The Predicament of the Body, During and After

May Swenson's poem "Question," My Secret Night Ritual, and Trying to Fly

Body my house

my horse my hound   

what will I do

when you are fallen

-from “Question” May Swenson

*

“I heard a thing about green cemeteries on the news. Weird to think about, but…”

“I definitely don’t want any kind of ‘viewing’...So creepy and public.”

“Sitting shiva…I like that idea much better.”

“Why do we never talk about death…not even in science, really?”

“Seemed like we talked more about it in elementary school.”

“I think they think if you talk to teens about death, it’ll give us the idea to kill ourselves.”

“As if that’s what’s gonna introduce the whole idea.” (mildly amused laughter)

“That poem ‘Question’ is like the opposite. Talking about how she’ll miss her body…”

“Like a good, smart dog or an old house you love…”

“Yeah...like…what will I do without you…?”

• Excerpts from class discussions/writing about “Question” (Swenson), in “Spirituality in Literature”  classes, 2013-2018

***

When I was five, I had a plan to see if I could escape my body. I did it over the course of a few months at bedtime up in my top bunk. It was like an experiment, and I gave it my all.

When I was sure my little sister was asleep below me, I would start by fixing my eyes on the ceiling and being very serious and still. I would then conjure the being, whom I envisioned as not The God, but near to god, in godly cahoots–up there, and powerful. She was female and tough. After a bit of stillness and gazing, I’d feel something rising in my belly like a beckoning or a dare. Then I’d close my eyes, tense up my body, and try to make myself weightless to see if I would be transported, up and out of my body, to somewhere else.  It was like trying to sneak out of a house with no doors. I’d open my eyes and still be there in my bed, a little out of breath.  Eventually, I’d fall asleep. 

I wasn’t wanting or trying to die. It was nothing like that. I think this secret ritual was about two things: First, it was me wanting to believe in god and experience something bigger than just my body. And second, I was trying to feel what it felt like to fly, which was a perpetual goal and dreamscape of mine and a source of low-grade existential disappointment for most of my childhood (the not flying, I mean).  Anyway,  I knew this bedtime practice was weird enough not to tell my parents about it. I’ve never mentioned it to anyone.  

In all the years since the bunk bed experimenting, I’ve cycled in and out of sync with my body. I take turns resisting it and relenting to it, as I think most people do. A shell game of hubris, hope, and humility– being at odds with my body, and then at ease, and back to odds…

I was always the smallest growing up, which for a girl isn’t so bad. (I’ve seen the boy edition of  late-blooming up close, and it’s a rough ride.) Still, when other girls were becoming contoured and womanly, I had the body of a small boy–a foalish Iggy Pop. Luckily, I was big into gymnastics, which took the edge off some of the shock and shame of middle school and its trick mirrors.

At the gym, I was surprised and delighted at the things my body could do. It could vault and careen, fly up and twist and land. It could let go of one bar midair and catch another. It balanced and danced.  It could flip!  This was close enough to flying. And it was a transcending, the likes of which I’d craved as a little kid. When the seizures came a little while later, still in middle school, it was not the kind of transcending I’d bargained for. It was the body leaving me and not the other way around. But I learned with practice to surrender to these involuntary Irish exits. At odds, then at ease…

The body exposes you. It conveys and protects you, delights and disappoints you. You indulge it and deny it, talk shit about it, dress it up and down. If you’re lucky, you learn to love it like you used to. It’s a predicament and a playground–and then it’s gone. You part ways, and then you have to get to know it all over again.

That’s the point of entry into May Swenson’s“Question,” the poem that made me remember my secret childhood ritual with the lady god. Who will we be without our body, and where? What will contain us? How will we navigate?

For a long time after my father died, my dreams were only about the body. And they were all sad slapstick: We’d be carrying his coffin, but then drop it and he’d fall out in front of everyone. Or we’d bury him in the wrong place, or misplace him, or someone would steal him and we’d have to chase them down the street. The same thing happened when my beloved friend and ex, Ollie, died a few years ago, but those body dreams were even weirder. The bodies we know so well in life become in their death so foreign. Like Emily Dickinson said, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.”  I wonder if these body dreams were all by way of re-introduction: This is your dad, the body-less version, and This is Ollie–out there somewhere. 

The way Swenson’s poem frames the whole proposition of the after-body is affectionate and unusual, transcendent and surprising. Body the loyal protector and beautiful conveyor. House. Horse. Hound. When students and I would work with the poem, we’d always get around to how untrained most of us felt for death, whether we’d had a close person die yet or not. You can see in the excerpted class discussions at the beginning of this essay that many teens seem eager not to have death be a(nother) censored topic.

I felt so untrained for death when my father died that I took a sabbatical from teaching to go work on a doctorate. I longed for a place and space to contain me, where I could be and think. And the container was a familiar one: reading, writing and talking about books in literature classes, this time as the student.

During my coursework, I dove into death and dying with zeal: I took a course with Elie Wiesel, where we read most of his fiction. There were only about 20 of us and him, discussing his novels that grappled with grief and death, injustice and god. I took another class called Death and Mourning in American Literature with Susan Mizruchi; in that one, the literature grad students would talk fancy academic talk, and I’d talk about the books and how much I missed my dad.

Not everything about my doctoral coursework was death-y (my dissertation is about teaching poetry); but it all helped. Time and reading and thinking and great teaching and company and questioning.

I stopped having dreams about my father’s body, and started having dreams about him instead, doing things like fishing in his flannel shirt out in his canoe. In February of that sabbatical year, I got pregnant. It was a surprise, and it seemed like the perfect time, and it was. I was at ease. I was ready.

Question       May Swenson

Body my house

my horse my hound   

what will I do

when you are fallen

Where will I sleep   

How will I ride   

What will I hunt

Where can I go

without my mount   

all eager and quick   

How will I know   

in thicket ahead

is danger or treasure   

when Body my good   

bright dog is dead

How will it be

to lie in the sky

without roof or door   

and wind for an eye

With cloud for shift   

how will I hide?

Pairings and ideas and questions for teaching, further reading, and writing about “Question”

Little side note: We overexpose sex and underexpose intimacy. So it seems like a radical act to love one’s body as an ally, for what it can do, and what it does. Swenson’s poem gave us a way to wonder about both earthly and ethereal selfhood, about where the “I” resides. As you can imagine, like many of the works we got to read in Spirituality in Literature, it gave us permission to question, and question big. 

Questions/challenges:

• Write the poem out as prose, with punctuation where you think a sentence or a question ends, and other punctuation as needed. Now, look at that prose alongside the poem as it is. What does it say or do differently? How does it feel and read different now? How does the content get altered when you manipulate the form?

• What do you think of her using and braiding together not one metaphor for her body, but three (horse, house, hound?) What does each- horse, house, hound- offer the idea of the parting of body from soul…the body as a trusty container for the “real self?” Wearing a cloud for a dress?

• What is the speaker’s primary concern/worry? Does she offer herself any comfort? Where? Is this an ode to her body? An elegy for the future?

• Do you find this a reassuring poem? Terrifying? Both? Neither? 

Pairings that could and probably would be great:

• Wings of Desire (Wenders) 

• The Hours (Cunningham) and Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf)

• “Some years there exists a wanting to escape…” (Rankin)

• Sweet Old World (Lucinda Williams)

• A Beggar in Jerusalem  (Wiesel)

• Sula (Morrison)

• When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be (Keats) (h/t to Ron Fletcher)

• Into the Glacier (John Haines)

• The Triumph of the Infinite Mark Strand

• The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Schnabel)

• Postscript Seamus Heaney

• Wind, Water, Stone (Octavio Paz)

• Courage Starts with Uncertainty (Chodron)

• Things I Didn’t Do with this Body (collection) Amanda Gunn

• My Skeleton (Hirschfield) (h/t to Deb Polansky)

• Dog Years (Doty)

• After great pain, a formal feeling comes (Dickinson)

There are so many more, but I gotta get this out! Please put your pairings and ideas in the comments here (click on comment bubble thing). Anyone can comment; you just have to have a Substack account. Xo