Oliver Sacks, the Incarnation, embodied souls and ensouled bodies.

Forgive me if this is somewhat incoherent, I’m rather tired but want to get this out and up while it’s fresh.

I’m really enjoying reading Oliver Sacks “An Anthropologist on Mars”, just as I enjoyed “Awakenings” when I read it a few years back, and for much the same reason. Sacks is such a respectful researcher – even as he delves into individual case studies seeking insight into brain chemistry, anatomy, and adaptability, he never loses sight of the individual, the person, and the unique way each person co-exists and in some ways is identified with symptoms of their illness. Rather than being reductionist, each case study opens up a window into the wonderful complexity of the thinking human person.

(The estimable Oliver Sacks, corporeality and all.)

Sacks most endearing quality – his desire to study his patients and subjects from the inside, from within their subjective experiences, rather than solely from the standpoint of the objective, detached observer – this quality is also responsible for the disquieting effect reading his essays has on me. It is difficult to read them from any distance. Instead I am drawn in to imagine with Sacks the life each subject lives – the things they have lost, the things they might gain. And naturally enough, I imagine myself in their position, or in the position of the family, friends, and caretakers who witness these often strange, bewildering or unearthly transformations. “An Anthropologist on Mars” deals mainly with stories of people who are lacking some commonplace ability – memory-building, sight – or who process and interact with the world differently, through autism or color blindness or Tourette’s syndrome. The essays attempt to show how these individuals adapt, often thrive alongside these neural differences. It is fascinating…but, as I said, unsettling to read in such vivid detail, especially when the differences are the result of injury or illness.

What it all has me musing on tonight is the fragility of being embodied. I believe we are embodied souls, ensouled bodies, intricately and (while alive) inextricably intertwined. There is no separating the soul from the body, no calling one good and the other evil, no denigrating the body and elevating the soul – as a Catholic, we are pretty clear that humans are inherently embodied creatures and will be resurrected in body as well as soul. That actually gives me a basis for enjoying discussions of neurological origins of behaviour that might bother some believers, since I have no problem entertaining the thought that the body affects the soul (and vice versa, for you pure materialists :-P). In fact, I asked a question about bodies, personalities, and souls on FB, and received a fantastic answer which I hope to reproduce for you in another post. But, back to the point…we are embodied creatures, and there is a whole host of material evils that can impact these fragile, eggshell bodies and scramble our tender, meaty heads into new configurations…and contemplating that makes me want to wear a helmet for the remainder of my natural life.

(Did this lady forget her helmet?)

I mean, I’m already a less-than-totally-with-it person, mentally. It’s a memory thing – I score pretty dang well on IQ tests, and I actually test well for courses and things I can study for, but my ability to hold on to information in the long term, or even access it on cue in the short term, is pretty shaky. I love bloggin because I can have about a million tabs open with websearches for all the bits and pieces I can almost remember, and so I can sound like a knowledgeable person. (As my closest friends know, in actual conversation I can sound pretty feather-brained as I attempt to reference things that…who was it? what was it? only worse feeling is realizing afterwards that I have misattributed something on the fly and have mislead someone because i was unable to admit that i just can’t remember). My friend Jen P. would probably say that I am using the new technology to extend my intellectual tendrils further, using external tools to extend my neural networks…and she’d be right. It’s handier than stacks of books with post-its in them. But I feel already a modicum of that frustration at having to find ways to deal with a shortcoming that others, and reading so many accounts of people who have been irrevocably changed by injury and illness, without warning and without reason…

It’s scary. It makes me feel how fragile this life is, how suddenly it can change, how suddenly I could change – or any of the people I love. And it invokes one more reaction….

Wow.

God became MAN. Embodied. God has a body! One of these strange, fragile things that changes us and is changed and is so very very vulnerable. God was embodied, knowing where it would end up, knowing that His body would be beaten, whipped, pierced, hung, killed. And he didn’t get to trade it in for a new one either – nope. Christ’s body is as much Christ as is his soul – an embodied soul, an ensouled body. So he rose from the dead and he was still wounded, and Thomas put his hands in Christ’s side and his fingers in Christ’s hands and believed and knew Christ because he knew that body and the person who died in it and with it and is it.

I mean, the Incarnation. Wow. Wow.

More on bodies, personality and eternity in another post.