Body consciousness

My body is an instrument, both scientific and musical. I use it to discover the world through the senses. Meanwhile, it vibrates with its own frequencies, for no other purpose but joy and sensuous pleasure. “Body consciousness” needs what Wikipedia calls “disambiguation”. In the media, which is to say in the lowest common denominator of consciousness, it means such things as “Does my bum look big in this?”; which is not body-consciousness at all but a variety of self-consciousness.

One of the beauties of being a blogger on Blogger (Google’s proprietary product) is setting out your Profile; not so much to advertise your interests, favourite films and so on, but to click each one and discover who else shares those interests. When I put in “body consciousness” as one of mine, I find that there are only three of us. One has no posts published, one has a single post only. As for me, I have not used the actual term till now, but body consciousness is the springboard for most of my writing here.

A Florida academic Richard Shusterman has written a book Body Consciousness (2008: Cambridge UP). Though couched in the professorial style, it seems to chime with what I want to say here. He has his own Web presence and there is also a YouTube of his lecture in Cracow. He coins the word “somaesthetics”. But let me first follow my own trail, not his.

In the days of my chronic illness, I consulted many practitioners outside the medical orthodoxy. A shiatsu specialist recommended I tread grass barefoot, to nurture my body’s connection to the All. A crystal therapist suggested I practise being a tree: my roots sinking deep in the moist nutritious soil; my leaves exposing themselves to the sky, delighting in all weathers, breathing the atmosphere. The exercises had scant effect on my illness, but demonstrated an intuition common to both therapists—that my body-consciousness needed unblocking. Looking back, I wonder if the blockage was actually a cause of the illness—or merely an effect.

What I have to say is conventionally left unspoken: the sensuous delight in one’s own body, experienced from the inside, for example in movement—dancing and sport perhaps, though I rarely do either. It’s in walking that I touch the sky and am most aware of dwelling in Heaven; that, and working with my hands. To body-consciousness, sitting at the computer is an affront, an abomination.

So I find myself without words to express this thing, even though the experience must be universal. To feel one’s own body, the act of proprioception is only part of it. To praise the feeling within one’s body is nothing more or less than to praise God and give thanks for his beneficence; at any rate to a unbeliever like me.

Later: it dawns on me that what I really wanted to talk about might better be described as sensuousness. I’ll add that to my Blogger profile, under “interests”.

Later still: I’m the only person on Blogger who admits to an interest in sensuousness. Perhaps its delicate fronds have been choked by the vigorous, factory-farmed plantations of pornography.

Even later: I tentatively put "sensuality" in my profile under "interests". Hm, most of the others understand it a little differently!

Nightmare

I’ve taken a vow to post here daily, to discover what is happening to me. A million things hit my consciousness each day, so what can I mean? I shall write in accordance with blind compulsion, with no guarantee of truth, other than some poetic kind. “What do you mean by that?” “Dear reader, this is for entertainment only, not public confession! That is what I mean!”

I awoke this morning disturbed by a dream whose miasma clung to me for many minutes. Dreams can be tedious to relate and worse for the listener, so I’ll try to distill this one’s “poetic truth”.

I’ve recently been on a long train journey, but something has happened to the train: some unknown emergency. I stand on a platform with a knot of other passengers. I’m wearing a suit, but no shoes or socks. It dawns on me that my luggage is still on the train, wherever that went; my shoes too. I’ve no idea where I am. I have nothing besides what I’m standing up in, and no clue as to my intended destination.

In the next scene, an officious woman tells me my luggage has been found. The company is anxious to return it to me. “However, Mr Vincent, you failed to follow the railway company’s instructions to put a label on your suitcase. We therefore had no option but to submit it to a laboratory for analysis. With the aid of forensic skills including DNA profiling, we identify you as the owner. Here’s the bill for that analysis. As soon as you settle, we’ll arrange for the suitcase to be flown back from the laboratory to any address you choose; anywhere in the world. You look worried, Mr Vincent. Let me assure you that airfreight charges are included, and there will be no extras.”

I have no money to pay the charge. In any case, it hugely exceeds the value of my lost things. I wander back into the crowd of travellers to escape her shrill voice, which now threatens me with prosecution, bailiffs and a poor credit rating.

In the final scene, I arrive at some kind of terminal: it might be a bus station, or airport. Someone greets me with “Good news! Your family are here! Your troubles are at an end.” It turns out to be the family of my eldest son. Apparently they are staying at the terminal for a few days, for it’s a kind of holiday camp too; or perhaps a stage set by Piranesi. So I wait till they appear. My granddaughter comes, looks excited to see me, takes my hand, dances expectantly round me as if I am a kind of Santa Claus. I don’t know what to say and have no presents to offer. All I have is what I’m wearing: the same suit, the same unwashed shirt, the same lack of shoes and socks.

Finding them solves nothing. We cannot even offer each other understanding. Till this moment I had hope. Now, not even that.

I wake up.

Blessings for all

My life is a series of blessings, like a string of pearls. If a blessing is possible, surely it is bestowed, distributed, not hoarded by a miserly God. And if blessings occur, why should they ever stop? For a blessing by its definition is a supernatural thing. No obstacle stands in its way. So I take it as given that blessings rain down continuously, ready for me to catch in pan or barrel. The greatest blessing is to know I am blest. For otherwise a blessing might seem a curse, just as electricity might be a curse to someone who doesn’t know what to do with this powerful cable, that can deliver such fatal magic.

*******

I had only intended a short stroll but it turned out as a two-hour round trip. Three years ago I did a pastel of St Lawrence’s Church and the Dashwood Mausoleum. Yesterday I passed the spot where I drew it, and walked the landscape depicted therein. What a privilege, what a blessing to walk in the landscape of a painting! For I saw it in my mind’s eye as I traversed the paths, and wondered if I ought to depict my own self in it when I got home.

Then I had a thought: that our happiness and misery are provoked by the symbolic landscapes we traverse, rarely by the “real world”. It’s like being in a dream. The bedrock reality is our physical safety and well-being; whether we are threatened or not. The rest is a waking dream, in which I, Everyman, endlessly embroider this simple theme, till its outline, so simple originally, becomes unrecognisable.

*******

And in this realm of blessings, the blessings themselves are symbols: gift-wrapped angel-messages, reminding me.

The abyss

Scattered amongst these pages is a series of sketches which, extracted and sorted in chronological order, constitute a personal memoir; more of a collage than a coherent portrait.

But I’ve never yet managed to cover the era between the ages of sixteen and sixty-four. Until this moment of writing—in which dawn has not yet broken, there’s just a grey sky slowly lightening—I’d thought my narrative might reach eighteen at least. But I see that the abyss was already opening, even at sixteen. There had been signs before that: cracks in the solid ground, always present, though I have chosen to skirt round them in earlier narratives. There was never a time free of possible vertigo. I could choose to remain silent about it—as almost everyone does. But then I could no longer proclaim “the personal is the universal”: for I would not have been personal enough.

How to depict this abyss? This morning, as the new day brightens in the sky, I recall it as a flush of self-consciousness and dread, an embarrassment of showing my face to the world, a sense of lack and inadequacy, a lostness. These are not the emotions of today, I’m glad to tell you, but emotions remembered, or rather a single emotion, harvested periodically across the decades like unripe fruit garnered uselessly, a fruit that never ripens, just rots in shame.

I know the abyss exists for others too, not through any revelation of that flush of shame on their faces that I’d instantly recognize. Everyone tries to hide that. But you know them from the desperate strategies they adopt: addiction, fake happiness, religion, suicide. Or, if so blessed (or cursed), they take up an activity which, repeated obsessively, becomes a talent valued by the world, and can be traded in exchange for consolations.

I’m sure the existential abyss, or at least the cracked surface of life’s path, is known to everyone. At the mildest end of the scale, it’s a game of hopscotch, where we mark the ground with chalk, to hop across the squares. Or we walk as if superstitiously, avoiding the gap between the paving-stones.

Me, I was almost engulfed; but with the instinctive caution of an animal, I kept clear of some sticky traps—addiction, fake happiness and suicide. Then, after surviving to the age of thirty, I succumbed to a guru cult and a chronic illness, two kinds of patched-up boardwalk over the abyss. I’m cured of both now. I no longer fear that steep ravine, which Albert Camus in his Myth of Sisyphus makes part of the landscape of The Absurd.

The young woman in the painting is Jane Aiken Hodge, elder daughter of Conrad Aiken. Like her father she became a writer. Like him she was drawn to suicide. At any rate, whilst in sound mind and good health at the age of 91, she recently died of a self-administered overdose. Nobody seems to wonder why. [Picture scanned from front page of The Times, 29th July.]