ManicDDaily

On the napkin at the restaurant while thinking these things through

Increasingly I realize that I really don’t own my body; if anything, my body owns me.

I don’t use the word “ownership” to refer to title, so much as in the Pedro Martinez sense of “who’s your daddy?” i.e. who dominates.

I use the word “me” in the sense of personality/soul/ what makes me lively, gloomy, manic, depressed, loving; what makes up my understanding of myself.  I suppose a philosophical type would think of “me” as the “watcher”; that part of my brain which observes everything, including, sometimes, itself.

My first conscious memory of my body’s overriding vote in matters of self-image is from my childhood, hearing  my voice on audio tape.  Back then, it came in big brown reels; it was slick, difficult to manage.  (The old tape recorders remind me of slippery sewing machines, except that they used brown tape instead of thread and tried to stitch a past moment into the present one.)

Agh!  My voice sounded like a baby’s.  A baby’s. When it came on, I was mortified, crushed, had to leave the room.  I had imagined myself to sound sophisticated, an echo of Julie Andrews.  That babyfied voice could not be me, and yet I knew that it was.

These older days, I have the surprise that my body is not “me” every single time I look in the mirror, every time I hear my voice on an answering machine.  There’s always a small second of surprise, sometimes even shock, absolute non-self-recognition.  Worst of all, every time I get familiar (which does not happen much), it changes;  the body refuses to stay put, pat, in place.  (It droops, it sags, it grows, it bags.)

My surprise at my body is one way in that it continually tells me that I’m not its daddy (or mommy).   This doesn’t even begin to address the problem of what the body feels like:the lungs that are suddenly winded, the hips that want to sit down, the eyes that just won’t focus properly.

All that complaining!  And I’m not even someone who actually suffers physical pain. In that case, the body would really take up the reins.

The good news, I guess, is that when Pedro Martinez taunted the Yankees with the question of who their Daddy was, he went on to lose badly and to be taunted right back.

My body is not really Pedro.  (Somehow I know I should bring up George Steinbrenner here, but just can’t.)  And I don’t truly want to taunt it, or to cause it to lose anything (except perhaps a few pounds.)  Still, it would be  nice to see the taunted sometimes come out on top; for the “me” in this case to suddenly feel some identification with itself.

It only happens every once in a while, sometimes even when you hardly think about it, when, for example, you are just walking, simply walking along.