The Lens of the Body

 

Miguel Cervantes

Professor Abinader

English 203

9/3/17

Blog Post 1: Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember

            Living in our bodies is an everyday experience of the extraordinary.  In each and every moment, the daily routines of our lives are governed by countless internal processes that allow us to breath, move and engage with our world in a way that is entirely unique to the human experience.  The way we nourish ourselves, interact with others and interpret the vast array of sensory information around us is handily sorted by a harmonious cooperative of cells, tissue, blood, bone and water.  It is a complex and dizzying array of tasks that keep our bodies afloat, yet we hardly ever have to think about it, and as we go about the business of our lives we begin to take the process for granted.  Movement, speech and coordination become second nature, and in the process of this forgetting our minds move on to grander, more important things in life.

And then, somewhere along the way, usually through age, disease or the combination of both, the rug gets pulled out from under us, and we begin to lose our grasp on even the most basic faculties. 

In Christine Hyung-Oak Lee’s memoir, Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember, we are given an unsettling and ultimately inspiring look into the life of a person whose essential processes of living – her memory, cognition and fundamental coordination between her body and brain – are stripped from her at a time when she feels most entitled to them.  At age 33, Hyung-Oak Lee never expected to suffer a stroke, but as we begin the journey of reliving this ordeal through her unique lens, we quickly come to realize that the life she had in place – her home, her husband, her job, and the fundamental sense of self-identity she drew from them was based on a flimsy narrative that had her sleep-walking through her life. 

From the very outset, Hyung-Oak Lee makes it clear that the incapacitating effects of her stroke forced her to rethink the way she was living her life.  It forced her to be still, to write everything down, to relinquish her independence and become vulnerable and dependent upon others.  It was a journey that was fraught with anger and frustration.  Yet these were the keys that opened the doorway to self-reflection, moments where she was able to see her helplessness from a point of view that looked at the body as a starting point, a catalyst that sparked insights into the nature of life and the things we build around it – our identities, our relationships and the self-constructed beliefs that we hold as sacred. 

This is one of the focal points that fascinated me.  Christine Hyung-Oak Lee started her journey from a position of experiencing life through the lens of the body, and through that perspective she had come to forge a self-narrative that allowed her to function in life as most people would, building a home, career and relationship.  Yet unbeknownst to her, there were piles of baggage building up in the inner realms of her mental and emotional self.  In Chapter 2 we learn about Christine’s parents – her taciturn mother and stubborn father, for whom admissions of pain, even severe pain, were tantamount to weakness.  From a very early age, the physical and the emotional were linked in terms of suppression – one succeeded in terms of how much adversity could be ignored, and by the time we find Christine in her own marriage, it is made clear that silence and stoicism still go hand in hand.  Two days after her stroke, returning home from vacation, having already endured multiple episodes of serious disorientation, confusion and exhaustion, Christine and her husband still had not realized that something was seriously wrong:

            “By nature, during our drives, Adam and I never did talk much.  We expected and enjoyed miles of comfortable silence.  And at that time, my new cognitive functions weren’t yet tested.  We had also done that drive many times, preoccupied with thoughts of work the next day and errands to run once home.  If there was talk, it was usually banal.  So the silence was infinitely ordinary.” (p. 20)

            Living day to day in our bodies has the curious effect of making us less aware of them, as illustrated in the anecdote above.  Christine and her husband were, in essence, living out their days as they always had, despite early warning signs that Christine was in trouble.  Could there have been subconscious denial at play?  Was Christine in fact so immersed in her life, so entrenched in her own bodily lens, that to even approach the idea of disruption would take much louder and clearer warning signs?  If this is so, then it is highly indicative of the lens that we all share for much of our lives. 

Disease, injury and death always figure into our universal perception of the body as a fragile thing, of life as fragile, but oftentimes that doesn’t translate into the workings of our day to day mentality.  We live our lives in conscious expectation that most things will hold – our country, our society, our bodies – and that what we did not accomplish this day will most likely await us the next.  And, perhaps most importantly, we believe in ourselves as conscious daily participants in a life that, like the larger structures around it, will hold together.  Will not undermine, or abandon us.  When that betrayal does occur, as in war, our fundamental security is also shattered, and what was once a given for our most cherished notions of stability must be re-arranged, or re-thought in a way that allows us to continue. 

And so it was with Christine Hyung-Oak Lee. 

Her stroke shattered the fundamental illusion of living primarily through the body, ignoring her emotions, ignoring the pain of her past and expecting that somehow, in the hustle and bustle of her day to day life, she would escape what she described as,

“…the hole in my heart that I tried to dam up with other people’s needs and then filled with resentment.” (p. 1)

What is so inspiring about all of this is Hyung-Oak Lee’s response to this life-shattering event. Even something as severe as a stroke doesn’t necessarily have the power to move one’s view beyond the body.  But Hyung-Oak Lee sees her stroke as a catalyst.  In depriving her of some of her most cherished and essential capabilities, her stroke opens the doorway to a profound inner state of healing that, alongside her physical recovery, enables her to go deeper into her own sense of self-understanding, creating a newfound vision of her life that sees health of mind and wholeness of spirit as foundational to the health of her body. 

This is a wonderful lesson to take heed of, for we all experience moments where the body’s lens becomes the clearest compass by which to navigate our lives.  Left un-examined, this viewpoint can erode our awareness of the mind’s vast potential, not just as an intellectual storehouse, but as an infinite reservoir of spiritual and emotional strength.   What we discover in Hyung-Oak Lee’s journey is not a repudiation of the body, but a restoration of balance in the way we see our bodies, reminding us that we are much more than the image of our day-to-day selves, and that our minds are capable of feats that are extraordinarily beautiful and unique.