Longing to be Embodied

The free gym on campus that we go to isn't open on the weekends, so for 2 days a week, I sit at home thinking about a treadmill (but not of the 1.8 miles of road between home and the treadmill...). Running (jogging, I guess, really, but I call it running because that feels more empowering (like "I could run all day and never get tired," that thing we say about our selves in childhood but would never envision for ourselves as adults -- shit -- I've made a parenthetical within a parenthetical), and converting my own power from metaphysical into material, resourceful, and beneficial is presently a priority for me) reminds me that I'm fully and wholly heavy, a million systems under one agreement that is me. It's an avenue that seems to help me connect my mind to my body in a deep, core-strengthening sort of way.

The vision of myself as an older woman who runs and stays in shape came to me when I lived in Heidelberg, Germany, in 2001. A few girlfriends of mine and I were about to catch a street train a few blocks from my apartment when we saw what must have been an 80 or 90-year-old woman with a cane pulling herself up onto a train cart. It's nothing to see folks that old or older walking unassisted, even riding bikes and grocery shopping. They're spry -- spitfire -- a quality I value in myself, though at my age (almost 29!) it's called energetic. Ten years ago, they called it obnoxious, so at least I've learned a bit of self-restraint. It's that control -- that ability to leash in some of my energies and direct them into a project that's meaningful, helpful, and rewarding that has been my salvation, and it's taken the most work from me to get a hold of and control... I'm learning to control my ability to control, if that makes any sense. I'm metacontrolling? Theorizing the phenomenology of control? Yeah, maybe.

Another thing that's been on my mind as of late is the intersection between embodiment and culture, particularly religious cultures. I believe that Christianity -- the religion I know and therefore the one I'll talk about subjectively -- is a long-term practice in sustained disembodiment. The ideal is out there, somewhere, nebulous in the ether between myth and history, for followers of Christ to seek but not find, knock but not be.... you know. It demands its adherents struggle toward righteousness while knowing they'll never get it. It's sameness through pursuit of "excellence," the same rubric that guides the lives of perfectionists and genocidal dictators. No wonder there's so much depression, PTSD, and a host of traumatic-overload mental conditions: we live in a world that pushes contradictory information upon us constantly, information that skews the boundaries between reality and make-believe, what we are and what we should be, our bodies and our selves. It's a vicious cycle that keeps people locked into a source of power outside of themselves to insure they'll never claim control of the powers they actually do have. It's devious, the descent of man.

It's complicated to call oneself a Christian in America today, because with the fracturing and fragmenting of identity, Christian isn't the monolithic, homogenous cult that it used to be: it's now, in like order, a fractured and fragmented, loosely-affiliated grouping of religious ideologies held together by the shared name "Christian." Almost on a church-to-church basis, ideology changes to reflect microcosmic and macrocosmic histories and myths. Who-slept-with-who's-wife narratives bend and shape inteprerations until men can't wear shorts for fear of so distracting a woman, she'll drop her floor-length skirt in front of all the others and demand he procreate with her this instant! It's really quite an interesting cultural phenomenon, but it's one that's deviously hegemonic, so much so that people mindlessly follow it, demanding the same of their children and refusing "Satan's" higher education and "liberal arts."

While a disembodied heavenly host are singing, an action accomplished through the use of larnyx, lungs, and diaphragm. Make it make sense.