Eloquent Body

Dawn Garisch

Description

Eloquent Body explores the juxtaposition of healing and creativity both from a personal as well as medical point of view. Dawn Garisch works as a medical doctor and a writer in equal measure and advocates dialogue between our bodies and our creative selves. Her novel Trespass was nominated for the Commonwealth Prize in Africa.

Sujets

• Poetry
• African people
• African

Informations

• Publié par: Modjaji Books
• Date de parution: 25 mars 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781920590178
• Langue: English

Extrait

ELOQUENT BODY
DAWN GARISCH
ELOQUENT BODY
Also by Dawn Garisch
Not Another Love Story
Stoning the Tree
Babyshoes
Once, Two Islands
Trespass
Difficult Gifts
Publication Modjaji Books 2012 Copyright Dawn Garisch 2012
First published in 2012 by Modjaji Books PTY Ltd P O Box 385, Athlone, 7760, South Africa modjaji.books gmail.com http://modjaji.book.co.za www.modjajibooks.co.za
ISBN 978-1-920397-39-5
Cover artwork: Katherine Glenday Cover design: Nicola Glenday Book design: Natascha Mostert and Life is Awesome Design Studio. Thanks to publishers and authors who gave permission for quotes. Details in Endnotes. Printed and bound by Mega Digital, Cape Town Set in Palatino
For Luke and Jon
Contents
Introduction
PART ONE Talking to Myself Across the Table
1. The Science and the Poetry of the Body
2. Dancing to the Whistling
3. The Story of Our Lives
4. The Psyche Doesn t Speak English
5. The Wounded Healer
PART TWO Fear: The Guardian with Two Faces
6. The Body is a Big Hook
7. The Valley of the Shadow
8. Of Detectives and Gardeners
9. On the Fear of Failure
10. Rhyme or Reason - Fear s Role in the Brain/body
11. Not Waving, but Drowning
12. Denial, Deception and Illusion
13. Physician, Heal Thyself
Interlude
14. Travels in the Eloquent Body
PART THREE Tracking the Truth
15. To Trust or not to Trust
16. Instruments of Truth-finding
17. Tracking the Truth as a Scientist
18. Buying Health, Trading in Illness
19. Seeing and Believing
20. Sickness and Health
21. Truth and the Artist
22. Truth-finding Tools of the Artist
23. Sharpening the Tools
PART FOUR Heal Thyself
24. Non-Medicinal Ways to Loosen Torment
25. Dealing with the Inner Critic and the Daimon
26. Of Creativity, Connections and Healing
27. Image and Imagination
28. Going to Source
29. Adequate Images
30. Image and the Body
31. Working with Image
32. In Service
33. The World in a Grain of Sand
34. Living in the Crocodile s Mouth
35. Recapturing the Original Plan
36. Changing the End of the Story
37. Of Knives and Glue
38. Endings
End notes
Acknowledgements
Introduction
My heart has been speaking; so I have been taking notes
Geoffrey Godbert 1
A few years ago, I found myself up all night, as though with a new-born. Every time I started dropping off, another thought arrived, demanding that I commit it to paper. I knew that if I left the ideas till morning, they were unlikely to survive. So I pushed myself upright again and again, scribbling on the closest paper at hand - a prescription pad from work. In the morning, wanting to transcribe what had arrived in the night, I could hardly read the notes. The muse s handwriting looks just like a doctor s.
The Great Healer of the Arts had prescribed a cure for what Richard Ford called the commotion in his chest and Virginia Woolf called a wave in the mind, otherwise known as the itch that can only be scratched by a fountain pen on paper.
The previous day, a call for applications for grants for non-fiction work had arrived in my inbox. It attracted my full attention. Life had thrown this across my track. A work of non-fiction would allow me to pursue the concerns of my novels -how to integrate the personal and the political, character and context, the use and abuse of power, old ways of being and new ways, the rational and irrational, desire and restraint. It would give me the space to explore the many other splits that I experience both within myself and within society, for I am a doctor and a novelist, a scientist and a dancer, a researcher and a poet. Sometimes they are suspicious and uneasy bedfellows.
My whole adult life I have been gathering material about the body, unconscious drives, illness, creative capacities, and how they intersect. This book, I realised, would be a place to set it all down, and to investigate the subjects further. In addition, I was frustrated by the limitations of what I am able to do as a doctor and excited by my discoveries as a writer. It became clear to me that if I were to act in the best interests of my patients - of people in general - this book was the way to proceed.
***
As a medical doctor and a writer, I have lived a split life for many years. Slowly, very slowly, I am changing from a doctor who writes into a writer who doctors. They are the two legs of my working life, and I am merely shifting my weight from one to the other. It feels right. I feel on track.
Over the years, this dual and parallel life has afforded me glimpses into the complexities of human behaviour in general, and also into the heart of my own condition. I am fascinated and concerned by the trends I see.
In the consulting room patients frequently come to me complaining of conditions that are self-inflicted. Many want a quick fix, rather than to attend to the aspects of their lives that are untenable. They are anxious, and unwilling to pay attention to their bodies. In running writing workshops, I have discovered how fearful people are of applying themselves to those things they yearn to do. I have had to find ways to assist myself and others with creative conflicts. In addition, I have a chronic illness which has forced me into the position of a patient.
Anxiety is a part of the human condition. It is to an extent innate - a normal stage of development - as we can see when an infant is handed from a parent to a stranger. We call this separation anxiety and, if it is managed well by the caregiver, the baby learns to feel secure. Anxiety is also a product of our time and the way we live - high density living, pollution, deadlines, worries about climate change, the economy and crime rates. We all have to develop strategies to deal with our fear so that we are not overwhelmed or even paralysed.
We think of ourselves as rational, logical creatures. Ours is an age of science. Yet our behaviour often contradicts logic. We live mythical lives in parallel with our physiological ones, yet we do not understand the stories, symptoms and symbols that are spliced into our flesh: the body as repository for legend and memory and dream; the body as stage or as battleground for feuding narratives; the body as foreign country to be invaded, conquered and subdued, or approached with curiosity and respect; the body as a guide and friend, assisting us, or as an enemy which obstructs our plans and dreams.
We think of the enemy as out there , but we often act in ways that are not in our own best interests. We are strangers to ourselves, shielded from our true natures, our desires and abilities, by self-deception, denigration and the fabrications of our time.
***
Eloquent Body is a place where the two streams of my life converge. They have been heading for this point in place and time for years; for years I have been preparing to write this manuscript without my knowing it. The book is a contribution to the pool of ideas and works that aims to find out who we are, and why we are here. It examines the drive towards life as it manifests in the body, in illness and in the creative act. It looks at how we can determine what we can trust and suggests ways of developing a partnership with ourselves, which axiomatically includes not abusing the very ground that we live off and stand on.
I imagine there was a time when everyone around the fire was encouraged to participate in imaginative and creative acts - to dance, sing, tell stories, make music, or draw in the sand. I imagine a time when people took note of their physical and political selves as an essential part of their survival. We have become spectators, rather than participants. We watch TV, film and sport, most of the time not even leaving our homes to do so. We think only professionals know enough and are good enough to do or to make. We are even observers when it comes to politics, no longer involving ourselves in civic life, and leaving meaningful decisions and protest up to those we vote for or employ.
The body, health and creativity appear to have been abdicated by individuals and co-opted by professionals and commerce. This book investigates why we have allowed this to happen, and how it is detrimental, not only to human beings, but also to the earth. It will look at the strengths and weaknesses of the decision-making tools available to us.
The first section gives a personal account of how both my own illness and my son s accident forced me to reconsider, fundamentally, my understanding of myself, my body and how the world works. From the perspective of a medical practitioner and an artist, I contrast the different rational and non-rational strategies we employ to manage our lives. In illustrating the endemic attitudes of disregard and abuse we have towards the physical homes of our bodies and of the earth, I emphasise how essential it is to pay both consequential and non-rational attention to the distress flares of illness and injury.
The second section looks at the roles fear, anxiety and self-deception play in impeding our best efforts as I have encountered them in the consulting room and in the studio, with the body as a central motif. I illustrate how those with vested interests encourage our disconnection and fear in order to sell us a product or a way of living in both the economic and political spheres of life. I set down what psychological theory and neuroscience have to say about fear, and illustrate how our anxiety management plans often tend to make things worse. It seems that we sometimes trust where we should not, and do not trust where we should