Liquid Bodies, Eternally Written
A 2014 post by Maria Popova’s blog The Marginalian recently came up on my social media feeds. The post gave a concise overview of what celebrated literary figures - Sylvia Plath, Oscar Wilde, Thoreau, Susan Sontag and Anaïs Nin get a mention - thought about the importance of journaling. Towards the end of her entry, Popova made a striking statement that a journal is
an artificially permanent record of thought and inner life, which are invariably transient…we are creatures of remarkable moodiness and mental turbulence, and what we think we believe at any given moment…can be profoundly different from our beliefs a decade, a year, and sometimes even a day later.
I found this statement striking not because I agreed with it, but because Popova’s statement reveals two things.
First, Popova highlights what is taken to be a given in our current cultural moment, that we exist as “fluid selves” living in what Zygmunt Bauman called a “liquid modernity”. It is an age where the self moves within and adapts to the constant flow of ever multiplying cultural reference points. Within this context the body, once championed as the bastion of stability amidst a disintegrating cultural milieu (I am reminded here of the character Julia in Orwell’s 1984, who reminded Winston of the base of reality by making him grasp her body), has over time become as liquid as the flows of cultural symbols that surround it, and also mark it. In this respect, Angela Franks has done some provocative and enriching writing on the fluidity of bodies and the emptying of selves in our current era.
Second, Popova’s statement is striking because she identifies a tension between this liquid body and self and the task of writing which “sets things in stone” - she uses the qualifier of “artificially” here. I found her identification of this tension helpful because it helped me made sense of a question put to me some time back about the contemporary appeal of tattoos following a paper I gave on the implications of hyperreality for Christianity (now a chapter of a book on 1968). Back then, I did not have the right words to answer this question, but I realise now that part of the appeal might stem from something more than just extending the expressive capacities of the body. A nuance of note might be the seeming permanence that comes with inscribing one’s flesh, which has been rendered impermanent by postmodernity. Inscription thereby becomes the anchor by which the disappearance of the liquid body may be averted, or at least slowed down.
Set against these two observations, would Christianity have any response? There seems to be a temptation to go one of two ways, both of which would be contrary to the Christian tradition.
The first temptation would be to uncritically accept Popova’s observation of the liquid self as fact, and with that, the liquid body that expresses this self. To do so risks forming a duality between the self on the one hand, which even in its liquid form is the one constant in one’s journey through life, and the body on the other. This anthropology would cleave through Aristotle’s (and by extension Aquinas’) notion of an ensouled body, where the body is a crucial hinge to our personhood.
The second temptation would be to categorically reject Popova’s observation and defend the body as the unshakable spike in the ground which resists any change. This temptation fetishises the body, and runs the risk of idolising the body, which ignores the effects of sin upon the self and the body. As Origen’s ancient maxim puts it, the fruit of sin is multiplicity, and with that multiplicity comes the tsunami of changes that would undermine the integrity of self and body.
A way between these two extremes can be found in the body of Jesus Christ, the Divine Word which, by His incarnation, inscribes itself into flesh. Going further, by His Passion, the body of Jesus takes on the effects of sin, becoming scourged to the point of becoming a semi-liquid mound of flesh. The wounds produced by His scourging do not disappear with His resurrection, but become part of His declaration to Thomas about the veracity of the resurrection. This same wounded yet resurrected body, now ascended, is also part of the life of the Triune God, part of the eternal principle by which every creature is created, and to which every creature is oriented towards. In a strange paradox, the eternal Word has had the fruits of liquidity written onto Himself, and through the inscribing of that Word onto ourselves, we ourselves are meant to become a paradox, by which we are not meant to hold onto the body’s permanency, and yet not yield to the liquidisation of postmodernity, since the inscription of the Divine Word onto ourselves is what allows us to await the coming resurrection of that same body.
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