11 – 2 – 18 I am my Body (5 minutes)

What does it mean to talk to someone?

To be painfully analytical: My brain sends impulses to mouth, lips, and tongue to coordinate with my diaphragm and conjure a complex mixture of fricative and non-fricative sounds at a volume loud enough to be audible so that somebody else’s ears can perceive that pressure wave through a mechanism that’s far too complicated for me to understand or explain, ultimately sending an electrical signal to their brain with some message that I did or did not intend. That gets interpreted and so on.

Cartesian Dualism bookends this process with two souls that possess wills that manipulate those brains and so on down the line.

So what we really mean when we say we’re talking to someone is that we’re making noise with our body (probably, hopefully, meaningful) and that other person’s body has the machinery to decode that meaningful noise, if we speak the same language.

Who’s the “we” here? Is it that thing Descartes would call a soul, or the bodies actually doing the observable conversation? Let’s try another angle.

When you hug someone, do you hug their body or their soul? Weird question, I don’t like it either.

But if we believe in Cartesian Dualism, that we are a soul inside a body, a person inside a husk, those are really our only two options. You can hug that body with your body and that will convey some symbolic meaning to the souls on both ends. It feels a bit unsatisfying.

It almost sounds to me like if you were playing SIM’s or Second Life or some other game like that and you made your avatar hug another player’s avatar.

Why doesn’t this sound right? Why is it that when we apply something as logical as Descartes’ Cogito, Ergo Sum we get results that feel uncomfortable and unnatural?

We’ll get away from that for a moment.

The last time you kissed someone, for the sake of specificity let’s say romantically, why did you do it?

The first person to raise their hand says, “Because I love them.” Good answer.

A slightly braver person replies that they were drunk. Kind of the same reason, you thought you loved them.

What is them?

I know “them” is not a pair of lips because no one’s answered in a way that would indicate that. Seriously, have you ever kissed someone just because it looked like, or you had heard, that they had nice lips? Well, maybe you have. Did it feel the same as a romantic kiss?

So maybe it’s this “soul” that Descartes talks about. But if that were the case, couldn’t you just express that in words. Wouldn’t “I could kiss you” or “I’d like to kiss you” or “Remember when we kissed?” have the same effect in that soul, keeping in mind that the soul is a separate being from the body and not influenced by the body’s merely physical, animalistic appetites and whims?

I don’t think it works. I think deep down we all know it doesn’t work. When we have the prisms of pain, or naivete, or too much time spent thinking, this vision of a separate mind and body doesn’t quite click with what we know intuitively.

Through inexperience; I think we see this in baseball.

First base, kissing (if I’m still up on the times). As we just talked about, we generally don’t kiss people because we hear they’re good kissers or have good lips. That first expression of love, the most naïve expression, keeps with what is true.

As you go around the base path however there is an increasing tendency to see people as bodies. I think it’s likely because the physical sensations become so much stronger in comparison to the emotional sensations that we fall into acting as bodies, rather than acting as people. And only a person can see a person, a body can’t.

Through the prism of pain. In pain we abandon overly complicated rationalizations. We go back to what we know is true, what works, even if we’ve convinced ourselves otherwise.

You’ll rarely hear a grieving family say, “She killed her body.”

I’ve never heard a victim say, “He abused my body.”

Parents on the news don’t say, “They shot his body.”

Pain knocks the rose-colored glasses off our eyes and forces us to see reality. We are our bodies, and we are our souls, and we are. We are inseparable from ourselves.

When we aren’t forced to clue in to reality we can believe that what we do with our bodies doesn’t affect who we are. We can develop an attitude of ownership, saying “my body” instead of “myself.”

My intent is not to convince everyone to wait to have sex till marriage, it’s probably too late for most people who would read this. My intent is not to say that we should all be paragons of health; never drinking or smoking, exercising daily and meditating constantly.

My intent is to remind myself, and to encourage you to consider the possibility, that what we do with our bodies matters. That our bodies are beautiful and excellent expressly because they are an inseparable part of who we are.