Embodied - Feb 10 2025

 

Embodied

Feb 10 2025

Even though I don’t believe

in reincarnation

inhabiting this body

feels much the same.

As if I were a soft-bodied lobster

living in its shell.

As if I could detach

from my flesh and blood carcass

and exist perfectly well.

And who is this “I”?

The life force,

my ineffable self,

the ghost in the machine;

what some would call my psyche

and others my soul.

So I feed the body,

march it out for exercise,

take care to pamper it.

After all, I need it to last,

want it to be trouble free.

Yet it’s not just a vessel

getting me from here to there.

Not just a system of sensors,

keeping me aware

of the outside world.

Because there’s no one without the other.

Because I feel every twitch, pain, bump,

every pang of hungers

longing for sleep

loving touch.

Because we’re bound together

so intimately

and inextricably

in every fibre and every cell.

And because I’m not seen in it

but as it;

and so — captive to vanity, as everyone is —

how I see myself.

So when Descartes famously said

I think therefore I am

he was wrong;

there is no thought without this body

no separation of me from it.

I’m not a crab

shedding as it grows;

its disposable shell

discarded like a pair of pants

one size too small.

The only body I’ll ever have.

Because there’s no reincarnation

no second chance.

No heaven or hell

or astral travelling,

no successive ever-afters

rising to enlightenment.

Together to the bitter end.

When my ageing body

will turn on us.

At best

a shrunken old man,

half blind and hard of hearing.

And at worst,

in pain

in a hospital bed,

pissing myself

and short of breath.

Together to the bitter end.

When even in death

there will be no parting.

No disembodied soul

moving on,

just a decomposing body

returning to the soil.