FLESH

"What they want are words of power that stir their souls like the memory of childhood."  -- Peter Galison

When our flesh is forming by following an embedded formula that pushes our individual being against a particular world, first as a matter of survival and second by opening a realm of virtual world-building through interacting with a sheltering other of our kind, the boundary membrane called skin is tender and thin.

Some people have the idea that if they could somehow recapture that early time, their flesh would come alive the way it did then.  With stubborn greed those who are merely human in a mammal-species way will thirst for the blood of babies, hoping to be restored.  They call this sacrifice as an obfuscation, since they themselves are not sacrificing anything but hope to gain something.  In their ignorance they don't understand that the molecules of baby blood -- as in all mammal cannibalisms -- is merely food and particalized when eaten.  It does not go anywhere else.  

But, as someone pointed out, healthy humans are the perfect food for other humans, since all the necessary elements are present.

The horror of this doesn't come from this level of thinking -- not from thinking at all.  Rather it is in the post-mammal primate and hominin stages that emotion -- which is present in a primitive immediate way in other animals -- becomes something more.  Eliade used to use the word "valorized" but his meaning, which reaches for the transcendent, becomes commoditized into mere value.  Referring to the quote above, what ARE the words of power that stir our souls?  What IS the river that runs through us and forms our lives?

Surely it is our living flesh, in the most scientific and real sense.  We are told that research suggests that experience becomes memory, indexed by the senses and stored as potential in the cells -- not just in the brain but, as Galison suggests, also in our muscle memory of weight and movement, and also integrated in the body reaction of the organs: heart, lungs, gut and blood, which is an internal riverine organ, flowing.

Next I go to Porges, who describes how a direct nerve connection between brain and the expressive frame it serves (face, neck, blood, breath) makes empathy possible.  One human being can in some small way inhabit the being of another human being.  This connection -- echoing the originating connection of mother and child as a liminal space of trust, play, laughter, and attachment -- is what makes us capable of culture, humanities, and science that is more than technology.

When this liminality is used in sex, then the act becomes more than reflex response and can even separate from the actual flesh and perform in a virtual way we call love or, at the least, attachment.  Then the forms of words we call poetry become containers for the emotion, which is more than merely happy or sad, angry or peaceful.

When this liminality is used in torture, it can be an inversion of love, an intense effort at connection that might be mixed with sex.  Like pepper or hot sauce, it can be formed into increased intensity, an art form of pain.  It's hard to call it love, but it can be mixed with sex.

There is another category.  Some say that love and hate form two sides of the same coin, which is why they mix so easily, but others point to a greater evil, which is no-emotion, null response, refusal of engagement.  A person who has no ability to form a virtual space of empathy with another person has the condition of what people try to describe by using the words zombie or robot.  With near desperation they may use cruelty to try to make contact.

Provocation, an attempt at control, mixes with vengeance.  Destruction of flesh/persons through incarceration, starvation, weapons is the phenomenon at a distance, but the torture chamber is the same phenomenon when up close and personal.  It's just that destruction through contempt, domination, is not the same satisfaction as the rending of flesh, the crushing of mind.

During WWII it was the strategy of the mainstream consensus to sentimentalize the emotions of loss and damage, to claim that a higher purpose -- preservation of freedom, personal bravery and gallantry, gender reciprocity of cherishing, -- made the agony of flesh worthwhile. The human ability to bear suffering for the sake of principles has seemed admirable.  Only recently have some begun to sneer at trauma, sacrifice, disablement, exclusion.  McCain goes from being a brave patriot to being a contemptible victim.  

This is a continuation of torture, imposed by a lack of feeling which is again a kind of torture for the person who has no human dimension.

Greeting card or t-shirt effusions of "love" are sentimentality.  Only by presenting one's "frame of communication" to each other can empathic perception happen.  It is not sympathy, which is compassion, but participation in the life of the other, deeper than words because the river of being is felt.

This "river" needs flesh to be fully apparent, but media (writing, imagery, sound) can sometimes come close.  Sometimes the very fleetingness and ambiguousness, lack of focus, absence of smell and temperature, darkness, can convey as much as the real muscles pumping blood, the actual photons hitting retinas, the tympanum of the ear quivering.  

The cruelty of suffering is that in the chaos of pain, all this is lost.  Maybe numbness is wanted for a short time, giving value to the times of relief, but it's not meant to do that.  The purpose of suffering is to protect the flesh, to sound an alarm, to demand escape.

But some kinds of suffering are so exquisite, so pervasive, so entwined with emotion, that the only equivalents in sensory terms are destruction, rot, darkness.  In times when these are real, and they are always real somewhere, people try to close them out, to deny the action that is demanded.  A worldview and a vocabulary can form around this context.

Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about.  I've had mostly a comfortable life, though some parts have demanded that my "mind" override my flesh through tenacity: "stoicism", if you like. But I've worked at being open to the empathic suffering of others when they have presented it with bare ribs and trembling lips. I try to be human.