Sallie Tisdale - Is the Body Obsolete? A Forum

Whole Earth Review, Summer, 1989 by Sallie Tisdale

I was a tomboy. I wore torn cut-offs, t-shirts, short hair, and no shoes all the hours of the long bright summer days. My brother and I would hike the big, dark pipes that passed the nearby creek beneath the streets, listening to the echoes of our bare feet knocking rocks against the metal in the cold trickle we crossed. I climbed, everything; jungle gyms, fences, reservoirs. I flopped in the dust by my father's shop to count grasshoppers. I could swing higher than anyone else around, and fling myself out at the end of the arc with a primitive, lusty cry. That name, tomboy, never meant a thing to me, except perhaps as a point of pride: it meant a girl who lived solidly inside her body, rather than simply on its skin. I was my body and my body was me, and that more than anything defined the limits of space. I remember reaching the top of a very tall cedar tree one afternoon and perching at its swaying, flimsy tip, sticky pitch on aU my fingers, rocked by a giddy, wet-palmed thrill. It seemed, under that canopy of heat and air, that I looked out of my own eyes and saw the world from the world's very center.

I have a photograph taken the summer I was eleven years old. I am with two friends, entangled arm and leg, shirts hiked up cockeyed across our bare bellies. Even with breasts blooming out under my shirt, even with coarse hair beginning to sprout between my legs, I was at ease. I was thoughtless and free. It was the last moment, I think, in the life of that particular body; when that summer ended that body died and a new one - an altogether different one - was born.

I am thirty-one. I am midway through the life span of my current body, a weaker, softer shell than the last but not without its virtues. Barring the unexpected - wouldn't that be lovely? - I can expect this body to last, in more or less the same condition, another 25 years. And then my second body will die (perhaps all at once, in one summer's breath) and my next body, my old and altogether different body, will be born.

I find it hard to admit how much I think about my body. There are new points of pride, opposing beliefs hard to reconcile. I see many people my age caught in a frantic state of body amendment, struggling to mold and refine the recalcitrant shell, neglecting other duties, other joys, in the effort. I am too lazy, too fond of leisurely pleasures, to participate. Then there is the intellectual disinterest in the body, an absent-minded inattention to the body's needs, the willingness to injure the body in casual ways for more immediate goals. This is the pride I pretend to, but the fact is that I struggle with an almost ceaseless concern for my body and the bodies of other people. (I am far more forgiving of other people's bodies.) The body haunts me; body as idea, body as object, sensation, boundary, the body as a universal and the body in isolation. The specter takes several shapes. There is sex, the possibility of it, its prohibitions and risks. There is the fear of illness and pain - those little twitches in my legs at night, the sudden ringing in the ears. There is the eternal fountain of taste and sound and sight, the grief which fives at the heart of beauty - because, lastly, there is the certainty of decline. My joints dry up day by day, my neurons skip a signal, my liver sags a bit in its owm damp darkness. Whether I am looking from the center out, or from the outside in, the body is there, unforgettable and constant and seductive. I can beat it, abuse and neglect it, deprive it, but it won't go away and God knows I hope it stays here a long, long time to come.

A long time ago, in that other body, I didn't consider the nature of bodies. In fact I think it is part of the nature of child bodies not to consider themselves, but simply to use themselves.

And oh! the uses to which those bodies can be put! That body of mine climbed steep and winding trails, swam lakes, tumbled through football and slid through skiing. That body slept with an unconscious and total grace. That body did what it was directed to do, unfailingly, without complaint. There was no separation. No analysis. No ghost. My body was me and I was my body; if I thought at all it was about the way my body stood in relation to the bodies - which were the selves - of the people with whom I shared the world.

In my current incarnation I am one step removed from the shell. Perhaps it is in the nature of adult bodies to do this, to think about themselves. I think about the ethos of my body, defined by its tendencies. This shell I'm in has a tendency to respiratory problems, is allergic to codeine, has green eyes, delivered one baby shell. It came complete with all the requisite equipment, and a few pieces have since been removed. Another shell, your shell, will have a different ethos. It is possible for me - uncommon, but possible - to view my own body without judgement. I can see the body as a metaphor, that my body in all its imperfection is a physical expression of an internal self. It is just my body, a transient and changing thing, the product of many forces beyond my reckoning: merely a thing which arrives, has a life, and dies in its own proper time. My body is my Doppelganger, far less substantial than it often appears to be.