I was sent a famous poem yesterday that was entirely new to me. Nor was I particularly familiar with the poet other than plain name recognition. I’ll get to the poem in a minute. I was much more interested in my friend’s writing that accompanied his introduction to Delmore Schwartz: “Our bodies are such strange and astonishing and sometimes burdensome companions.”

To view one’s body as a companion rather than integral part of self creates a glorious distance. It relegates responsibility for unfriendly or destructive behavior by that very body when it refuses to function properly, to an entity that can be dealt with like all other external entities – with irritation, anger, dismay or fearfulness. Once you define “companion” as a separate other, you  no longer have to retreat to that horrid place where you feel a part of you is betraying all other parts of you and you are fighting yourself if you rage against that betrayal.

Of course, you then run into the next problem: if body is companion, is soul as well? What’s good for the goose is good for the gander and so forth? (Distracting aside: that proverb always struck me as a weird gender reversal – if the idea is that women should have the same privileges as men shouldn’t be the gander named first? Oh well.) If both of these basic constituents of what we perceive to be self are external components, then where is the very core?  Of course variants of that question have remained unanswered through millennia of philosophical searches, psychological research and now neuroscience’s attempts to join the chorus of seekers. We won’t solve that mystery today.

Here is the poem:

And here is a fascinating review article that explains numerous different perspectives to be intuited from the verses above, beyond the issue of the “withness of the body.” In addition to giving a short overview of Schwartz’s life – too bitter, too needy, too self-destructive, too pre-occupied with seeking fame, too short – it explains how poems can stand in for the poet’s demands, the audience’s complicity, the writer’s self justification, his somewhat hidden plea for forgiveness and our power to provide it, or our gullibility of being lured into it by simply being hooked on the beauty of the language. It’s a worthwhile read.

That Inescapable Animal

Luckily there is great news for bodies: researchers have created a device that can be implanted under cancer patients’ skin to act as a “cell catcher.” It shows great promise in slowing down metastatic disease.

“The scaffold is designed to mimic the environment in other organs before cancer cells migrate there. The scaffold attracts the body’s immune cells, and the immune cells draw in the cancer cells. This then limits the immune cells from heading to the lung, liver or brain, where breast cancer commonly spreads.”

 https://news.engin.umich.edu/2016/09/implantable-decoy-could-limit-cancer/

Now let’s invent some decoy for the soul that catches self-defeating thoughts before they migrate!

Since I have no ready images of a bear of a body, I figured we’ll change perspective and focus on a bit of flitting-about soul. These dragonflies were all photographed yesterday in the heat of the middle of the day  – getting myself out to the river was definitely worth it.