Sitting in a hospital to look after someone else, my healthy body hangs heavy and awkward.
The feeling of our bodies as constant threats, as ever-present sources of ruin, like sleeping with a coiled cobra. The feeling that, while healthy, our bodies are gaudy, showy things - that I am as indecent and vulgar walking around this ward in a healthy body as I would be to wear an actual crown.
And then the queasy sense that it might be the other way round - that the physical self is the master and keeper rather than the kept: that my body has me at gunpoint - kidnapped! That our bodies keep our souls as playthings, as whores, to be kept until tiresome - and then my body will kill me.
Nightmares. Awful and imbalanced thoughts.
Perhaps I should be in hospitals more, around death and misery more often. Then I would sit through a hospital night, sleep in a vinyl padded chair unperturbed, and not see old women wheeled past, not smell the morbidity, not hear the machines beeping, the patients moan. I would just think about the work I brought with me.
Was there ever so wondrous and humane a thing, so necessary and good, that was yet so hateful and disorienting, as a hospital? Those intense cross-currents and resources of moral and physical force are what make a hospital, like a courthouse or a prison or a military base . . . a real temple: the house and ministers of something to be reckoned with.
