Outside Tolerances
The human body is a biomechanical device. This image appeals to me, dovetailing so well with conventional parameters of self-care. And indeed, we are just like any other machine: power it, maintain it, repair it, sometimes scrap it.American culture in particular is truly lousy at optimum biomechanical care. We undervalue it as a concept ("No pain, no gain"), denigrating listening to the body ("Only quitters quit") while simultaneously plugging wholly worthless panaceas as restoratives (night after night on the couch in front of the TV, drinking too much, smoking, driving the Right Car, etc.). It never surprises me that we drop dead en masse of heart failings, gut failings, brain failings. What do we expect, when we treat our bodies as if they were disposable?
But what of failings of what I call the "anima?" I borrow that term from both the Jungians (altho I view it more personally than they do with their "collective unconscious") and Latin, where it means "animating force." Some religious believers would call it the soul, although I suspect most would object to my supposition that it can be less than perfect, that it can fail. Yet it seems absolutely logical that anything affiliated with the body is as capable of disease and abuse as any other "part," whether it can transcend this mortal coil or not. Let's be candid: what the body does affects this mysterious essence, whether we like it or not. Whether it's the love the body falls into, the alcohol the body abuses, the legs the body breaks in a fall or the back that breaks in a car crash. All affect the soul. (I'll use "soul" instead of "anima," since it's the more common term.)If we can put a man on the moon, I don't understand why we can't take the soul's temperature. (Or why we can't cure the common cold, for that matter, but I digress.) Why can't we more clearly check it for fitness? Is it running a fever? Does it have chronic fatigue syndrome? Us humans, with our oh-so-large brains, can't seem to properly grasp the soul in concept, much less give it proper attention on how it's holding up. We have to guess at it: do I feel blue? Am I tired too much? Have I stopped caring about things that used to be important to me? Do I have any will to keep living?Even finding a visual representation of this mysterious, crucial component of every sentient human is frustratingly difficult. Go ahead -- Google images for "soul" or "souls" and see what little pops up. The closest folks seem to come is to liken it to the heart. But that's separate and clearly different, with its own set of functions and purpose. Yet we give our "hearts and souls" away to lovers and sports teams and gods and jobs and devils. We talk about "soul searching," but usually we mean "deep thinking" when we use that phrase, confusing the soul with the mind. We say that eyes are "windows to the soul," but we mean something emotional when we invoke that image, and again it seems to confuse the heart with the soul.We have an art history chock-full of misleading imagery to blame for this confusion, so let's go ahead and blame Memling and Guariento and Raphael and the rest for that enduring muddle. Maybe because we have been so remiss in giving the soul an image that we can wrap our heads around, we have also been remiss in defining the ways we could give our souls the proper care and feeding required for real contentment, true satisfaction.
I suspect my own anima is ailing, but since I can't stick a thermometer in it, I guess at its lack of fitness by how unwieldy it has become. If mine were a boat, it is swamped, full to its gunwales. The slightest wave threatens to put me under for good. I no longer know for sure if I'm hanging onto it, or if it is merely stuck to me.So I float well outside my tolerances and deploy countermeasures: I try to stay in sunny, still water. I avoid the dramatists, the Cling-ons. I dog-paddle away from the Users and the Slick. I ask the occasional dry, boated passerby for assistance, if they can give any. And I try not to swallow too much water when I take a wave in the face.While I have slowly exhumed the why's of my soggy soul, what I don't know is how to remedy the inundation, how to "pump it dry," to use the flooded basement term. And since I can't check it into a hospital, I am frequently at a loss at what to do for it. Except to tread water. And bail.