Hello, everyone. I appreciate the invitation to blog a bit with you, and apologize for starting later than planned. I took some time last night to look over some of your recent conversation, and was taken with something Jim said recently. Watching someone play a hymn on the piano, he writes that there was “something about the physical activity combined with the hymn that seemed perfect to me.�
I’ve been struck by similar instances in which a physical act has seemed loaded with far more meaning than merely the accomplishment of a specific task . . . I say “merely� because I think we so often think of our bodies as mechanical tools, useful for collecting sense data and by means of which our will/mind skoots around. This is the point at which it’s easy to slide into debates about mind-body dualities (or modalities or constantly reintegrating fragments), but I’ve got something else in mind.
A few days ago, my husband and I were out mountain biking on the trails around Sundance. I was there to have fun, but also to test some gear [digression: I have been searching for the perfect mountain bike pedals – ones that allow me to get my feet out quickly should I need to bail, but which don’t allow my feet to bounce off the pedals on steep and very rocky technical descents. I’ve literally tried dozens of configurations, from the latest in clipless technology to older styles of clips & straps that haven’t been seen in 20 years. I’ve been disgruntled with everything]. I had put a pair of “bear-trap� pedals on my bike – large, steel pedals shaped like horseshoes (and almost the same size), with giant sharp spikes for gripping shoes. For the first hour I was in bliss. Even on the fastest, wildest descents (rocks, pits, stump-jumping, etc.), my feet stayed firmly planted. And because my feet were without clips or clipless restraints, I could get a foot down at a moment’s notice. Better yet, I was clearly out-performing my husband in both speed and finesse (piratical laugh), and I hit a moment where I was very much in “flow�, the place where my body found it possible to accept as an [extension? modulation? integration? expansion?] of itself the bike, the trees, the rocks, the wind. I even had that hyper-attuned awareness that made me look toward sounds (you do have to watch out for leaping deer and the odd stray moose at this time of year) before I was fully aware of them as sounds.
Musicians, dancers, athletes – all have felt that moment of “flow.� But I have found myself thinking about such experiences in a very specific vein. I am currently working on a Renaissance poem in which a couple of fascinating theological strands are being developed. In overt contrast to contemporary 16th and 17th century Christian doctrines on the place of the body in relation to the Divine Nature and Will (most such insisted on the body as the thing that needs to be transcended), this writer seems to be suggesting that the body is somehow central to certain kinds of spiritual knowledge, and that there is a special form of grace within such imbeddedness, something that transcendence would erase . Christ’s spiritual beauty is conceived of as being fully realized only in embodiment, a kind of blooming which made possible the moment of pollenation for eternal life. Given the even more radical LDS position, that God has a body which is somehow central to the continuation of light and truth, I wonder what, exactly, is it that bodies provide by way of spiritual knowledge? There seems to be more at work here than merely matrixes of contrasts (pleasure/pain, etc). While I think we would all agree that the body includes, in a crucial and inescapable sense, one’s beliefs, habits, and entire context, what enlightenment does it produce? That’s the first question I’m tossing onto the conversational table.
For my second question, let me return to my mountain biking experience. Remember, I said that for the first hour I was in bliss. For the second hour, I should have been in hell. It turns out that the great drawback to the bear-trap pedals is precisely what makes them so great: those giant sharp spikes that jab into the bottom of shoes, holding feet firmly in place on the platform of the pedal.
I don’t usually think of climbing as the dangerous part of any given ride, but on the day I’m telling you about, there had been rain off and on for hours. The trail was mostly dry, but had these curious places where moisture spread across areas of “quicksand� (where hard trail gives way to sinking dust holes that can jarringly slow your momentum). What happens is the moisture on top of such dust holes doesn’t immediately soak into the dirt – it spreads out, and behaves like a sled might on an ice sheet that’s suddenly sinking. To put it another way, those thousands of water molecules sitting atop the quicksand can momentarily behave like a bucket of bearings (the combo is a function of water molecules spinning and fluffy dust sinking), so when you hit them, even a really grippy tire can slip and slide. So as I’m powering up and around a sharp turn on a particularly steep bit of trail, I hit this configuration of moisture/quicksand, and my tire slides 3-4 inches to the left . . . which is where the cliff happened to be on this extremely narrow path. I am in mid-leap, hoping to get clear of the bike as I go down, when my brake lever catches my jersey, and the bike and I go down together in a flurry of flying rocks, sticks, and leaves. As you might expect, I was covered in bruises. Worse, I had dozens of superficial slices all over my arms and legs thanks to those spikey pedals. But the most dramatic result consisted of two deep puncture wounds in my right leg, which were bleeding profusely. Nothing was broken, though, so I got up and we continued on. The bleeding soaked my sock, my shoe, and after another twenty minutes of riding had gotten smeared pretty much all over. I was looking dramatically gruesome (teens passing us on the way down were wildly impressed). What is surprising to me is that, given the abruptness with which my “flow� experience had been interrupted, the pain in my legs and lower back did not prevent it from returning. In fact, and this is what I find odd, I became even more acutely aware of the details of my surroundings even as I continued to experience that [extension? modulation? integration? expansion?] of my body and its surroundings.
So here is my second question: within a theology that posits bodiliness as part of the Divine Nature, what is the role of pain? What would be lost if pain were lost? What gained? I’m interested in this partly because of something Paul Brand wrote about when reminiscing about his work with lepers – leprosy is partly a degeneration of pain receptors, resulting in the inability to make judgements about where the body is in space and time (people burn off fingers and toes, don’t realize an infection is eating away at an ear, etc.). Brand points out that there is a sense in which the loss of pain is the loss of entire worlds. C.S. Lewis has a slightly different take on this. What thoughts do you all have?
Heavens! I’ve gone on much longer than I had intended. To make up for being so long winded, I’ll keep subsequent blogs to 3-4 sentences.
Brandie,
By all means, there’s no need to cut things short, especially if you intend future posts to be as insightful or interesting as this one. Don’t worry about anyone thinking you’re going on too much — your signal-to-noise or light-to-heat ratio is quite good.
About pain, it’s an interesting question. My immediate reaction is to think of Second Nephi — without the bad, we could not know the good. Without pain, we could not know its opposite. (Lack of pain? Pleasure? Contentment?). I’m not sure if pain has another function, qua pain (but perhaps it does — Christ suffered pain for us, as part of the atonement) or whether it is simply part of “the bad” which must exist so that we can come to know “the good.”
It seems to me that a good deal of bodily enlightenment comes under the heading of what can broadly be called “habit,” bodily know-how. Pain interrupts that know-how (of course, that isn’t all that it does), making it possible to reconfigure our habits. As with many other things having to do with the body, I don’t have any clue what this means for immortal bodies, but I think that it makes sense with regard to mortal ones.
And ditto what Kaimi said: there’s no length quota, so don’t feel constrained to write shorter pieces after this.
It sounds like you Dump Shocked http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?DumpShock really badly, it is very annoying but getting back into flow is only somewhat difficult if you can keep the mind set pretty much intact.
Brandie,
First of all, thanks for making me miss Utah–especially Timp. Hawaii is great, but that particular area is a kind of second home for me.
One quick thought about pain:
I don’t know if it’s a ‘role’ of pain to do this, but isn’t part of what pain does (as you point out in the case of leprosy) is to reveal limits, and to show when the limits we are approaching are becoming potentially dangerous? It’s a kind of reminder of embodiment and of the distinction of me and the world (including other agents). When you say “I became even more acutely aware of the details of my surroundings even as I continued to experience that [extension? modulation? integration? expansion?] of my body and its surroundings” I wonder if it isn’t a revelation or encounter of otherness. It wasn’t exactly only you that caused yourself pain yesterday, or the pedals you were using, or the terrain you were crossing, but the interaction of all of these, revealing limitation and difference. The limitation isn’t a bad thing necessarily, but in integral part of embodiment.
I think about God’s spiritual pain manifest in Moses 7 as he weeps over those who don’t chose him as their father and instead chose misery, hate, etc. Isn’t some of the pain precisely because of the limitation–of knowing that he can’t save those who won’t be saved, that despite all he does, persons can chose damnation. Agency, embodiment, and limitation (including pain) seem to go hand in hand.
A couple of thoughts come to mind for me. In the short time I’ve studied martial arts and read about the TAO, I have found a lot of references to briging the body and spirit in balance. One can meditate and one can excercise but one without the other neglects something. Doing both as with Tai Chi or other martial arts attempts to bring the body and spirit into balance. The few times this has started happening has been pretty spiritual. Without actually having experienced the sensation of becoming a translated being I would say the feeling is close to what I would imagine.
Secondly, I thought of your question regarding the role of pain. In our world pain exists to provide the natural boundaries of our abilities. It alerts us when we are in danger before the danger is all too eminent. First we have discomfort then a little pain, and finally the intense feeling that tells us something is seriously wrong.
I imagine that this would work to our advantage in learning our limitations and how to properly use our bodies and minds. As we progress especially beyond our present experience I imagine pain would offer many of the same benefits until we are attuned enough to recognize limitations before we reach them, or perhaps until we evolve enough that there are no limitations.
On a lighter note regarding your bike pedals maybe you could invent some that fit your needs. Imagine an electromagent in each pedal and metal clips to the soles of your shoes. A switch on the handle bar turns it on and holds the foot in place. When you need to bail you release your grip switching the magnet off and your foot is free. I have no idea how powerful the magnet would need to be to work sufficiently or how much wieght it would add or anything technical, but its a thought. If anyone wants to run with the idea I’ll take 3-5% of the gross, whatever seems fair.
“I wonder what, exactly, is it that bodies provide by way of spiritual knowledge?�
I’m throwing this out there as a hypothesis: I would submit that bodies provide the knowledge of all things (I resist the separation of spiritual knowledge from any other kind). From a physical perspective, all energy is matter and vice versa. We know that there is a difference in our premortal bodies and those we have now (though, they both consist of matter). We know that spirits can manipulate matter (e.g., the creation) and communicate. But I would submit that spirits cannot See, Hear, Smell, Touch or Taste. I submit that they perceive by “The Spirit� or by a medium that is effective for the matter of which they consist. Thus, any perception or manipulation of Matter (that is our matter) by a spirit occurs as a function of faith.
The fact that God is specified as having a body leads me to believe that it is of matter that at least relates to ours – one that can See, Hear, Smell, Touch or Taste. We can believe that our matter is the matter of Eternity. As such, we can have knowledge of it and by it that a spirit can only have faith in. Moreover, the principles of righteousness that spirits believe and have faith in Christ for can be implemented and proved by our physical experiment.
As per my previous comment: maybe the Zone, Tao, or Flow isn’t a balance of the Spirit and Body, but the Body as it is intended to be.
Kaimi said:
In LDS circles, pain is most often described as the polar opposite of pleasure, and consequently acquires a negative valence. Everyday experience bears out the notion of pain as a part of “the bad” that Kaimi refers to.
However, after a little reflection I can come up with several violations of the pain is bad/pleasure is good classifier. For example, physical exercise is not terribly beneficial without some pain, and the high induced by narcotics masks the deleterious effects of such substances.
Reconsidering pain, I submit that it is best understood on the axis of intensity. The most intense physical sensations that we can experience for extended periods of time are those of pain. Pleasurable sensations are either not as intense at their extreme, or are not experienced for long periods of time (thinking of Kaimi’s musings on orgasms). This seems to be borne out by the experience of other intense sensations as pain (bright light, for example). Even though such sensations are not painful in and of themselves, we interpret them initially as painful because that is how our bodies experience intensity.
One thing that pain does for us is to call attention to areas of the body that require special consideration. Generally, we only attend to one or two things. I’m guessing that in the case of being in “the flow” or “the zone,” a person is able to attend to many things at once — Brandie’s description of being hyper-aware of her surroundings suggests this. In normal experience, when we can pay attention to one thing at most, pain overrides all other sensations when it reaches a certain level. Athletes must work through the pain, which tends to distract. In “the zone,” pain becomes one feedback stream out of many — it does not overwhelm the attention system.
As for the role of pain in the divine, I can’t imagine eternal progression without pain. Stripped of its negative connotations, pain is a useful signal directing our attention to what needs improvement, as has been mentioned already in this thread. Also, I imagine that a perfected body will be able to experience physical sensation in its extremes not only as pain, but as pleasure as well, so that pain might be perceived differently in relation to other sensations.
I like Jim F.’s formulation of pain as interrupting habit. I started my thinking imagining pain as an unmaking.
I’m pretty much making all this stuff up — I may read this tomorrow and think it’s a load of hooey. I am, however, greatly enjoying watching Mike Mussina in the zone inflicting great pain upon Boston Red Sox fans.
A debate about the purpose of pain raged around the issue of childbirth in the nineteenth century: it was thought that pain was not merely a symptom but a necessary moral and physiological component of labor, and thus, although anaesthesia was available, it was denied to laboring women. So although pain sometimes transmits useful signals, there are many other times when it serves no productive physiological role and can be blessedly intercepted. (I still aspire to undergo one parturition epidural-free, just to know what it’s like, but have yet to accomplish such a feat.)
As for bodily grace, I disagree just slightly with your generalization (and I realize of course that it is intended to be a generalization) that the Renaisssance body had to be transcended, Plato-like, by Spirit or Will. Christ’s body always existed as devotional object outside the form/matter binary, especially in Catholic devotional poetry, of course, but in reformed writings as well. Small quibble aside, I think the question is fascinating, both in Renaissance culture and in our own. As you well know, the Renaissance body was theorized by the humors, linking the body by means of analogical correspondence to the elements of the cosmos and thus rendering the human continuous with the universal. Understanding ourselves as permanently embodied might similarly allow us to experience continuity (and, one would hope, affinity) with the natural world.
Note to silly superstitious self — do not comment on pitchers working on a perfect game in progress if you want said perfect game to occur.
Brandie,
On the assumption that your experience with being in the flow is somewhat unusual — i.e., its occurrence is a matter worthy of note — I wonder at its similarity to what we understand to be spiritual experiences. With the right set of doctrinal underpinnings, I could imagine that such experiences could comprise the charismatic basis for a religious or spiritual tradition.
Are there differences in kind between your being in the flow and your perceptions of what is more commonly understood as spiritual experience within the traditions of the Church?
I just got around to reading this thread. Kewl stuff.
If we take Rosalynde’s comment about the body as an analogue to the universe and couple it with the idea of pain as an indicator of limitations as expressed by Keith and Charles, then perhaps we can view the tears of a weeping God as an expression of pain with in His own body – or the universe. Those elements of the universe which seek to alter the form of or dismember themselves from God, cause pain to be felt throughout the cosmic body. Indeed the heavens weep for such, for as Paul said in so many words, when one member of the body suffers all other members share in that suffering.
I’ve enjoyed reading the various responses on the issue of pain. We seem to have come to some agreement on a few things: pain is a useful cue to boundaries that may need attention (limits imposed by habit; dangers that might cause serious harm; demarcations of difference that invite further reach and desire-towards; and those that may remain in place yet stretch to encompass more-of-the-world in a divine embrace).
Rosalynd was right, of course, to assert the small quibble re: Renaissance bodies. In the work I’ve been doing this past year, I’ve been able to define at least nine quite distinct attitudes toward the body, all of which complicate the generalization I gave you as part of my discussion question. Each does seem to be wrestling with assumptions implicit in that generalization,though, and in the case of Aemilia Bassano, there is a particularly interesting desire to meld certain schools of Catholic thought with newer assertions arising out of the Puritan movement in England, and non-comformist thought in some of the Reformation literature being imported from Dutch publishers, influenced in part by several French philosopher/educators.
Keith’s comment has me thinking about the potential “revelation” always imbedded in the encounter with otherness. Several German and French thinkers (philosophy/theology) have done much to help us appreciate this in detailed and provocative ways in the last century. Taken in conjunction with Charles’s observation regarding what we learn when we consider notions of flow in the marial arts (and perhaps more particularly in relation to related iterations in Taosist thought), we might add that the encounter with otherness is often paradoxically a recognition of “through-ness” — pain, in this sense, might have an additional complication: in addition to being a boundary in the ways we’ve been elaborating, it might also be the shock of that moment of “through-ness” that challenges our notions of separateness. J. Stapely’s comments about matter might be the thread that connects both the “boundary” and “through-ness” aspects of pain: pain — whether human or divine — creates threads of empathy that simultaneously reveal otherness as well as through-ness.
And now I’m thinking of Merleau-Ponty. But I’ve meandered on long enough and must run off to teach Shakespeare.
Your experience came up in a conversation I was having with a good friend who is semi-pro. He says you need some Shimano PD-M959s.