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Timeless
1) I was attending a faculty meeting that included professors from throughout the liberal arts, and the pre-meeting banter brought this comment from a male colleague: “When I had a body.”
2) I was dating a man who said he was a mind without a body.
The first comment was made jokingly, the second was made as a self-revelation. Both came from men in their 50s, intellectuals who, from the outside, people would not perceive as physically fit.
The comments surprised me, sadly, when I heard them. Most of the time, they still do. They describe a state of loss or dissociation that verges on the unimaginable.
Do the comments indicate surrender? To nature and the “natural” course of corporeal events? To mental activity as a numbing of the body? To an inability to feel?
I think that people commonly surrender their bodies to the “ravages” of time. Men, women, older, younger. They expect to be ravaged by time.
Last week I happened upon a statement by Herbert Marcuse about the true ravages of time. Marcuse is one of my intellectual heroes, and I hadn’t read the statement in years. Here’s what stays with me, in my own words and interpretation: the concept of time conditions people for submission, for surrender to misery, tedium, and dullness; timelessness is an essential component of pleasure.
How funny!!! I just heard on the television (which I rarely watch) as I’m writing: “Time is always running out.” The result? Stress and urgency.
How I love the timelessness of writing, of playful, fascinating conversation, of making love.
- March 21, 2010
- Filed under: Body and mind, Pleasure
- Comments 3
delightful reappropriation of the phrase “making love.” yes! “making love,” and being gratefully in the body/spirit, while not counting time as if it is finite or controllable. wonderful thoughts for today. thank you, kat
Fear, anxiety, and nerves consume the soul a little bit at a time.
I’m certain we are meant to become more beautiful every year. Not ravaged, but ravished by time…