Of Bodies and Minds

Body

by Sophia de Mello Breyner

Body serenely built
For a life that afterwards wrecks itself
In rage and disappointment turned
Against the total pureness of your shoulders.

If only I could hold you in the mirror
Absent and mute to all other companions
Keep the bright knot of your knees
That shatter through the glass of mirrors.

If only I could keep you in those afternoons
That drew the line of your flanks
The grateful air enclosed.

Brilliant body of vivid nudity
Built by recurring waves
Into a temple resting on its columns.

I've written about this poem before. I discovered it in a class at BYU and it's words have been etched into me since then. They echo around in my head sometimes when I'm doing my makeup or trying on clothes in dressing rooms. "Body serenely built for a life that afterwards wrecks itself" 
I want to speak the words to my friends sometimes. "If only I could hold you int the mirror absent and mute to all other companions"

This time it's a class on material culture that has the words of this poem bouncing around my brain. For centuries philosophers have encouraged people to believe that there is a separation of the material and the mind. They taught that the body is something to be used; a carnal, sinful thing to be overcome by the strength of thought. As the binary of mind/body was created they talked of the body as a tool to be used-- an object. And so the mind became a thing separate from the material world in western philosophy. 

This class attempts to refute some of those ideas. The aim of most of my readings the past couple of weeks have tried to give agency back to objects as they explore possibilities outside of a hard line separation between the mental and the material. In one of my readings, I learned about the concept of affordances. In this essay they used the example of a chair. One affordance of a chair is that you can sit in it. We give that affordance to the chair as it's purpose. But chairs can do many other things. They can hold doors open. They can smash windows. They can be used as props for a blanket fort. They can be purely ornamental in a doll house. The possibilities are limitless. So what can a chair's affordance and meaning be outside of our limited conceptualization of what a chair is? 

What if we extended this idea to bodies? What affordances do we give our bodies and what affordances do our bodies have that we can't see? 

"Body serenely built" "Built by recurring waves" "Keep the bright knot of your knees" 

In LDS culture, I think the idea of temporal and physical is often conflated. Temporal means placed in time. It doesn't mean physical and lesser than spiritual, though that is sometimes the rhetoric. Our doctrine clearly teaches that things are created both spiritually and temporally-- both eternally and materially. 

But I have questions about what that means for our bodies! When Mormons talk about a heavenly afterlife, we imagine ourselves to be thin and perfect, celestial supermodels with not an ounce of fat or pimple among us. And yet, when Jesus Christ appears to His disciples post resurrection, etched into his skin are the scars of His mortality. The temporal wounds inflicted exist on an eternal being. 

I have scars on my body which I've written about before. And I thought I'd come to terms with them because I had this understanding that my scars would disappear someday. But I've realized that my temporal scars are so very connected to my spiritual scars from that time. Years have passed and my scars have faded, but they are still there. Both types of scars are still there. Am I supposed to always have them? 

If temporal bodies are a mirror to our spiritual bodies than what are we supposed to learn from them? 

I haven't come up with definitive answers yet. But I think it has to do with accepting these seemingly imperfect tabernacles of clay as actually very whole and therefore perfect. But more importantly, I think it's accepting the seeming imperfections of ourselves so that we accept it in other people. So that we see the good, beautiful, whole, perfect bodies of people outside ability and skin color and age and shape. 

Brilliant body. Built by recurring waves. Into a temple

I don't really know. But maybe that's why we're given temporal bodies. So when we see and accept the waves that built our tabernacles, our temples, we'll finally be able to see the waves that went into building the temples of each other.