Body Knowledge

This is Tiresias, my cat of fourteen years. Or rather it was until the other night. He died quietly of kidney failure just as the lunar eclipse was about to begin. Looking at the picture, it is, admittedly, an ignoble end to what was, by feline standards at least, a pretty full life. But here in Ohio the ground is still too frozen to provide him with a proper burial. Perhaps in a few weeks spring will arrive to soften the brittleness of winter and the earth will once again be prepared to absorb its small and arbitrary misfortunes.

Predictably, my daughters, ages three and five, did not take Tiresias' passing well. They were distraught and tearful, quite heartbreaking really, the way that only weeping children can be. Sorrow as reflected in a child's large, red-rimmed eyes is always magnified by a factor of ten. For them, loss, any loss, (My youngest was equally inconsolable when the dog ate her favorite puzzle), is experienced as truly irrevocable, and its undiluted finality is compounded by upswells of confusion and fear that, as adults, they will learn to filter and repress. In a couple of years faerie stories of "cat heavens" and "happier places" and eternal souls will actually help to take the edges off the inevitable deaths of our quckly declining menagerie, but for now there is only their grief whose depth and purity I can only barely recall, and their wailing punctuated by sniffled questions and sobbed entreaties that my wife and I can only stumble over...

By an odd coincidence the day after I slid Tiresias' broken body into the Hefty bag, I was to introduce a course project in which I ask my students to confront their conceptions of "the body" specifically to rethink their relationships to their own bodies, to think of them not as physical objects but rather as a mental constructs, to envision their bodies as defined not by the limits of skin but rather by the relationships that bodies strike with the world. If the body is defined by its relationship to the soul, then it might be envisioned as a temple, or a vessel or a prison. If the body is defined by its relationship to biology then we might think of it as a machne, a lump or flesh, or as a process-- lived bodies as events. The body as imagined in its relationship to the universe might be thought of as a mere speck, or as "star stuff" or as a microcosm...

Anyway, as part of this overall discussion and to illustrate a point which I now cannot recall I brought up Tiresias' death and the sobbing children, and their fascination with his lifeless body, and segued into Americans' fear and revusion toward anything that proceeds from living bodies, and of the dying and rebirth of the moon, and its imagined baccinalic tethers to mideaval bodies... and at some point I must have trailed off because the next thing I was aware of was silence and the buzzing of the flourescent lights, and twenty pairs of eyes staring at me, some with looks of genuine sympathy, and others with puzzled impatience. I suppose they thought that I was verklempt over the loss of a pet, lost in some moment of rembrance or sadness. I don't know. Perhaps I was. But as I reconstruct the moment now, I believe that in that pause I had tickled loose some arcane bit of knowledge from my physics training. Up floated the thermodynamic concept that defines bodies as a localized pockets of negative entropy that feed parasitcally on the energy surrounding them. Although bodies generate order and structure within themselves, they do not add to the overall orderliness and structure of the cosmos. On the contrary, bodies actually accellerate the overall entropy or "heat death" of the universe hastening the inevitable march from cosmos into chaos.

I guess that this can be taken to be some sort of nerdy, detached approximation of grief: The simple death of a cat transformed into Mortality with a capital "M", death at a cosmic scale, a scale so grand that while it can be thought, it can't actually be felt anymore-- at least not by me.

So maybe my more sypathetic students were right. I had simply skidded into an unexpected moment of sadness. But I think that I stopped talking because in that moment I suddenly realized that I knew absolutely nothing about bodies.