stops listening. And when the hangover comes the soul blames the body for it. She is a victim of metaphysical domestic abuse and can't speak out, only flinch and bleed. But Christ no doubt considers her one of his.
And the fact that she cannot speak makes a very loud sound.
*
The body is maybe a better Christian than the soul. At least she knows what she can do and especially what she can't do. She knows her place. If that sounds despicable to you, for someone to know her place and be so humble and abject, well, the body is often despised. The ones who live for pleasure treat her the worst.
Whenever the body commits sins she does so sobbing, kicking, against her will. Instigated by someone else. The soul was always the ringleader who got away. The soul is the one who imagines God doesn't see.
The body knows better but she can't speak. Her only language is pain but she gets roughed up when she uses that language. The body cries out Please don't continue doing that, you are hurting me, but the soul, wrapped in its dreams and its transcendence, stops listening. And when the hangover comes the soul blames the body for it. She is a victim of metaphysical domestic abuse and can't speak out, only flinch and bleed. But Christ no doubt considers her one of his.
And the fact that she cannot speak makes a very loud sound.
*
She tried to warn you
*
Okay the body fell into convulsions, spit her contents onto the sidewalk, rolled into stuff you normally wouldn't touch with your foot.
Don't put any more of these substances into me!
*
This body, she was like an angel, she came to warn you but you didn't listen.
*
Okay the body fell into convulsions, spit her contents onto the sidewalk, rolled into stuff you normally wouldn't touch with your foot.
Don't put any more of these substances into me!
*
This body, she was like an angel, she came to warn you but you didn't listen.
*
Beast of burden
*
In regard to places where everything human breaks down into death, you know the places I mean. I have often been there, way too often, maybe you too. I have often stepped into those places, and they are not sinks of despair as they are said to be but breeding grounds of new faith. This faith new minted, and even tasting of mint, leaps out of the vacuum like a virtual particle. Faith turns out to be growing where nothing else can.
And the beast of burden who takes me to that place... that carrier is never the soul, it is always the poor despised body that knows the way to that place.
*
In regard to places where everything human breaks down into death, you know the places I mean. I have often been there, way too often, maybe you too. I have often stepped into those places, and they are not sinks of despair as they are said to be but breeding grounds of new faith. This faith new minted, and even tasting of mint, leaps out of the vacuum like a virtual particle. Faith turns out to be growing where nothing else can.
And the beast of burden who takes me to that place... that carrier is never the soul, it is always the poor despised body that knows the way to that place.
*
Friday, July 02, 2004
Tourists of the body
*
I think most of the modern philosophers of the body are really tourists, not residents. (The way a New York Times reader imagines herself as tourist of the whole globe instead of more humbly as resident of one small part of it.)
Think of poor Foucault, picturing himself as riding a body instead of being a body. The thing he thought he could use eventually caught up with him, not out of a desire to do this, not out of revenge, but because the structure of a body, the definition of a body, is to contain and accumulate pain (not just play with it -- that would be a mind game).
*
I think most of the modern philosophers of the body are really tourists, not residents. (The way a New York Times reader imagines herself as tourist of the whole globe instead of more humbly as resident of one small part of it.)
Think of poor Foucault, picturing himself as riding a body instead of being a body. The thing he thought he could use eventually caught up with him, not out of a desire to do this, not out of revenge, but because the structure of a body, the definition of a body, is to contain and accumulate pain (not just play with it -- that would be a mind game).
*
Story: A vigil
*
She watched her father die while hospice helpers scurried around the room and war news played on the TV. It was a long time since he'd given her a sign that he was still there, a strong man resting inside the shell of his debility. Now he couldn't eat, couldn't speak, couldn't gesture, couldn't will his own movement, yet by no means was he at rest, no, not yet. The breathing broke into the room like the sound of a big body heaving. What was the rightness of this? Such a strong man rendered powerless and dependent on people who couldn't help him, except by being there. Being there. And she was there. Her own bulky body was like a plug keeping the water from draining.
Then the plug faltered and the water began draining and her father turned himself over to God. Or was turned. And the weakness that everybody said was his dying, not really him ("Isn't it sad to see him go?") became revealed as his true nature, only disguised for a few years by the gestures of strength. This was his body, this weakness. It was more itself even as it broke its bonds and the muscles and sinews left for wherever it was that they went. His core was this weakness and dependence.
It made him like a beast of burden, a gentle one, that God was riding into its pen to rest. Just for a little while.
*
She watched her father die while hospice helpers scurried around the room and war news played on the TV. It was a long time since he'd given her a sign that he was still there, a strong man resting inside the shell of his debility. Now he couldn't eat, couldn't speak, couldn't gesture, couldn't will his own movement, yet by no means was he at rest, no, not yet. The breathing broke into the room like the sound of a big body heaving. What was the rightness of this? Such a strong man rendered powerless and dependent on people who couldn't help him, except by being there. Being there. And she was there. Her own bulky body was like a plug keeping the water from draining.
Then the plug faltered and the water began draining and her father turned himself over to God. Or was turned. And the weakness that everybody said was his dying, not really him ("Isn't it sad to see him go?") became revealed as his true nature, only disguised for a few years by the gestures of strength. This was his body, this weakness. It was more itself even as it broke its bonds and the muscles and sinews left for wherever it was that they went. His core was this weakness and dependence.
It made him like a beast of burden, a gentle one, that God was riding into its pen to rest. Just for a little while.
*
Thursday, July 01, 2004
Last and first
*
I have a theory that "the last shall come first" may mean that the body will be pre-eminent over the soul -- when the final decisive judgments come to be made.
Body, oh you poor donkey, so abused by the soul!
It is the soul that plans the sins while body, poor beast of burden, is forced to carry them out, even when it knows better. It knows that that alcohol will kill it but the soul, in its dreams and draperies, conveniently forgets this. Or doesn't care.
The body is whipped and led into swamps it knows better than to enter on its own.
The soul as a bad steward.
*
I have a theory that "the last shall come first" may mean that the body will be pre-eminent over the soul -- when the final decisive judgments come to be made.
Body, oh you poor donkey, so abused by the soul!
It is the soul that plans the sins while body, poor beast of burden, is forced to carry them out, even when it knows better. It knows that that alcohol will kill it but the soul, in its dreams and draperies, conveniently forgets this. Or doesn't care.
The body is whipped and led into swamps it knows better than to enter on its own.
The soul as a bad steward.
*
Poem: Sonnet of the body
... not really a sonnet however ... more like the eggshells of one that fell
Sonnet of the body
As though it were one's body that now prayed,
body, strapped in its belt of flesh,
death hastening, this inward crumbling
pain taking up all space, not felt but feeling,
one's being deeply wedged and vast and sad.
As though it were these bones of yours
that felt the hovering and heard the swish
of the Lord's garment just beyond fingers’ reach.
As though the soul, harboring this
buzzing discontent of yours,
your hunger to transcend, as though the soul
were a box without a lid,
in which the body laid its prayers, wrapped
like old love-letters, in a cord of flesh.
*
Sonnet of the body
As though it were one's body that now prayed,
body, strapped in its belt of flesh,
death hastening, this inward crumbling
pain taking up all space, not felt but feeling,
one's being deeply wedged and vast and sad.
As though it were these bones of yours
that felt the hovering and heard the swish
of the Lord's garment just beyond fingers’ reach.
As though the soul, harboring this
buzzing discontent of yours,
your hunger to transcend, as though the soul
were a box without a lid,
in which the body laid its prayers, wrapped
like old love-letters, in a cord of flesh.
*
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