Part of me wants to take this opportunity to wax rhapsodic on the importance of seeking out opportunities to fail, and to fail spectacularly. But mostly, I just want to talk about scars and, more importantly, bodies.
I'm an academic. My days are spent lost between the covers of a book or poring over mountains of ungraded essays. I spend long hours debating the merits of Bahktin's heteroglossia or helping students recognize the difference between a iamb and an anapest. It's heady stuff, a cephalic feast, and yet at the end of the day I often have very little to show for my efforts other than the scraps and bones of half-gnawed metaphors and some stale prepositions. I live in the abstract, floating from idea to idea, and I've come to realize just how much I miss my body.
This is why I love basketball so much. I'm not good enough to play it with my head. For me, it's all elbows and sweat. I don't think (a truth to which I'm sure my teammates will attest). I'm the guy who remembers to pick but forgets to roll. No, I just go out there and run around. If they pass me the ball, I shoot. If not, I run around some more. Occasionally I'll set a screen on one of my own teammates. Like I said, I don't play with my head.
But that's why it's so cool that I got clocked. Loose ball on the floor. I dive. Other guy dives. Elbows and eybrows meet. Blood flows. He falls all over himself apologizing, and though I'm a little dazed, I'm just thinking how freaking awesome it is that I'm actually bleeding. I don't get to bleed nearly as often as I'd like, and now here it is, dripping on the freethrow line, leaving little red inkblots on the court. One of them looks like my mother. Someone drives me to the ER.
And so I'll have a scar, a little one, hiding in my eyebrow like a shy housecat. It's my red badge of courage, a tiny reminder of a life lived fully, at least temporarily.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not a sentimental advocate for "sucking the marrow out of life," a stance popular with Hollywood teachers and starry eyed English majors. Thoreau's injunction to live deliberately is sound, and yet it does not follow that all passions ought to be pursued with the same monomaniacial devotion. Nor do I endorse the testosterone fueled faith so disturbingly promoted in John Ethridge's Wild at Heart. If you haven't read it, don't. Ethridge attempts to make the case that American masuclinity is God's design for all men, that climbing mountains and shooting things and dragging women back to the cave by their hair (I am only slightly exaggerating) are all part and parcel of being made in God's image, that had Jesus been born today, he would have ended the sermon on the mount by BASE jumping off the top.
But this I do believe: our bodies are good. We're meant to use them. We're supposed to eat and drink. We're made to stand up and run and trip over things and skin our knees. This strange assembly of flesh and bone is made to jump and squat, to throw, to cry, to have sex, to type, to dance, to sleep. Though God gave us minds of incomprehensible depth and complexity, he also gave us bodies, bodies which are no less sacred than our most precious incorporeal creeds and beliefs, bodies which both house the soul and are the soul. The Platonic dualism that divides the body in two, condemning the flesh while exalting the spirit, is, for lack of a better word, dumb. Even Yoda, wise and wrinkled as he is, falls prey to this line of thought. In his desperate attempts explain the Force to Luke (who is, by the way, just about as obtuse as Jesus' disciples were), he finally grabs him by the arm and says "Luminous beings are we, not his crude matter." It's unsettling: nobody can mangle theology like a muppet can mangle theology.
Anyhow, although we proclaim the glory of God through what we think and say, the truth is that we could probably just shut up and let the wonder of the human body do the talking for us. Walt Whitman's ode to the human form, I Sing the Body Electric, confesses this to be true:
and mind. And when I go to bed at night, I think about the science fiction that I love, about the projected futures in which we've evolved into pure energy, finally free from the shackles of flesh. And right before I drift away, I think scandalous thoughts, heretical thoughts, unforgivable thoughts. Just this once, I think, I hope they got it wrong.
