We are our bodies
Bits and Pieces
One day walking, Mr. Roberts’ friend lost his arm. Machete. They replaced it. No big deal. Then came the wood-chipper, two legs, the other arm. More parts. Bad beat.
People still recognized him. Face. But the arms wore slightly different shades and one leg swung lower than the left. He no longer played basketball with any confidence and scratched a pinky toe that hadn’t made the cut.
Other than that, he said, he felt himself.
Then came the head. Golf. Knocked clean off into the rough. They scrapped his mismatched body and scraped his brain into another. The only bright side to the previous occupant’s nail-gun mistake: symmetry.
He never played golf again. But that’s not the reason nobody recognized him. No, now he wore the new face. He had to explain its eyes to others and remind his friends of their secrets before they laughed and called him by his name.
He mostly felt fine, he still insisted. His memories failed to get a rise, but new moods kept him fresh. They seemed softer. Worth keeping.
So he stuck to writing.
Then his memory got shot. Old age. He forgot what had been what or who had been who. Should have kept a journal.
Friends kept calling him by his name because they thought he shared their past.
But who was in that name?
He hoped whoever judged him in the end would know.
“For I believe that much of a man’s character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and noble soul.” Moby Dick
“It occurred to me that my vision of the fig tree and all the fat figs that withered and fell to earth might well have arisen from the profound void of an empty stomach.” The Bell Jar
“Waking up begins with saying am and now. That which has awoken then lies for a while staring up at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognized I, and therefore deduced I am, I am now” A Single Man
“There’s a certain purity to this being who’s unable to speak, he thinks, as his finger traces the outline of her shoulder, arm, hips, legs, until it reaches her feet.” Tender is the flesh
“When a bullet hits a person you hear it. It’s an unmistakable sound you never forget, like a kind of wet slap. Your mate next to you falls face down in the sand, sand that tastes as bitter as ash.” Zinky Boys
“And, as if nature were protecting man against his own ingenuity, the reproductive processes were affected for a time; men became sterile, women had miscarriages, menstruation stopped.” Hiroshima
To see the connections, open the full site below.
