Elizabeth: Variations on a Theme of Literacy

I once wanted to be a superhero. Not to fight crime, but to transcend the limits of my body. I wanted to fly, before I realized heights frightened me. To have great strength, or to read minds. My heroes were strong women, not always superheroes, but each strong in her own way.

I pursued religion largely for the same reason, to distance myself from my body. But my relationship with religion was strained early in the endeavor, buy the rules imposed on bodies. Things such as wearing the right clothing or dating the right people. I wasn't as interested in heaven as I was supposed to be. Someday, perhaps, but not now. It was the thought of the spiritual life and the presence that enticed me.

Intellect was a means to the same end for a time, another way to think about what was out there, beyond the boundary of my body. I learned what it was to create a virtual self, all this time growing more comfortable inside my own skin. Pain in particular brings you home. And I learned to find the spirit within the body.

Some people say, "I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual." I don't know what it means to be either anymore. I attend church where I don't need to recite a creed. I go to sing, to adjust the bread and juice, to greet others in their bodies. I don't believe in hell, and I'm not sure about heaven anymore.

The digital world is enticing, though, and maybe I'll be immortalized there. A virtual presence for as long as the physical memory holds data that represents me, and someone is there to maintain it. But I am still in my body and more invested in it than ever.

After years of swimming, I am still captivated by the sense of floating, perhaps even flying under the water. I have no desire to compete, but I revel in drawing my strokes carefully. Pressing down in the shape of a quarter rest, a slash connected to a flourish at the bottom. I imagine my hands and arms reaching out like the flippers of a sea turtle when I execute something like a breast stroke. Racers do something else and call their stroke the same thing, but it is frantic and lacks the meditation I associate with it.

I practice music, not just to improve, but to experience the feel of the vibrations in my ears and my body. SO often, music is described in ethereal terms, expressive, emotional. For me, it is embodied. It doesn't feel like emotion I can name, but I suppose it is buried in my body. I don't think I feel emotion like other people; it seems to answer at the level of my cells, filters through my bones, and finally emerges when I can name it.

My most transcendent moment ever was on a board. gliding through several inches of mountain snow. How odd to be the closest to a spiritual experience while thoroughly invested in the physical. On the board I don't think--I do, and the mind follows. It is a form of literacy, an ease, a sense of sprezzatura, that Renaissance term. Good readers, good artists, good athletes all seem to perform effortlessly. It is about getting the body out of the way while becoming fully embodied in the process. Not having to think about it. Knowing the tricks to make the process go more smoothly. Sometimes not even knowing that one uses these tricks.

What do we miss, though, when we don't acknowledge these? They say one must stumble and fall in order to learn. But how we appreciate the moments of success, like a ride down the hill on a sled or on a bike, before making our way back up. Is there a price to the fall? How do we know when we have gone as far as we can? How do we know whether success is just one more try away, or beyond our reach? Will the body tell us? How will we understand it?