I once had an unforgettable sensation of incarnation, when my teeth pierced the lower part of my left cheek. I was a professional skater training to qualify for the X Games. Skating fast down a long incline, I slipped on some water and ended up flying ten feet in the air before crashing headfirst into the side of a skate ramp. I went to the ER, they stitched me up, and I was back in competition. When I look at my scar in a shop window or in a mirror, or touch it with my tongue from the inside, I do not experience it as a site of trauma or disfigurement. I remember the joy and excitement of flying through the air.
This certainly puts me in a minority. For most, a beautiful body is a healthy body, and the pleasures of treating the body well—massaging, cleansing, moisturizing, resting—are seen as ends in themselves, sure sources of calm, confidence, love, and joy.
But there is a limit to the happiness we can find in maintaining what is generally accepted as a healthy or beautiful body: if you are lucky enough to live a long life, your body will break down. And it’s not just age that can take its toll on our bodies. Illness, accident or disability can quickly destroy this bodily source of happiness. And then?
As a philosophy professor who explores important life issues with my students—most of them young people whose outlook on the world is more likely to be shaped by social media and corporate messaging than the occasional philosophy course—this is one I I come back often: How can we come to understand the full range of the aesthetic potential and power of the body?
I like to talk to you about Henri Matisse.
Around 1940, when Matisse, the revolutionary French painter, was 71 years old, his doctors discovered that he had an abdominal obstruction (the result of a hernia he had as a child) and a potentially cancerous tumor in his colon. They assumed his ailment was fatal, but held out hope for risky surgery. It worked and gave him 13 more years of life.
However, those years would be very different from the previous 71. After the surgery, his mobility was severely restricted and he spent a lot of time in bed. He suffered from fevers, exhaustion, and the effects of various medications. All this made painting almost impossible. Added to these physical difficulties were the doubts he had about the course of his art. Matisse discovered that everything in his life was an open question.
At the time – long before progressive ideas about disability became widely accepted – Matisse might have been expected to see his new condition as some kind of tragedy, a reason to give up. He did not do it. His loss, on the other hand, was transformative: “My terrible operation has completely rejuvenated me and turned me into a philosopher. I had prepared myself so completely for my departure from life that it seems to me that I am in a second life.
Matisse transformed himself by transforming his work and resorting to collage. With the help of assistants, he applied paint to the paper, then cut out and arranged the pieces into works that ranged from small to nearly monumental, abstract, symbolic, or figurative. Matisse called them “gouaches découpées” or “gouache cutouts” (gouache being the type of paint). He considered them the culmination of his artistic life: “Only what I created after the illness constitutes my true self: free, liberated.” The new limitations of his body became an opportunity for renewal.
There is a lesson there about what it means to take care of the body, to inhabit the bodies we have not just with acceptance and love, as we are often rightly advised to do. It’s a lesson learned when we live through our bodies as vehicles of beauty, as conduits for aesthetic engagement. It is a lesson learned when we practice a radical aesthetic openness to our bodies, to what they can do and produce as time and chance inevitably transform us.
I recently added a new scar to my collection, just below the one on the side of my face. While my youngest son was in the natal intensive care unit with a mystery fever, I got the results of an MRI needed for an old neck injury (from skating). He revealed a large asymmetrical growth on my lingual tonsils, a sign of lymphoma. Urgent surgery removed a plum-sized lump of flesh that was blocking most of my airway. I already met with the oncologist and heard the results. It was caused by a severe bacterial infection and there’s no sign of cancer, just an incipient scar and a hell of a sore throat.
Here I am in recovery, in pain, sitting in the strange and welcome light of the knowledge that I’ll be okay (and so is our baby). I won’t be going up and down ramps or flying through the air, but, like Matisse, I will sing with the scar. I will pick up my children. I will cook for my friends. I will help my students to marvel at the complexities of philosophy. I will write about this beautiful body.
César Rodríguez contributed reporting to this article.
By: Nick Riggle
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6511418, IMPORTING DATE: 2022-12-29 21:40:05
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