Life's a struggle

Forgive me for neglecting the blog over the past few days, but I've endured injury to my lumbar spine and most significantly the muscles on the right hand side of my body. I consider this really bad timing on my part since tomorrow is Christmas Day.  I feel absolutely stuffed. I woke in the early hours this morning, my body stiff and in the half light caught sight of myself in the mirror, sedated and restrained like Balatony Lajoska the taxidermist  in Györgi Pálfi’s Taxidermia (2006). On my way back to bed I noticed my fleshed and mounted squirrel, its furry skin permanently fixed in time, the look on its face frozen - it is immortalized! My own body rigid for fear that movement would cause yet more pain. And yet, I need to move for if I don't I will become worse. Thinking about it, taxidermy animals are bodies without organs. Perhaps we need to become like this, as Antonin Artaud suggested: 'When you have made him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his freedom'. (In: Susan Sontag, Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, California, 1976:571). But what is this freedom that is only skin, only surface? It is not us and yet it is simultaneously us. However, my identity is changed by my internal surfaces ~ blood, bone, muscle, nerves that play out their theatre of disruption on the outside of my body, cause me to distort my facial expressions like a circus of madness. Finding a balance between movement and stasis is most probably the ideal way to proceed. But what is too little and what is enough? The scalpel raised, be careful to remove the skin with out tearing it, make a mold by dipping the remaining carcass in Plaster of Paris.  Fashion the skin over the mold then sew a little or sew a lot with invisible thread. Jeremy Bentham, English philosopher and social reformer had his body mummified in a different way. After death his skeleton and head were preserved and stuffed out with straw. Dressed and placed in an 'auto-icon' cabinet he may be viewed by visitors to the University College London, where he has been sitting since 1832. No movement for him! OK, so by going through this little stream of thought, I've thought more about life and pain and agree with the old lady struggling down the stairs  yesterday who said: Life's a struggle, but it's better than the alternative!