Remembrance of Words Past

Monday, July 03, 2006


THE EDUCATION OF THE BODY

The body, when we are young, and if we have the luck to be healthy, runs on its own. We ignore it, feed it what we choose to feed it. Ignore it. Smoke too much, drink, and perhaps other more illicit things. We are learning, at this point, the things of the mind, the things of society, so that we may gain our portion of it. So that we will be employed, marry, have children, contribute to the others who surround us. But the body is not to be ignored it has a way of creeping along, to remind us that we are after all just frail creatures. So we become sick, and we have to turn away from the education of the society(ies) in which live. Instead, we must turn towards the society inside that contains whatever is truest about ourselves. Life has crept up to us, and we must be subsumed by ITS needs. And so we come down from the mountains we have built for ouselves, colliding with the glaciers of our own bodies, hoping that these encounters won't kill us. And we are stuck beneath these mountains on the rocky valleys of our own health, wondering what we are to do. We become stuck with our bodies and minds and the outside world, the education(s) of the past seem more distant, atop the peaks from which we have been thrown down. This new education must train the body and the mind. The body must be kept healthy and the mind must be trained to tos aside the notions of the past - the education of the future life. We become ourselves, edging forward and flingin out our minds. To discover what is truest for us. "Free human dialogue" with ourselves, "wandering wherever the agility of the mind allows, lies at the heart of education." (Postman, 1996). We descend into ourselves thrown down from the lives we have created and which have been created for us.

Illness takes away the security of our mountain-top chalets. The lives we have built. The lives that we think we have chosen. All is lost on these rocky valley floors. We must stare around us and get our bearings. And then we can begin to see what has become of our lives and what we must wrench away from the illness and that which we must discard. Security has vanished into a mist and fog of choice, clinging to the rocky sides of the mountains which surround us. "Security is mortal's chiefest enemy." (MacBeth, Act III Sc. V) and so we are led from its grasp to rediscover what we mean to ourselves. What our lives mean to us. To stop living in our chalet and make the entire range of mountains our home. We can only find security now in those things that are most important to us. We cannot take health for granted, nor can we entirely trust the education that came before us. We are creatures searching for ourselves and for the lives that we think we have lost but which have merely been replaced by an existence more free and more difficult. One which will truly be ours.

We do not forget those around us, but our relations to them are changed, they merely travel down to see us from their own chalets. It is a visit for them, a test of compassion. While we inhabit these cold, misty and rocky valleys. They must find themselves in their own time, if they are to be happy and content when they come to see their own deaths. We are confronted with ours in what we hope to be the middle of our lives. This changes us, re-educates us, sets us on different paths and to different homes.

"For by the death-blow of my Hope/My memory immortal grew," writes Byron. We are reformed in memory and let the former education fall away, remembering what we may once have known, as infants. That the world is important in what we make of it, when we were learning what it was meant to have a separate body. To learn to use it and to learn to see the wonders that were then nameless around us. We are connecting body and mind with the filter of the memory and the lens of education. "'Education,' he said meditatively, 'I know enough latin to know that the word must come from educere, to lead out...'" (Morris, 1966). and so we are led out. Past former lives, guilts, memories, to the passions and insecurities of the present. Something that burns away the past like a cold moon trying to burn away the sun. Impossible you say. Perhaps. But the hope and the new life are built on the trying. Whatever becomes of it we are re-formed. And the world(s) we discover are renewed each day by the mere act of trying. What we are, what we have discovered of ourselves, we can forgive. We must. Otherwise the fall has meant nothing, and the pain must be avenged.

References:

Morris, William. News from Nowhere in The Collected Works of William Morris. Vol. XVI. Russell and Russell, London. 1966.

Postman, Neil. The End of Education. Knopf, New York. 1996.

Shakespeare, William. MacBeth.

Photo References(from top to bottom):

1) Can be found at this link.

2) Copyright Roger Perman. This and many others can be found here.

Worrying about the Future

When you have cancer, all is subsumed beneath it. Then, when you wonder if it is gone or not, you worry about if it will return and whether you can live out a whole life without its reoccurance. I've stated that before, but as I lurge back in fits and starts to some sort of health, it is becoming more and more of a concern. Looking back at the past year or so, it is hard not to think that something MUST be wrought from pain and fatigue. But is it to be, and what's the point if the disease is to return. What is the point of getting better if there is only a return to illness. The point - if there is one - is re-examination, survival, another look at the world, before the eyes go blank and the skin grows tight and useless. It is to find some hope in the mere act of survival and the actions of daily life. Ritual is what we fail to see when we see through healthy eyes and strong bodies. The rituals of daily life, the first cup of coffee in the morning, watching children in the park down the street, sitting for a cup of green tea or - gasp - yet another moccacino in a cafe, while you write or watch people from behind the glass, or in the chair across from you. These rituals, the spaces of our lives, the cracks in the sidewalks of activities of the healthy. We do not realize or notice them. They escape the atention of the healthy. Or if they capture the attention of those so blessed it is only as a moment of relaxation, or a place to gather energy for the rest of the day or the week to come. But these cracks where daily concerns slip away ARE our real life. Work, is a mere economic engine to keep us alive. Our children will grow and capture lives of their own from the air as we have before they lived. The only true permanance is in the rituals themselves, not in the people which inhabit them.

"How very nice," writes Nikos Kazantzakis, "it was to be alive with all five senses - the five doors through which the world enters - working well. How very nice to say, The world is fine, I like it." (Kazantzakis 1965, 343). Whether the world is fine or not, it is better to see it through healthy eyes than it is to see it through sick ones. It is better to feel it through strong fingers that grasp tightly the branches of spring trees re-emerging with leaves, than it is with skeletal hands that can only grab weakly and must let go because of the pain of the grasping. To grasp is to remind oneself of life, and to be alive. So we grasp rituals, for they centre us. We can be ourselves and though the cast of our lives may change the ritual, the feeling the inhabits the mind and the actions of the hand remains the same. We feel through our senses, and our sense exchange something of themselves to the world and together they produce memory and ritual. Ritual which is the outward face of memory for it grasps us with its fingers and reminds us of the many occasions of the past and gives us hopre for the many rituals to come. We fade in its grasp and come to ourselves at the same time.

Balzac writes, "The she went back to her room, gathered together, as it were, into a single thought, all the thousand and one delights of that day; and after long contemplation of the picture she had made of her memories, she fell asleep, the happiest creature in Paris." (Balzac 1962, 207). We are each our own artists, draing together the paintings of the day and of our life outward onto larger canvases. These are our lives and when we concentrate we can see the smallest detail of our existence. And we paint with the minutest strokes and with the greatest precision in those time between memory and the future, when we grasp daily lives with the hands of ritual and relax and are. Each day is a lifetime, a painting, painted with action and tears and pain and love and voices. Each day passes us by and we pass by it. And capture it in the paintings we draw at night with the brushes that our parent gave us and the brushes we have created for ourselves. Ritual is that moment when we stand back and stare at what we have painted and consider how we will continue later. It is this moment, standing back that conncets our lives. There is no Language for ritual, only action and being. It is pure spirit. The one thing all matter contains. Eli Mandel, the Canadian poet, states, "The m0on has no language." (Mandel, 2000). There is no language for existence but ritual and being. The ritual of daily rising. The rituals that are threatened by illness and gain more power and significance because of these threats. They signify our lives. Our failures. Our victories. Our glory. Our weakness. Our Pain. And the pains we give to others. They are a symbol for our lives.

Alice Munro has a character state, "What I need is a rest. A deliberate state of rest, with new definitions of luck." (Munro, 1982, 128). Luck, it seems to have passed the ill by. It seems that its threats have killed the idea of luck. We have been cast from Eden, to live lives of OUR choosing; of OUR design, to grow up from the innocence of garden life, to the beauty of the adult world, where pasions and pain reside. We can remember Eden with pleasure, but know that freedom to choose is what makes humans human. "The world was before them, where to choose their place of rest..." is what Milton writes of Adam and Eve (Milton, 2005). Luck is living and still having those choices and in not worrying about the wisdom of the choce but reveling in the choosing itself. We are artistic creations, created by ourselves and the sick know that William Morris was right when he spoke of choosing for your home nothing "...which you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful." (Morris 1880). The wisdom is the choosing, for your home and for yourself. For the artistic creation which bears your name and your face and is composed of your memores and desire and wishes and loves and your past. We should choose wisely and choose for ourselves.

References:

Balzac, Honore de. Old Goriot. Translated by M. A. Crawford. Penguin Classics, 1962.

Kazantzakis, Nikos. Report to Greco. Translation by Bruno Cassirer Ltd. Faber and Faber, London. 1989.

Mandel, Eli. "The Mad Woman of the Plaza de Mayo," in The Other Harmony: The Collected Poetry of Eli Mandel. Ed. by Andrew Stubbs and Judy Chapman. Canadian Plains Research Centre. Regina, 2000.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Ed. by Godon Teskey. Norton Critical Editions. W. W. Norton and Co. New York, 2005.

Morris, William. "On Simplicity," (1880) in William Morris on Art and Design. Ed. by Christine Poulson. Sheffield Academic Press. 1996.

Munro, Alice. "Bardon Bus" in The Moons of Jupiter. MacMillian of Canada. Toronto, 1982.