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You greet me as if you know me. I smile, play along. But you don't know me, just like I don't really know myself. I am Rapunzel high up in the tower, the tower of my body. How I got here I have long forgotten and the old witch has been dead for yonks. Most of the time I sleep in the dreamland of old fairytales, like my sister, Sleeping Beauty, where I follow unicorns or princes and try not to eat poisoned apples. But sometimes I wake up with a fright and peer out at the peaks and valleys that stretch out far below my windows. Then I wonder who is this person whose life I am apparently leading? Who is this body, these hands that touch and feet that tread? Panic-stricken - what am I doing here?
The question of the relative unity or dividedness of this body-mind structure that we call a "person" is older than the fairytales, though it was only in the seventeenth century that Descartes put it properly under the philosophical spotlight. Personal and public opinion still seesaws between arguments for and against a Cartesian division in which two clearly demarcated components meet and complement each other somewhere, and then part again. Like marriage partners who bid one another farewell after years of having lived together, not necessarily on a friendly footing.
You can see it as a literal till-death-us-do-part relationship, with the spirit always slightly holier-than-thou owing to its anticipated elevation to a higher status when the body finally calls it a day. Or you can make a purely scientific distinction between a body and a mind that clearly have a mutual influence, but are indivisible like … Well, like what?
Is there still anything that is indivisible? Even the atom lost its status as an indivisible entity a long time ago. All the same, the fact remains that you who are spirit or mind have to live together with you who are body, for better or for worse, until further notice.
There is a living together that is like "twee bome in die veld/ vlak
langs mekaar" (two trees in the veld/ one next to the other),
as Elisabeth Eybers puts it in her Afrikaans poem "Bome"1 (Trees),
and that's how it should be between mind and body as well, I think:
Each could spread and drink sunlight and live,
and together they formed a unitary whole.
No matter how intimately their roots entwined,
their branches did not tangle or touch
- To me they were upstanding and free and proud
yet still modest in their courteous ways.2
It is in this type of modest courtesy that I try to live together with my body. Somewhere, in a place I cannot reach, the roots of my spirit and body are entwined, but stretching up and out, I am aware of how far apart the branches are moving. In truth, the two trees sometimes struggle not to pull free at the roots as well. Rapunzel bloodies her fingers scratching against the towers inside walls.
After a recent photo shoot and interview for a magazine, I was visited by an awful dream. Sitting in the chair, waiting to be powdered and painted, I systematically unpack my insides onto my lap. I sort through it as through tangled embroidery thread, pull off bits of fat, stretch out the intestines, tear the organs loose from their attachments. I do all this with the mental abstraction of someone sweeping a house or pulling up weeds, my thoughts somewhere else. However, the dream-reality hits me with full force when I hear that for the make-up session I have to hand over my liver and spleen. And I won't get them back. Death therefore lies ahead.
Does this mean that I can attend to my outside only at the expense of losing my inside? Is Rapunzel going to plunge from the tower when someone starts painting the outside walls? Surely not! But how do you subordinate your body to your mind without throwing the baby out with the bath-water? It's a fine balance one has to maintain. It takes guts to be a balanced head-body entity.
In this new era of freedom, equality and sisterhood everyone tries to pretend that the body no longer makes a difference - whether white or black or brown, whether fat or thin or disabled, whether male or female or somewhere in between. That's all good and fine and noble. After all, who we really are, our essential humanness, exists apart from our identity as "homeowners" of a temporary physical establishment. Viva equal rights for man and mouse, for child and chick, for woman and warthog! Viva!
I rebel. I protest.
A decade and a half ago I was part of another group of female students who were finally granted admission to veterinary science without any gender bias. We made our mark, for our sisters and our country, in gumboots and overalls (admittedly with an old T-shirt on underneath, for the sake of modesty, ladies), nonchalantly shared a residence with the guys, milked cows and subdued snarling dogs. Tied our hair in ponytails to keep it out of the blood and dung and mud. Genderless, equal. As we wanted it.
And so later on, wellingtons and all, I cross the equator into England, right into the bloody mess of mad cow disease. And there, among tattooed butchers with sneering smiles and bleary eyes, in abattoirs with stark-naked pin-up girls on the walls of the meat inspectors' office and the walls of the only cloakroom, I begin to admit to myself what I had long been trying to ignore. That bodies do make a difference. That you cannot simply reason your body away or make it conform to an identical, mass-produced entity. Not only are you born with a body that simply cannot pee against a tree, but your spirit is cast into your body and has no choice but to adapt to its form.
Women today flourish with few problems in most of the occupations that were formerly the domain of men. However, in a traditionally male occupation in which physical work plays an important part there is no such thing as equality of the sexes. There are some things that a woman is simply not physically capable of doing, no matter how many push-ups she does. That just as much strength as intelligence is required to assist with a difficult calving becomes clear all too soon. The freedom that you have acquired through your spirit is dragged back under the table by your body, that jacket that fits your spirit so snugly that you've started thinking it's your skin.
Is there something she, this body of yours, can give you in exchange for the limitations that she puts on your spirit?
I have to rely on others' opinions when it comes to the biological events of pregnancy and giving birth. This is possibly the only area in which women are physically one up on men. Perhaps such an experience (or experiences - however many times you see your way clear to going through it) is enough to compensate for a lifetime as the weaker sex, but it will take a lot of convincing to get me to believe that. Unless you want to see weakness itself as a plus, I remain convinced that God simply created women's bodies in a less user-friendly form than men's. I have a bone to pick with Her.
If one buries the hatchet of sexism, there is of course a wider angle from which the matter can be viewed, because as a person, of whatever kind or sex, your spirit is restricted by the limits of your body. "The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to", according to Hamlet. Man cannot live by bread alone, but neither can one live from writing poems. Someone must ensure the tower is maintained. Like the sorcerer's apprentice, we rush around without stopping to keep the body's begging-bowl filled. What's the magic word that will bring it all to a standstill, so that there will be enough time and space for the spirit to take a breath and stretch its legs?
You own (or occupy) your body only once and in only one place at a time, cast therein with no chance of escape. If only there was a parcel counter where you could leave it temporarily while your spirit gallivanted in other places - a visit to the Louvre before breakfast and tea with a friend in Antarctica at nine o'clock; perhaps just a day relaxing under a tree. You would be able to pop into the Bolshoi without worrying about the cold, or listen to a lion growling next to you without being eaten.
Although - would you really?
Our world of experience assumes certain physical abilities, like seeing and hearing and feeling. Would pure spirit be able to "see" paintings? Would it be able to "hear" sounds? Is it possible even to envisage an experience that can occur without the benefit of a body? Just as one cannot imagine what it must be like to think without using words or language, so you can scarcely separate your thoughts from a certain physical connection. Pure abstract thought as in mathematics is probably the only type of thought without a physical element.
For the price of restriction, then, this is what the body offers the spirit - the ability to experience the world through the senses. It is often precisely through physical experiences that our souls are enriched. And those who can think sniggeringly of only one type of corporeality, ain't seen nothing yet.
No matter how inexpressible or undefinable it may be, there is nothing that speaks to the spirit in and through the physical like beauty. Is there any other way to experience beauty except through the body? Just ask Van Wyk Louw - we can't live a human life without "all the beauty of eye and ear and senses in abundance". I would have liked to quote the whole of his poem "Aan die Skoonheid"3 ("To Beauty") here:
and man
by grandeur, love and sin so greatly touched,
his sorrow and the light construction of his body
with its rooms for much glimmering desire and passion;
then are birth and death all disentwined,
the golden borders round the body and its pow'r4
and so on.
What beauty is, I do not know. That I am able to see and hear and feel and smell and taste beauty, of this I am sure. My eyes' enjoyment explodes to the very back of my skull every time I see a full moon, when I gaze at a Chagall in all its colourful glory, when my two-year-old nephew trots out his most charming smile. The rumbling of thunder fills every last cell of my body with joy, as does Beethoven's symphonic version of it.
So I can recite long lists of the things that I enjoy, that I receive as messages from my senses. My body and I aren't anywhere near being on bad terms.
The paradox of the body's experiences is that it is only against the background of drabness and sorrow that beauty can be fully appreciated. Would the moon be as glorious if it were full every night? Would silence be as blissful if there was no noise to measure it against? It is after experiencing extreme hunger that food tastes the best. When the body is deprived, the spirit also yearns to be satisfied and then feels the same fulfilment and wonder when the hunger is stilled, the pain soothed. What could one be deprived of without a body? What would there be to give up?
Deprivation also has its own kind of beauty - a certain clean-ness, if one were to play on the Afrikaans word for beauty, which is skoonheid. When you become aware, in every fibre of your being, of your body's basic needs, the thick layers of cultural care fall away from your shoulders for a while. Your tower gets a spring-clean.
It always amazes me that people flee the city for the bush when they want a break, but drag all the paraphernalia along with them - luxury chalets and air-conditioning and satellite TV. How is your body-spirit connection supposed to remain pure through such a glass case of civilisation? It is only with the sun on your skin and the sand between your toes (and teeth), the hard ground under your back and the river water against your sweaty face that you remember once again what a body actually is. Someone once said that to remain mentally healthy you must sleep under the stars, squat behind a bush and swim naked in a river at least once a year. Keeping your mind and spirit healthy demands more than a healthy body - you have to be aware. Wake up and smell the roses.
* * *
Growing up means to sneak, to run, to dance through the rooms of your tower on a journey of exploration. Step by step you learn which window has the best view, where the sun shines in the warmest, where the rain sometimes leaks in. When a storm is lashing, you can retreat to the deepest cellar or clench your fists against the lightning. But the storms don't threaten only from the outside, because sometimes when Rapunzel awakes from a dream between four dull walls she roars to be released. Somewhere else, the carpets must be softer and the grass greener.
Growing older means to start preparing yourself for that process or act of letting go, the farewell. Not to move into another body, but to leave your body behind. And the only grass that is greener is the grass under which your body will lie. Beneath the green, green grass of home.
You could occupy your body with bitterness at the limits it places on you and rebelliously draw graffiti on the walls. You could live in it like a fanatic interior decorator that changes the curtains with every new fashion trend and washes the floors twice a day. Or you could make it a home to love and to be loved in, a tower with roots like a very old tree, through which the threads of your soul are entwined. In the meantime, let your hair grow long, because one day you will have to leave it behind, and although it might be a sad separation, it can also be a gracious leave-taking.
Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair.
1 Versamelde Gedigte van Elisabeth Eybers,
Human & Rousseau and Tafelberg Publishers, 1995.
2 Translation of an extract of the original
Afrikaans version of the Elisabeth Eybers poem "Bome":
Elkeen kon sprei en sonlig drink en leef,
en saam was hulle 'n suiwere geheel.
Al was hul wortels hoe intiem omsluit,
hul takke het nie verstrengel of gebots
- Vir my was hulle fier en vry en trots
en nogtans nederig in hul hoflikheid.
3 Versamelde gedigte van NP van wyk Louw, Human & Rousseau
and Tafelberg Publishers, 1981.
4 Translation of an extract of the original
Afrikaans version of the Van Wyk Louw poem "Aan die Skoonheid":
… die mens
met hoogheid, liefde en sonde so heerlik aangedaan,
sy smart en die ligte bouwerk van sy lyf
wat kamers vir veel skemerende lus en drifte het;
dan word geboorte en dood weer skoon ontwar,
die goue grense om die liggaam en sy krag …
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Ilse van Staden was born in Pretoria (1972) but grew
up in the Waterberg. She matriculated at Pro Arte High School,
Pretoria, and studied veterinary science at the University
of Pretoria. After various locums in South Africa and also
working for six months in England, she settled in Cullinan
as a vet in 1997. Her poems were published in Nuwe Stemme
2 (Tafelberg, 2001) and in the debut anthology Watervlerk
(Tafelberg, 2003). She is currently working towards a BA in
Creative Writing through Unisa.
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