It would be hard to imagine a setting less wild than the interior of a subway car rumbling through tunnels beneath city streets. The city happened to be London, but you could not have guessed that from glancing at the passengers. There we sat on plastic benches, forty-two of us by my count, every shade of the human rainbow in every sort of get-up, from sari to suit, reading newspapers and books, listening to earphones, clutching bags and briefcases and backpacks, our shod feet shuffling on the rubber floor while lights flickered overhead, wheels groaned below, and a nasal loudspeaker voice called out the names of stations. Although my watch told me it was 9 A.M. on July 1, nothing in the Underground revealed whether it was day or night, summer or winter. The smeared windows gave back our own reflections. I was headed to the British Museum, but for all I could see, our subway car might have been a spaceship rocketing to the stars.
Aside from the gleaming metal and glass, every surface was a pastel hue reminiscent of valentine candies or polyester shirts. Where our ancestors might have painted deer or bison or bears on the walls of their caves, the walls of the car were plastered with ads for condoms, liquor, movies, banks, weight-loss parlors, record albums, night schools, tourist destinations, soft drinks, air conditioners, perfume, bluejeans — beckoning images that reminded us only of our own cleverness.
We scarcely needed reminding. Weren’t we the magicians of this Underground? Except for us, everything within sight or smell or touch had been manufactured by human beings and our machines, and even we ourselves sat muffled in clothes, lathered in cosmetics, hidden behind parcels. Among those forty-two passengers, no doubt some used medicines to regulate their quirky organs; some wore dentures; some flexed artificial joints in hips or knees; perhaps a few hearts ticked to the beat of pacemakers. Certainly there were ears among us that listened with the aid of batteries and eyes that saw through spectacles or contact lenses.
Taking inventory, I noticed that all but one pair of eyes carefully avoided looking into the eyes of any other person.
The bold eyes belonged to a toddler, perhaps a year and a half old, who squirmed in his mother’s lap and stared at anyone and everyone, as though he had just been set down among marvels. The utterly clear gaze of those brown eyes swept over me like warm rain. Not content with looking, the child crimped one hand into his mother’s blouse and reached out with the other to feel the arms and tug the hair of people sitting nearby. The mother kept pulling him back, apologizing to their neighbors, but he kept groping and staring. In the commotion, a stroller and shopping bag propped against the mother’s knee slid to the floor, and when she bent down to retrieve them, the child wriggled from her lap and set off toddling among the travelers, peering up into each face as he went, patting legs, babbling nonstop.
While the mother pursued, the child swayed down the aisle, and the warmth of his presence thawed the subway glaze. People began murmuring and grinning and stirring wherever he passed, as though restored to life. Even pinstriped businessmen and terminally cool teenagers let loose a smile. I suspect that I was not the only one who felt like cheering him on, the uninhibited little animal so curious about his surroundings. But the mother soon caught up, gathered child and stroller and shopping bags, edged toward the door, then hurried off at the next stop, the toddler still craning around for one last look.
After their departure, the glaze quickly hardened again over the passengers. We drew everything tender back inside our shells. The rest of the way to my stop near the museum, I kept thinking about that baby. We all once dwelt in our bodies with such frank delight. We ran our hands over everything within reach. We sniffed and tasted. We studied buttons and pebbles and bugs as if they were jewels. We turned our cheeks to the wind. We gaped at birds kiting in the sky and froth dancing on water and sunlight flashing through leaves.
Such richness flowing through the branches of summer and into the body, carried inward on the five rivers!
exclaims Mary Oliver.
Any child is a reminder that the rivers of our senses once ran clear. As we grow older, the rivers may be dammed, diked, silted up, or diverted, but as long as we live, they still run, bearing news inward through ears and eyes and nose and mouth and skin. Beneath our grown-up disguises, beneath a crust of duties and abstractions, even beneath the streets of London in a rattling subway car, we are still curious and marveling animals. No matter how much we camouflage or medicate them, our bodies remain wild, bright sparks from the great encompassing wildness, perfectly made for savoring and exploring this sensuous planet; and that is a source of hope.
I rode escalators and climbed stairs up from the Underground into the bustle and blare of Tottenham Court Road. The breath I drew tasted like one part air to three parts engine exhaust. The gray sky might have been a scrim. Otherwise, here on the surface, too, nearly everything visible except the crowds had been manufactured: pavement and poles; buildings, buses, and taxis; kiosks heaped with T-shirts and London souvenirs; windows in shops and everything for sale behind the glass. I felt as gray as the sky, my senses numbed by noise and fumes and the crush of people.
Then, as I dodged along the sidewalk, a poster on a news agent’s booth caught my eye. It showed a young woman in black bikini, the top undone, a hand cupping a triangle of fabric to each breast; she leaned forward with a grin on her lipsticked mouth, and tawny curls tumbled down over her shoulders. The image snared me. I paused long enough to see that she was promoting the latest issue of a men’s fashion magazine. The caption read: “Bikini or Bust . . . the Body Laid Bare.” For a few seconds I gawked, as vulnerable to her paper gaze as I had been to the toddler’s real one. I felt stupid for giving in, even momentarily, to this cheap ad. It was as though the woman’s shape exactly fit a lock deep within me, opening the door to an old hunger.
Once that door was swung wide, the women in light summer clothing moving past me on the sidewalks of London kept it open. Their bare arms and legs, their glistening hair, their shining faces seemed all the more vivid against the backdrop of concrete and steel. In the sober light of the British Museum, I fixed my eyes on the antiquities, browsing through the Middle Eastern halls in a vague effort to commune with my Assyrian grandfather and a deliberate effort to forget the bodies laid bare. But there, in the first exhibit case I approached, were two figurines entitled, accurately enough, “Women Holding Out Their Breasts.” One of them sported an elaborate hairdo, the other was painted with designs as if tattooed, and both were naked. Had they worn bikinis, they could have been posing for a magazine.
The rest of the morning, in room after room, I kept finding other little statues of women in the same pose, their breasts cupped in their palms. Made from terra cotta or stone, ranging in date from 5000 to 500 B.C., they came from all across the Near East, Anatolia to Babylonia. The labels speculated that the figures might have been fertility charms or amulets to assure safety in childbirth. I could imagine one hanging over the bed, the pallet, or the straw mat as couples made love; I could imagine a woman clutching one as the birth pangs arrived, nine-month fruit of that old, old hunger.
Humans will do almost anything to their bodies, it seems, to heighten their chances of winning a mate: bleach or tan skin, straighten or curl hair, bind feet, flatten heads, stretch lips and ears, cinch waists, inflate biceps and bosoms, tattoo or scarify, pierce and perfume and paint. A good many of these stratagems were on display in the British Museum, among the onlookers as well as in the exhibits. Judging by the size of the human population, the stratagems have been working all too well.
While snared by the woman on the poster, I’d read that her name was Elle, the French word for she. The name suited her, for there was something of the archetypal female about her, something primordial, as there was about the figurines in the museum. Images of men rippling with muscles also appeared on pedestals, and they might have been labeled simply he, as embodiments of the archetypal male. “The nakedness of woman is the work of God,” William Blake declared, and I believe him. The nakedness of man, too. She and he. We ordinary men and women move between these figures as through the charged air between the poles of magnets, pushed and pulled by desires that have been stirring in our kind since the invention of sex.
For the child on the subway, that particular marvel still lay in the future; for a few passengers and museum-goers, perhaps, it lay in the past; but for most of us, most of our lives, the allure of sex is present and potent. Body, body, burning bright. What power framed this fearful symmetry? Like Blake’s tiger, humans, too, shimmer with the fierce and magnificent power that lassos the comet and stiffens the fern and guides the owl on its deadly flight. We are wild. Through our bodies, through the ever flowing channels of our senses, and, most vividly, through sex, we participate in the energy of Creation. That energy wells up in us like a perennial spring, urging us to ramble and play, to poke about and learn, to seek a mate, join body to body, and carry on with the story.
When I was in high school, the former Marine drill sergeant who taught health looked aggrieved when he told us that most of what went on inside our skins was beyond our control. “You like to think you’re the boss,” he would say, “but you’re not.” Our hearts thumped to their own tunes, he pointed out, just as our glands secreted hormones and our livers, filtered toxins and our eyes dilated; just as our cells zipped and unzipped strands of DNA, all without our say-so. “Right now,” he told our afternoon class, “you’re digesting those baloney sandwiches from lunch whether you want to or not.”
Forbidden in those puritanical times from speaking about the one bodily subject that obsessed us all, our health teacher let us know in his gruff way that certain of our organs and appendages might be unruly at times, even embarrassing, and that strong feelings might wash over us “like tides of the sea,” he said, “except less predictable.”
As teenagers, we knew without being told that our bodies were swept along by obscure currents. Acne, hot flashes, chills, blood flow and blushes, growing pains in our joints, nightmares looming up from the still waters of sleep — all convinced us that we had lost control. Unable to govern our bodies, we yelled at our parents, pounded fists into lockers, teased or dyed our hair, and tortured the engines of cars.
We could remember when life in the body had seemed far simpler, when the world had been a smorgasbord of sensations, all of them delicious. Now suddenly every sensation was edged with danger. The print of a girl’s fingers, where they briefly settled on your elbow between classes, would burn for hours. A girl might cry all night, so the guys were told, because of the way a boy curled his lips when he said her name. And when lips opened, there was no telling what might fly out. Obscenities bred inside there, along with sweet nothings and jokes. Songs would get into our heads and circle like birds of prey. Disastrous odors leaked from every crevice and pore. Dreams lit up our sleep with mad fireworks. In cinemas and drive-ins, we watched giant gorillas break out of cages and hairy monsters lumber forth from caves and werewolves howl at the moon, and we knew in our own flesh the truth about these rebellious beasts.
Much of the lore we learned while growing up taught us to be wary of the animal lurking within. We’d all heard of family dogs, as gentle as lambs indoors, that would disappear for a few days into the fields and return with bloody snouts and meat on their breath. Bigfoot, rumored to be shambling through the nearby woods, was a suggestion of what we might become if we gave in to our instincts. Stories of satyrs and centaurs bolstered our fear that, however human we might appear above the waist, we were lustful beasts below. In folk tales, bears and frogs claimed the heroine’s heart only after she broke the spell to reveal that they had been charming princes all along. Beauty might come to love the shaggy Beast in spite of her revulsion, yet he, too, was redeemed only by turning back into human shape.
The very suddenness of these transformations was unsettling. If beasts could so swiftly turn into princes, couldn’t princes turn into beasts? Before going on dates, girls were cautioned that no matter how polite a boy might be in the daylight, he could become savage in the dark. Savage, brutal, bestial, filthy, foul: we learned a litany of scornful names for our animal selves. Boys were cautioned against their own impulses, but also against the wiles of loose girls. “Don’t give her that first kiss,” our mothers told us, “because you know where kissing leads.” Where kissing leads was never spelled out, but we sensed that the werewolf’s fur might bristle beneath our own smooth skin, that our teeth might suddenly lengthen into vampire’s fangs.
Two bas-reliefs in the Assyrian galleries at the British Museum brought back memories of those teenage anxieties about the body’s fierce desires. In one of the stone carvings, a bearded, winged, and heavily muscled man stands with a goat clamped under his arm; the goat is small and thin by comparison to the man, helpless in his grip, meekly waiting to become supper. In the second carving, an Assyrian king in armor holds a rearing lion at bay with one hand and with the other plunges a sword through the lion’s breast. The king is calm, upright, wearing the hint of a smile, while the lion’s huge paws flail uselessly, and its great mouth sags open in a deathly grimace. In both panels, human will triumphs, either by taming the beast or killing it.
Those twin icons, the good beast and the bad one, the tame and the wild, lay behind the cautionary lore about the body that I learned during my teenage years. One had to choose, it seemed, to become either a docile goat or a dead lion. Only when I went off to college and began reading about cultures other than the ones I’d inherited from Europe and the Middle East did I discover quite different points of view on our relationship to animals.
In ancient tales from Africa, Australia, China, and India, humans appeal to animals not only for gifts of food but also for guidance on the path of life. Men and women talk freely with monkeys and spiders, birds and snakes, leaping the chasms between species. In totemic cultures, every clan has kinfolk among the animals. The Lakota and Chippewa and many other North American peoples tell stories of humans changing form to become seals or salmon, ravens or coyotes, buffaloes or wolves. Wayward, tricky, and charged with power, these shape-shifters bring wisdom and spiritual medicine to the human tribe from our nonhuman neighbors. We can only guess what our paleolithic ancestors meant by painting deer or bison or bears on the walls of caves, but we cannot mistake the feeling of awe that suffuses those portraits. Although we are clever, these old pictures and tales remind us, we also have much to learn from our fellow creatures, for we are only one tribe in the great circle of life.
This seems to me a more convincing, as well as a more hopeful, view of our animal nature than the one conveyed to me in high school. The truth is, as teenagers or toddlers or elders, we would be in trouble if we thoroughly tamed or killed off the beast within us, because nothing else keeps us alive. Waking and sleeping, the body goes about its business faithfully, assimilating food and water and sunlight, pumping and circulating, clearing away old cells and making new ones, fighting disease, mending and dreaming. What we call instincts are those enduring habits of the organism that hold us together and keep us going from conception to death. Saint Francis referred to his body as Brother Ass, because it carried him so patiently on life’s journey. We each ride our own dutiful beast, however much we may ignore it until injury or illness grabs our attention.
When I began work on this essay, my right thumb was split from a run-in with a chisel. Every bump of that thumb on the space bar sent pain shooting up my arm. Day by day, as I’ve added words, the pain has dwindled, the split has closed, and now fresh skin gleams where the wound used to be. That was a minor cut; I have recovered from worse. In fact, after fifty years, much of my body has been torn apart and reknit. In each of us, all the time, countless bruises and scrapes are healing, infections are simmering down, imbalances are being set right. Whether damaged or healthy, all of our cells get replaced every seven years or so. It is as though the body longs to be whole.
A lifetime of study persuaded Carl Jung that the same is true of the psyche, by which he meant the entire mind, conscious and unconscious: “The psychic depths are nature, and nature is creative life. It is true that nature tears down what she has herself built up — yet she builds it once again.” Certainly our conscious minds may tip out of kilter — from worry, doubt, hatred, fear — but when that happens, according to Jung, the unconscious mind casts up countervailing images and impulses, thus moving the psyche back toward balance: “The psyche is a self-regulating system that maintains itself in equilibrium as the body does.” The fact that most of us are sane most of the time, holding ourselves together while life tugs us in a dozen directions, suggests that Jung is right. The mind, too, longs to be whole.
This parallel between mind and body is precisely what one would expect if the two are both manifestations of a single reality, as I believe they are. Whether we are made up of two substances or only one is a grizzled metaphysical debate that I do not expect to settle here. But in either case, we know that mind and body are intimately linked, that pain and well-being can leap over any gap there may be. Doctors have long known that the state of a patient’s feelings, the degree of happiness or grief, hope or despair, can greatly influence the prospects for healing. As physician and Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl testifies, “the sudden loss of hope and courage can have a deadly effect” by lowering the body’s resistance to disease. Following his recovery from cancer, Norman Cousins reports in Head First on medical research that shows how “the negative emotions — hate, fear, panic, rage, despair, depression, exasperation, frustration —” can “produce powerful changes in the body’s chemistry, even set the stage for intensified illness,” while “the positive emotions — purpose, determination, love, hope, faith, will to live, festivity —” can “help activate healing forces in the endocrine and immune systems.” Whatever else may be involved in the seemingly miraculous cures performed by faith healers, the faith itself is crucial.
Here, then, are two more reasons to be hopeful: because hope is a healing balm, and because mind and body, against all odds, keep renewing themselves. If you have ever looked at photographs tracing the growth of a fertilized egg into a newborn child, you realize that millions upon millions of things must go exactly right in order for a healthy baby to enter the world; and most of the time, amazingly, they do go right. Once born, we depend on the same organizing genius to keep us going from moment to moment.
The body is not endlessly resilient, of course; injuries or disease or the cumulative fraying of old age will eventually break it down. Senility or madness may shatter the mind into pieces so jagged they will never fit back together. In a universe ruled by entropy, where everything slides from order to disorder, this eventual disarray should come as no surprise; the remarkable fact is that an organism can repair and maintain itself for twenty or fifty or ninety years. Life runs counter to entropy, drawing scattered elements and fleeting energies into coherent shapes. The Old English root of body means “trunk, chest, or cask”: thus, a container. You are one of those astounding containers, and so am I, and so is every living thing. We may be temporary, but here we are, each of us a gathered wholeness.
Since we are containers, we must be careful how we fill ourselves. Whatever we take in through our five senses, which Blake called “the chief inlets of Soul,” becomes who we are. Try this experiment: sit beside a freeway for half an hour, listening to the traffic; then sit beside a rocky stream for half an hour, listening to the current. Which sound calms you, feeds you, restores your soul? I expect you will choose the stream, not because the mechanical world is evil, but because over millions of years our bodies have been tuned to the sounds of the earth.
Like the London Underground, with its drab concrete and flickering lights and tattered ads, much of the world we have made starves our senses. As we insulate ourselves from wildness, retreating farther and farther inside our boxes, life loses piquancy, variety, delight. So we gamble or drink or jolt ourselves with drugs. We jump from airplanes with parachutes strapped to our backs, or from bridges with elastic ropes tied to our ankles. We ride mechanical bucking bulls in bars or drive fast cars or shoot guns, hunting for a lost thrill. We cruise the malls on the lookout for something, anything, to fill the void. Bored with surroundings that we have so thoroughly tamed, we flee into video games, films, pulp novels, shopping channels, the Internet. But all of those distractions eventually pall. As the novelty wears off, once more our senses go numb, so we crank up the speed, the volume, the voltage.
These manufactured sensations pall because they have no depth, no meaning, no being apart from ourselves. Again, let me be clear that I am not condemning human works: I spend most of my days in the midst of them. I am only pointing out what a small fraction of the universe they represent. Buildings may be comfortable, but they are never mysterious; they speak of no power, no intelligence, no imagination aside from our own. Like those windows in the subway car, they give back only our own smeared reflections.
No one who has been thoroughly awake to the real universe would swap it for a “virtual” one. Our deepest religious urge, as D. H. Lawrence wrote, is to bring our lives into “direct contact with the elemental life of the cosmos, mountain-life, cloud-life, thunder-life, air-life, earth-life, sun-life. To come into immediate felt contact, and so derive energy, power, and a dark sort of joy.” Mary Oliver speaks of this craving in a few exultant lines:
there is still somewhere deep within you a beast shouting that the earth is exactly what it wanted.
No matter how clever our works, they will never satisfy this hunger. Only direct experience of Creation will do. The likeliest way to achieve contact with the life of the cosmos, the likeliest way to recover our senses, is by shutting off our machines, closing our books, climbing out of our tunnels, our cars, our electrified boxes, walking beyond the pavement to actual dirt or rock, and opening ourselves to the world we have not made.
“Body Bright” is excerpted from Hunting for Hope, by Scott Russell Sanders. © 1998 by Scott Russell Sanders. It appears here by permission of Beacon Press, Boston, Massachusetts.
