Body

It occurred to me recently that rather a lot of my writing involves stories about bodies. There’s strangely-clad bodies, tattooed bodies, painted bodies - and of course, naked bodies. Perhaps rather too many naked bodies. There’s plenty of big, important questions out there, to try to find the answers for, so was is the whole body thing really causing a bit of a distraction? I’ve seen it happen with artwork. Paint a huge landscape, and somewhere in the painting there are one or two tiny figures. People will shuffle up to within inches of he canvas and stare at the figures. And, heaven forbid, an artist tries to convey some deep meaning, by way perhaps of a visual metaphor, and places a nude in the painting. People, of course, just stare at the nude. ‘There’s a naked person there. What’s that about?’ one might say. ‘He’s made her too thin’, another replies. ‘No’, says another, ‘too fat’. So, I say to myself, why bodies? And the first thing that came to mind was that very obsession that I’m talking about – the fact that people always look at other people – other bodies. At the same time though, may folk are in denial of this – I’m in denial myself – and this, I suggest, is a big clue to what’s going on. We’ll return to that thought. But first let’s start at the opposite end of things, so to speak. If we believe ourselves to have a soul at all then we’ll often consider it belonging elsewhere – somewhere other than Earthbound reality. It is in the Realm of Being -whilst us poor creatures of flesh, we are in the Realm of becoming. And what actually is meant to be becoming? Well, simply to be transported out of this world and into the ‘real’ world that sits above and beyond us. This Platonic view of things has been around for at least 2,500 years- the imminent world of form a poor cousin of the transcendent. Aristotle gave us something similar with his concept of Zoe. Zoe is a jewel in the great necklace of being – the adornment of the cosmos. But he had another concept of soul – and this concept could simply be described as mind and body plus place in the world. That’s the great split in things. For Aristotle, the essence of things is contained in its own presence in the world. For Plato, essence is other-worldly. For the most part, Western thought has followed Plato – all footnotes to Plato, as it’s said. Looking at all the theories of truth and knowledge – the one that stands out for me is called Phenomenology. Unfortunately, all the great thinkers in the phenomenology line are unfailingly obscure. But we can get some notion of their ideas by just using the term ‘embodied cognition’. In other world, truth and knowledge reach us via the body. It’s Aristotle rather than Plato. Well, still a bit obscure perhaps? But just take a look at something we might say of ourselves often enough – ‘I have a body’. There’s Plato right there – the ‘I’ separated out from its manifestation in the world – like the person is distinct from matter. Yes, that’s Plato and Descartes and Galileo and Francis bacon – the state of dominion, extractive exploitation and control. Bodies owned – bodies to be ‘had’. So, how about – I am my body? Well, better, but still a bit of ownership creeping in. So let’s settle for – I am a body. It leads us into the question of where body stops and world begins. Our lungs are full of air, our blood full of oxygen. More than half our body weight is composed of a non-human eco-system. If we could somehow remove all that wildlife from ourselves then, I’m told, we would quickly fall ill and probably die within a few days unless we could be re-colonised by suitable plants and beasts. So we’re smudges in time and smudges in space. Skin is just a liminal zone – an apparent inside and outside, yet porous to everything in creation. Yet skin is where so many of our ambiguities happen – we’ve got skin in the game. Another train of thought that crops up here is paradox. There’s the universe – symmetrical, in many respects, - yet not quite perfect. It seems to hint at perfection but fall short of achieving it. We see this in several examples and finally we see it played out in the Nature we see around us. Today it’s common to emphasise the benevolent sides of Nature – mutual aid, co-operation across species – even altruism. Perhaps this is the antidote to the red-in-tooth-and-claw, survival of the fittest story propagated by popularisers of Darwin. So, we make excuses for the lions as they take down a zebra. It’s just in their nature, we might say. And besides, if the zebra could understand, it might prefer this type of death. It’s what they would have wanted. And then there’s the guy who thought that bears were getting a bad press. He set out to prove that they’re a lot friendlier and more sociable than they’re given credit for. He was eaten by the bears. Well, it’s what he would have … er, perhaps not. So Nature’s called wild for a reason – it really is wild! And this paradox in nature carries on through our own human nature. With us we call it good and evil. But good and evil are just stories we tell ourselves. Paradox and wildness dwell within us. And so, I think, that’s why systems of ethics and morality never really capture human behaviour. It cannot be captured – we are paradox – inherent contradictions through and through. And we’re often in denial, as I’ve said. Some folks seem okay with their bodies – they’re comfortable in their own skin, as we say. Other folks seem fine with the knowledge of their own morality. My own response to being embodied is mainly confusion and fear. My response to the world is grief, bordering on despair. So, you might say, I’m a natural optimist. The paradoxes get deeper when they’re under the skin. The dark emotions need to be embraced. But here we can ask, how can these different responses to embodiment be reconciled? Well, firstly, Plato wasn’t wrong – it’s just the way things are prioritised. There really is a realm beyond the appearances of the world – which is all that we ever experience. But it need not be considered a supernatural or even a transcendent realm. It’s Aristotle’s Zoe, if you wish, or Indra’s web, or the Akashic field or simply the pattern that lies beyond the quantum vacuum. And Plato’s naming of our own world as the Realm of Becoming – that really was genius. Ours is not a static world – it is moved by Spirit, it delivers grace. And before we go further, I just want to assure you that this is not some kind of happy ending coming up. No, I’d have to call this a savage grace – a wild grace. The various paradoxes that we’ve explored are not anomalies to the Cosmos – they are its cutting edge, where creativity and destruction meet. A liminal space – a wrack line between the ocean of mystery and the land of nature, bodies and matter. But then we use grace in another sense. To be graceful of movement, speech and the like. And again, I’d have to say that this grace is not the tame, cultured and somewhat uptight thing that we might sometimes think of. The wild grace of the Cosmos leads then to the wild grace of people. There’s always an element of the Trickster lurking here. There’s always the subversive, the deviant and transgressive here – otherwise our wild souls would not know grace – would not be able to channel it. And there’s our dilemma – our denial of the body is a denial of wild grace, wild soul, wild Cosmos. We need rules, structure, laws, manners, conviviality, kindness, compassion – of course we do. But, I venture to suggest, we also need to acknowledge who we really are. Western culture often fails on this. It is rational mind over spirit and soul. It is cause-and-effect, cost-benefit analysis over synchronicity and gift. It’s the story of objectivity over the subjective insights of the heart. Some folk seem to achieve that flow of Cosmic grace to embodied grace. I wonder if they somehow intuitively know the things I’ve tried to explain here. I’ve tried to explain all of this from within that rational framework. But you’ll see that this too is a contradiction. All this needs re-framing. It needs another story that starts from where we really start from – from the body. One day I will try to tell this story exactly from the body’s perspective. In the meantime, I sit with my confusion, fear and grief, because, I reckon, owning our emotions - that’s part of the deal. No happy endings then – but I wish you wildness – wild Cosmos, wild Nature, wild body, wild soul.