Present in the body

Some of you who are a lot more self aware than Percy or who have known yourselves more consciously for a longer period of time may find it amusing to learn that I only today realized what has been one of the most difficult aspects of losing a lover, my whole life. I had always assumed it was being reminded of her-- that is, re-minded. In the mind. Or that it was re-feeling, like resentment (from the Old French resentir, which simply meant to feel again), how difficult it can be to simultaneously feel tender and angry or jealous toward the same person, for example. 

An 82 year old man lost his wedding ring but found it a few years later while digging up carrots in his garden. This is the way things go sometimes. 

But no, to use the funny meme phrase, I was today years old when I finally got it: the most difficult part is in the body. It is, for me, sense memory that is the most searing, that leads to the greatest sense of loss, pain, isolation, nostalgia. The map of the interactions on the body is the real guide to this particular kind of loss, for me. Being mind-oriented, as well as being trained in poetry and the language of the heart which, in spite of its pretense, is still art and is still removed from immediacy, I realize finally that it is the language of the body, fierce, primal, irrational, immediate, uncontrollable and unmanageable, that cuts the most. 

This is fine.

The memory appears in the imagination and goes along with a sort of movie of a remembered time, and the emotions cascade the way they do in response, but it all begins first in my body, most of the time. I have not realized this before. And sometimes for whatever reason a person meets us in ways that are indelible. Traced, dug, cut, held, immersed, burned and branded into the skin, along the wild ramified pathways of nerves, in the muscle, to the bone, through the marrow. What may have been tender and gentle in the moment becomes more jagged, cutting, searing and gripping in memory. 

And I think the body's memory is both for me-- the most powerful and the slowest to forget. I still have sense memories of experiences with beloveds of mine, for example, from when I was 16. Weirdly and in keeping with the irrational and unpredictable nature of the body, sense memory is not dependent on time, for me. More recent experiences are entirely gone, for example. It reminds me that the core of my way of experiencing the world is sensual, tangible, tactile, olfactory, gustatory, and yet unpredictable and out of my control in many ways. Blind, made of mud and stone and blood. 

In this way Mary Oliver's Wild Geese gets to it:

WILD GEESE BY MARY OLIVER

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

So it feels. The soft animal of my body goes on loving what it loves for a very long time, sometimes. Longer than my easily distracted mind recalls, my mind so well trained in denial and whistling in the dark; even longer than my heart aches, which in this case I gather will be quite a while. The body is where the affair still exists, no matter what I do. This must be why people are drawn to fuck someone else soon after a terrible break up, just to try to rewire all of that sense memory, in a usually futile attempt to shut the body up by occupying it with someone else. The rebound impulse in me has not been to erase the mind or salve the heart. It has been mostly to shut the body the fuck up, to try to stop the sudden flash of the beloved's fingers in chest hair or breath on the neck, or all of the other indelible moments best left undescribed. 

This also speaks to a huge variety of numbing and body-killing activities we humans engage in, probably usually in an effort to kill the body's memory, whether it's of traumatic sense memory or beautiful but no longer present. I know drugs and alcohol were for that purpose, definitely. Sex and food. The oblvion I talked about a couple days ago makes even more sense in relation to body memory, which refuses to be silenced. 

Becoming more aware of the imperative of the body after the loss of a lover (resisting using the indefinite article, wanting to speak the truth of The Beloved in this case, afraid to look at it) gives me hope, however. It's not the end of the world when the stab of the simple memory of the way we used to kiss flashes across everything in the world, last night powerfully enough that I had to touch my lips to be sure they were still there, and the idea filled my mind that it would "never happen again" and I was infinitely disconsolate. It's the end of a part of the indelible world, where the breath and lips are. That's where the memory lives. It's somehow easier to let go when it is properly located. The lips, after all, are only one part of the body, and their memory is only one part of memory. And the fiercest part of the memory was actually the breath, and the peculiar way we used to kiss without even touching very much, where the space between our close drawn mouths held everything there is. 

So yeah no big deal when that is properly located right.  

But the most out of control part of all of this is how the body ironically has a mind of its own. Unbidden, even fiercely resisted. Sometimes to no avail. The memory of the body is there as plain as as a table or any other physical object. It refuses to be tamed. It refuses to play by the rules. It refuses to color within the lines. 

And my mind projects a lot, as you might imagine. I have already thought, for example, every woman from now on will just remind me of her. I'll be unable to be present with anyone else because my body will be remembering her. Not helpful, mind. Not helpful. 

All of this goes along with the other realization I had last night, which is that, ultimately, a decision and choice made by another person is entirely out of my control. The offense to my ego is grave enough that I subsequently try to tell some kind of story wherein I at least am deluded that I have regained some kind of control. But the plain truth is that, no matter how important someone is to us, they are free agents entirely separate from us, and they are bound to make choices that hurt us, and there is absolutely nothing we can do about their choice. As people often say in recovery, the only thing we can change is how we respond to the choices of others. 

I have been responding in an okay way, for the most part. The plain fact is that the way I have been indelibly loved, physically, which in this case also happens to be the best way for me personally of my life, that is what I am going to have to find a way to deal with. She and I will be mind-friends always, as we meet very well there. I don't mind having her "take up room in my heart," since I have had a lot of practice in holding space there. But the burn of the disconnected body, that is a painfully present challenge and I feel like it's healing cannot be rushed or faked. 

A major life lesson for me there. I think I have been trying to kill my body's memory for many years. I wonder what it would be like to let the soft animal of my body love what it loves.