The tyranny of physicality

[rackmount]

When days are hard, when Linus is difficult or I feel overwhelmed by the drudgery of it all, I find the greatest comfort in consideration of death. Not just death, but execution, by hand-gun usually, but sometimes by blade or somesuch. There's something so soothing about the idea of the blood seeping out as consciousness leaves.

I think it's a return for me to a time when I mistrusted my body. I've never been terribly comfortable with my body, but I had a few years during which it didn't seem to hold me back that much. Now that my body is such a dominant feature of what my life is, I long for my body to disappear, to watch my physical self unhinge from my actual self.

I was thinking about this during last Sunday's Mad Men. Peggy walks in the bathroom and runs into the maiden (defined by her youthful body) and the mother (defined by her uterus). It struck me that Peggy is the crone. I remember being very young, in my early teens maybe, and telling my father than I couldn't wait to be old. But that's not it, is it? Being a crone is not about old age, it is about outliving the tyranny of the feminine body.

Incidentally, Aquarians are seen as the crone of the Zodiac. The year begins with Aries, the infant, obsessed with its own navel, and ends with the transformation of death, Pisces, the creature of water. Just before the transformation of death is the crone, the Aquarius, wisdom of age when physicality has become beside the point but the body has not yet unhinged. Aquarians are said to be a strange mixture of the child-like and the wise, the two periods of asexuality.

I meditate on Prometheus. It's one thing to roll a rock up a hill, but another to wait for death that never comes.

Comments

[popkultur.livejournal.com]

Reading this makes me feel a little less alone in the world. Thanks for sharing stuff like this - it means a lot to me.

I won't go into the details of my chart here, but this post rang my consciousness like a bell.

[rackmount.livejournal.com]

Having people like you reading and understanding means a lot to me. It's amazing isn't it? This is one of the only places I feel like I can actually say what I feel. Even (and perhaps especially) with my husband, I feel like any divergence from a particular narrative creates a big ... Thing. Or something.

It holds me together, to have this and you.

[(Anonymous)]

Tobias Wolff wrote a story called "Bullet in the Brain" where he stretches the split second of a shot to the head into what seems like hours as the victim thinks all sorts of things, much like we seem to fall into dreams with complete worlds already formed.

[rackmount.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the rec, sounds incredible and just what I need to read right now.

[rackmount.livejournal.com]

That's what I mean, there's something to stepping away. I used to feel like that all the time, in middle and high school especially. That's what I mean by return. This was a detachment I used to live in, and now I feel like I'm returning to it. I used to walk through the halls feeling like my eyes were television, that everything had that sort of distance of unreality. Probably just a coping mechanism, to make it less hard. I always felt like there was a quiet hard center of me, that existed beyond what all this is.

[(Anonymous)]

I had to skim over the Mad Men bit, since it would be a spoiler to me, but... you're not alone. I am the antithesis of wanting death, but I do feel the tyranny of the body, 3mos postpartum (which, to me, is ENOUGH ALREADY). I feel very physically crotchety, and it's difficult to stay positive that one day my body will again be my own. (I was so fat for so long there [another hormonal imbalance], you'd think I'd be used to it. But I was lucky to bounce back quickly after C. Ah - to be 31 again!) I take comfort by keeping in mind a friend who is 5 years older, who just reclaimed her body. It took her several years, but she's one of those people who can say "I am fitter at 40 than at 30".
I tell myself, "this discomfort is just a phase". It'll be just like eschewing the baby toys, right?
Stay tuned.
-gk