Systems and Cycles

Bodies into the earth, earth into soil, soil into food, food into bodies.
Somebody once described death this way to me.
I am interested in the documenting of the cycle.
The medical history.
The documents that narrativize and archive the biomedical story of our bodies. The human body is performed. According to Diana Taylor our personal histories are embodied through a repertoire of learned and responsive gesture. The residue of trauma or physical pain is embodied and so is pleasure. Medical histories however, seem to only be an account of that which is diagnosed or ‘wrong’. Most of us then, have a missing narrative of our actual health. I believe there is power in the narrative. The story we tell about our body actually affects the way we care for it. In every moment there are infinite possibilities for interpreting meaning, thereby making ‘truth’ a relative term.

So I am thinking today about how that narrative is formed.
Articulated.
Brought into light.
Processing about engagement style.
Strategy.
Effectively communicating so that a point can be heard.
Cultivating space for voice.
Opening channels of and for communication.
Medical histories miss the point.
Are we asking the right questions?

How can what a woman says be so different from how she feels?
Or rather, what she feels, be so impossible to say?
Where is that gap?
What lives in the space between? I sense that this space is fertile.

I think and write a lot about cultural metaphors of the body affecting healthcare and therefore, embodiment. As Carolyn Merchant demonstrates in the Death of Nature, this model originally developed in the 1600’s by Descartes, Bacon and Hobbes assumes that the universe is mechanistic, following predictable laws, which those enlightened enough to free themselves from the limitations of medieval superstition could discover through science and manipulate through technology, in order to decrease dependence on nature. In this model, the metaphor for the human body is a machine. As it was developed in the 17th century, the practical function of the metaphor of the body as machine lay in its conceptual divorce of body from soul, and in the subsequent removal of the body from the purview of religion so it could be opened up to scientific investigation. Consequently, the men who established the idea of the body as machine also firmly established the male prototype of this machine. Insofar as it deviated from the male standard, the female body was regarded as abnormal, inherently defective, and in need of constant manipulation by man. Conceptions of the body are bound to this notion that the body is controllable and predictable… something like childbirth is a radical rupture of this model.

So it makes sense that we can't narrate our bodies.
How can we push boundaries in a system thats structure denies its own validity? Is any sort of questioning a crack in a system that has no floor to begin with?
In a medical space that is built on the model of the male body, the narration of womens bodies becomes either an act of violence to the system, or to the narrated woman, depending on how it gets used. Depending on who is listening (more on audience later).

I understand that a gentle entry is always the better way.
To become culturally competent. To work within to shape the borders. To have an understanding of or empathy for the person's experience in the world before attempting to understand the way she embodies; culturally contextualizing the symptoms manifest in her body.
I still question how we question without becoming a tool for the same mold we are trying to break.

Bodies into the earth, earth into soil, soil into food, food into bodies. Have you ever seen life leave a body? Without breath the body takes on a different shape, a different meaning. The experiences of that person are no longer connected to the body but to the memory of the body in life. The stories. The narrative. What that body passes on, will remain in the medical narratives of its children, re-invoking its own story through its constant telling. I believe that disease is truly just the body in dis-ease. If medical practitioners can engage and align with not just the measurable symptoms but the actual events and feelings surrounding the body in dis-ease, we may be faced with new questions- and with new questions come new answers, new ways to heal.