Being where your body is—

in this already brutal century

A short post today about two fragments of Stephen Dunn’s poetry which are repeating for me. So, as a way of exorcising them from my mind, I’m going to write about them here. The first is:

‘It’s part of the social contract / to seem to be where your body is.’

“Seem” does some work here, it suggests dissociation, performance, some kind of absence. It might be concerned with survival. In the poem, this couplet immediately follows the words ‘…you should have stayed at home’ so it becomes:

which changes things slightly, it becomes less about dissociation and more accusatory. There is a suggested failure to fully inhabit the moment.

Also “where your body is” is different to “where you are” reflecting the dualistic Cartesianism notion that posits the physical (external body) and the psychological (thinking mind) as separate and distinct states of being. We make an assumption that someone will be present and in the room with their body, that a person will arrive whole (mind and body) and stay that way. This has become a bigger social problem that we thought — it has become increasingly hard to exist in the moment, in just one place whilst inhabiting our hyperconnected technological world.

How can we seem to be where our bodies are? Perhaps it is one of the ultimate tasks of the twenty-first century, occupying the here and now. It was one of the things I became fascinated with when I started to visit the caves. That they were places nature hasn’t let go of, spaces that beckoned me to reconnect with myself, sharpening my ability to exist in the moment. They forced me to return to a simpler time. One which is the antithesis of our modern cave homes, where technology interferes, distracts, tracks us. For a while, I needed to be isolated from the torrent of digital information and the small death that swallows us on social media, inside the attention economy. In a cave, I re-staged my thwarted relationship with the natural world. Caves are about renewal and rebirth; a way of resting in a world where rest seems an anathema.

The second quote, also from Dunn:

implies disappointment; that the century (which had barely started in 2007 when the poem was written) had nevertheless already revealed its thorny character. (We are now 19 years on, and the century has become more brutal than seemed conceivable in 2007.)

And given that it’s hard to ignore that, what should we pay attention to? Is dissociation, moral injury, and compassion fatigue now the social norm? How do we be present with all our weltschmerz for the world?

Together, these Dunn lines ask us to remain whole inside the body, mind and space we occupy, with the people we are with, however brutal the world becomes.

To end this post, I’m resurrecting this 2 year old post as it features this relevant exercise:

Choose a quote from each of the philosophers... Take a fragment and translate/ rearrange it, making it strange, use it as a departure point. Write down your new version.