Welcome to this episode of the Embodied Pathways podcast. Today I'm speaking with Professor Lisa Blackman, who works at the intersection of body studies, media and cultural theory, particularly in the field of subjectivity and embodiment. Lisa also has a keen interest in mental health research and activism, and she was one of the early pioneers of the hearing voices movement.
Lisa is the author of six books, including, this is genuine, my very favourite book on embodiment, it's called The Body, The Key Concepts. It's concise and covers such a range of different areas. Just love it. I think it's great. So the second edition came out in 2021. So you're going to get the upgraded version if you so choose.
So Lisa, welcome.
Lisa
Thank you.
Adrian
So let's launch in. I'm really curious, especially knowing a little bit about your research, what does embodiment mean to you?
Lisa
That sounds like a really simple question that I could give a really simple answer to. And I've actually been thinking about this question, I think, going right back to my PhD. So you mentioned my collaborations with the Hearing Voices Network, and I was trying to sort of prepare for the podcast.
So I was thinking, when did I first use that term? And I actually found it in one of my first books, which was actually called Hearing Voices Embodiment and Experience. So this book, which was published in 2001, is the monograph that was based on my PhD, which was a collaboration with members of the Hearing Voices Network. That's predominantly people who hear voices.
Often they've had a psychiatric diagnosis, so often the voices are considered signs and symptoms of a discrete disease entity, like schizophrenia. But the group, when I first started collaborating with them, and this was back in the early 1990s, were trying to develop techniques for living with their voices and managing their voices, which kind of rejected some of the propositions within psychiatry. The main one being that voices are meaningless phenomenon, so they're just signs and symptoms of a disease.
Therefore, they have nothing to say about a person's life, about their circumstances, perhaps about intergenerational histories, perhaps cultural histories of trauma. So yeah, so I collaborated with them, and I just felt through my collaborations that I needed an account of the body. I guess what I was thinking of as the co-constitution of the biological with the cultural, with the social, with the political, that didn't think in terms of binaries.
And that question of what is embodiment, I don't know if I could answer. I could certainly offer some responses, but for me, it's still a really important question. I think there are so many different ways now of exploring embodiment, which reject these kind of binaries between the physical and the cultural, in the context of psychiatry, the biological and the social, perhaps, which all open up really interesting questions about what it means to have and be a body in different contexts.
So to say a little bit more, when I first started thinking about embodiment in the context of my, what was an ethnography really of voice hearing groups, that is peer support groups where voice hearers were coming together to share their experiences. I think one of the first sort of accounts of embodiment I read was the cultural anthropologist's work, Thomas Csordas. He was also interested in experiences like voice hearing, which confound clear distinctions between the inside and the outside, perhaps between the normal and the pathological.
So, you know, perhaps so-called altered states of consciousness. And as an anthropologist, he explored this in different cultural settings. And he used the term, I think, ‘somatic modes of attention’.
And I thought, now this is really speaking to me. This provides something that isn't cognitivism. It's not placing voices within errors in cognition.
It's not placing voice hearing within the context of sort of diseased brain processes or processes that have somehow gone awry. And yeah, that was, I think, the term that opened up for me, this idea of how we're always attending in and through our bodies. So we can't just think of a mind separate from the body.
And in the context of voice hearing, you know, this is crucial because so much of the literature even now is either voices of biogenetic phenomenon or they're cognitive, they're cognitive errors. This sort of need for theorizations of embodiment is still hugely important. So that's where it came from.
That's an elaborated kind of answer. But yeah, so it started with my research in relation to voice hearing, but probably it started much before that. But that would entail me telling you a little bit about myself, if you would like me to, I'm happy to.
That will enrich the conversation and be very happy to hear more. Yeah, because I think my research, I don't see, although I've written, as you said, a book called The Body, The Key Concepts. So I have this kind of interest in a very transdisciplinary field of body studies with a lot of competing perspectives.
I guess my interest came, I could go right back because I was born with a very rare congenital condition, which is rather weird. So I think I'm quite attracted to the weird, arguably voice hearing could be seen as a weird phenomenon, certainly for some people. Yeah, I was born with a very rare congenital condition and it's a twinning phenomenon.
One side of my body would have been one identical twin and the other side, another. I'm sort of an example of a perfect conjoined twin. So to try and explain this, with identical twins, often one twin is smaller.
So if you actually look at photographs of identical twins, you'll tend to see this and you have a mirroring called mirror twinning, where often one twin will be left handed, the other twin will be right handed. So they kind of mirror each other. And so my condition, which is called complex hemihyperplasia, which in the 19th century used to be called double monstrosity.
So this gives you a sense, I think, of the freakishness of my condition. So one side of my body is much bigger. And so when I was born, the right leg was nearly three inches longer.
So I have one foot that's much smaller. My left foot is three sizes smaller. I can show you my hands.
But, you know, obviously people listening can't see. But anyway, so I grew up with a sense of always being more than one because I was always referred to in this way. I had an operation when I was 11, where they stopped my big leg growing so that the smaller leg could catch up.
So I kind of had this language of compensation surrounding the way that I was talked about, that somehow medical interventions would compensate for the discrepancy. And that would mean that I wouldn't have to wear an orthopedic built-up shoe, which I did. I'm going to conjure for you the 1970s, a playground, lots of kids.
You can imagine I'm the one walking around with the built-up shoe. If anyone is aware of orthopedic shoes, the idea is that they hide the limb length discrepancy and they're just these awful brown or black boots. And so I was bullied.
So I'm sure you can imagine I had all sorts of terms that were very typical of the 1970s. And so I say all this because I think I come into my work with that sort of disability awareness, that where normative sort of morphologies in a way never captured my lived experience. I was always other.
I was always the kind of weird one, the freak. My party trick was I could stand with one, the shorter leg on a curb and the longer leg in the road. And then I would be the same size.
That was my party trick to try and distract some of the kids at school from bullying me. The idea you reverse the gaze and people are staring so you can sort of make a spectacle of it. But I think I've realized actually only quite recently just how significant my experience of sort of non-normative morphology, but also the embodied experience of that, the implications of that for how I was made into a medical object in lots of different ways has also really been an entry point into some 30 years really of research, exploring this question of what it means to have and be a body, which I think encompasses embodiment, but also opens up, I think, to the question that, you know, we all have bodies, but sometimes our bodies don't feel like us.
So this sort of disjuncture that I think we all live in different ways and that I think can be really heightened when you're positioned as other. So that's sort of some of my story, which I felt for a podcast. It's not something I've written about, but increasingly I think I'm kind of thinking that this might be something I'll explore.
I think it's probably important to understand my research.
Adrian
Yeah, I can really see how it would have fed into the research you got interested in that. And also this whole sense of questioning binaries and questioning norms and all of that.
It's kind of from that experience, you're going to come in and go, well, what do you mean by normal? What do you mean by weird? What do you mean by why is it either or? Why can it not be both and?
Lisa
Yeah, so I think of myself as more than one or one yet many. And actually, this was actually also quite normative. In the 19th century, there were lots of challenges to the evolutionary discourses of the 19th and early 20th century in philosophy, in my book, Immaterial Bodies.
I actually look at the way this question of how can we be one yet many was actually central to lots of scholars and practitioners at the time who were trying to think of subjectivity in a more porous way, in a more permeable way, rather than in terms of, you know, a singularity, a kind of bounded singularity. And this was in the context of the sort of new media technologies of the time and the idea that fads and fashions and trends could spread contagiously. So in the context of crowd psychology, ideas, again, very relevant now in the context of digital media and social media, but they were asking men.
And so I was looking at lots of those arguments which were challenging psychology and psychiatry, and indeed, at one point, were kind of part of psychology and psychiatry. But as they professionalised these disciplines, they sort of ditched all of this stuff because they went for a more bounded singular subject. And so although Immaterial Bodies isn't directly about embodiment, it also is because, you know, in my conception of embodiment, you have to include fantasies, emotions, feelings, processes that open us to the other, and that also are the sites of orchestration, regulation, and so on.
Adrian
So this whole concept of the porous body, I find absolutely fascinating. And it's something I go on about a bit. We're not integrated in closed selves. No, no. We are connected, and it comes out brilliantly in your book. And I see it in so many different places now. It's really such a countercultural notion, isn't it?
Lisa
It is. And I studied psychology initially because, you know, I think from my experience, I was sort of fascinated with, yeah, the sort of presumptions and assumptions that are made about what it means to be human, what it means to be a subject, what it means to have and be a body, how difference is constituted.
And so I studied a psychology degree in the late 1980s, and I realized looking back, I was so lucky because the psychology curriculum I studied was really radical. So it was very interdisciplinary. This was largely because there was seen to be a crisis in psychology at the time, that the sort of white ethnocentrism of Western psychology was being challenged.
There were people coming into the discipline who were challenging the sort of normativity assumed around psychological health, for example. Yeah. So I studied a really radical psychology degree, which took me into philosophy, anthropology, critical psychiatry.
So in a way, all of the approaches that I was exploring didn't start from that idea of singularity or boundedness. It was always about permeability, about what I guess we would now call co-constitution, co-evolution. I think there are a variety of terms we could use, but we're all in different ways rejecting dualistic categories.
I think I'm a sort of a product of my time, and also a series of very fortunate and lucky encounters with people that I would never have anticipated, that have enabled me to just produce a body of work that above all, I hope is helpful for other people to think through this question for the podcast, what is embodiment? Have you any thoughts on how we can deepen our relationship with our sense of embodiment? I've been going back to some of my experiences with the Hearing Voices group, because there were experiences I had that I didn't write about at the time. I sort of didn't feel I had the sort of conceptual apparatus or just really way of understanding what was happening. But one experience I had, which I think really deepened my understanding, was being part of a peer support group.
So now I should say at this point, because listeners might be thinking, why was I part of a peer support group ethically? But I also grew up with a mother who heard voices. So this is also really important, because that was also very formative. And so the Hearing Voices Network welcomed me as a kind of honorary voice hearer, because of the experiences I'd had growing up with my mother, because I always felt her voices were meaningful.
So I was a very curious child. I used to ask her what they were saying. I, over the years, realised there were patterns to her voice hearing. They often came at times of stress. They did seem to be speaking about particular circumstances, albeit in, I guess, quite broken or fragmented ways. The narratives were quite broken.
But yeah, so in the voice hearing groups, one of the techniques that we were using was everyone would share their voices. So they were encouraged for the week before the group to write down what voices they were hearing, perhaps their gender, what time of day they were hearing them, were they alone or were they in company, were they particular, was there a particular context? But then also what they were saying. And then what we did as a group were the voices were shared.
And there was something really profound about people sharing their voices so that they became a collective phenomenon. And I just, I did not know how to talk about this because, you know, it's very, very difficult. But it was actually through those processes of sharing that they became a sort of distributed experience.
And it was that process and the sorts of dialogues we would have with and through each other's voices that seemed to be part of the process through which the voice here is in the group would come to experience their voices differently. And by differently, I mean that that might be experience the voices perhaps less abusive or less intrusive, that the voices might stop or lessen having a sort of third person running commentary. And so there were literally changes in the embodied experience of the voices.
And also that through these processes, voice hearers were saying, it's not that I don't want to hear the voices. Actually, the voices I'm hearing now, I feel they're more, I think of them like good friends. They provide a sort of soul support, you know, and they give me advice and comfort and wisdom.
And yeah, so I've only just recently, I've started writing about these experiences, but using a different mode of writing. I don't think I could do it justice with kind of academic language. So I've been experimenting with different modes of writing.
Yeah, so I've just published something based on it, which is in an art book. And I think that's quite telling. You know, it's been artists who've been really interested in thinking through these techniques.
But yeah, so it's never gone away from me, this experience. And so I guess in terms of the question of deepening, what I would say is those processes of transformation were both hard work. So this transformation didn't happen in an instant.
And it required the group, you know, to have a more distributed sense of consciousness in a way or perception. I just find that fascinating. And I think it would probably have lots of implications for wider, you know, if we use Csordas’ terms, somatic modes of attention, particularly because increasingly everything's so individualized and we're sort of required to do lots of work on our own. Whereas the sorts of transformations I witnessed and experienced were the reverse of that. Yeah, so I think the deepening is interesting. And I think we still have a lot to learn.
I think after 30 years of doing this research, that's my conclusion, really. Ideally, we need scientists to really value humanities research, the arts and humanities. And they don't.
There are a few, but my experience of collaboration I've tried with various scientists has not been great. I sort of describe my experiences as being like a bad relationship. I feel like I learn a lot about science.
And then often the retort that comes back is, oh yeah, you deal with the social. It's so disheartening. If I have a vision for the future, it would really be that this kind of work, the work that maybe comes under this umbrella of body studies is relevant in all contexts to do with health and illness, well-being and just being able to cope and survive really with the kinds of challenges we face, particularly in the current conjuncture.
So if there's any scientists listening and they're open to creative experimentation, then that would be great.
Adrian
I do feel, especially with embodiment, we've got to break out of the silos, which you do beautifully. It's so transdisciplinary.
Lisa
I totally agree. We need to get the scientists on board and weave it in to the bigger pattern. Especially given the kind of devaluing of the arts and humanities, you know, in the current political context.
It's such valuable research, which could make such a difference. So, but anyway, we can hope.
Adrian
We can hope.
There's a really strong counter-cultural theme running through. Actually, it's probably through a lot of the conversations I've had. If you're into embodiment, you're probably going to be pushing the boundaries and like, well, there's other ways of looking at it. I just wanted to pick up on the power of community that you talked about there, that's something that I'm really interested in. There's this obsession with the individual, but it's like, no, it's the community is where the juice is.
Lisa
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, we started off talking or we were talking earlier about porousness. I start from the position of a kind of radical relationality. You know, we are interdependent. If only that was the starting point.
So many of the crises, whether it's environmental, in the context of war, in the context of migration, you know, we seem to have reverted back to such a conservative notion of boundary and defending discrete boundaries as if they exist. We've been through the COVID pandemic and you would think that, you know, one of the conclusions would be, OK, let's get rid of this sort of notion of bodily integrity based on separation and start from a different position. And yet it's almost the opposite.
I find it curious, really. But yeah, with the community, that acknowledging interdependency is the starting point, you know, and then you can start to ask different kinds of questions, work with different sorts of methods. That's my starting point, really.
I'm not interested in a bounded individual. I just think that's a fiction. But as Foucault said, it's one that functions in truth.
Adrian
That's one of the challenges. There's a real sense of vision emerging. And it is a common theme that I'm hearing again and again: The individual is porous. It is about interweaving, these same themes coming across. So I'm hoping this podcast is just a little kind of poke - pushing in that direction of getting people to begin to think and then experience in different ways.
Lisa
Yeah, well, I think it's a great opening, bringing people together to think about this question, what is embodiment from their own practice, their own research, their own lived experience. So I think it's really important. And I teach a module called Embodiment, an experience that's been running since 1997.
Every year, students say how life changing doing the module has been. And I think partly because they have a mode of assessment where they're encouraged to think in and through some aspect of their own lived experience. Might be in the context of health and illness.
It might be anything creative practice. And so they engage in a writing through their experience. They're encouraged to be experimental and they find the process transformative.
And so I kind of hope that at least in that way, you can have, you know, you can make a difference, which I think that's what I want to do.
Adrian
Well, on that optimistic note, perhaps that's a good place to conclude. It's been super. Thank you.
Lisa
Yeah. Thank you very much.
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Adrian
I'm delighted to welcome my final guest on this series about embodiment, Glen Mazis. Glen is a distinguished professor of philosophy and humanities emeritus, a Merleau-Ponty scholar and a widely published poet. Now, when I first came across Glen's work years ago, when I was doing my PhD, I read his 2002 book, Earth Bodies, which I can highly recommend. Glen and I have worked together on several projects over the years since then, including the one that comes to mind is a lovely conversational interview with Glen and David Abram back in 2018. And that is online. I'll put a link on the Embodied Pathways podcast page so you can check that one out. But for now, let's turn to Glen.
Welcome to my podcast.
Glen
Thank you, Adrian. Happy to be here.
Adrian
Let's jump straight in. I'm wondering what does embodiment mean to you?
Glen
Quite a good question for someone who's spent their whole life trying to bring to people's attention that they are embodied beings. That's pretty much defined my whole career and really why I became a philosopher, because I guess embodiment to me is quite a privilege to be an embodied creature.
And, you know, in philosophy, it's so often to be an embodied being has been seen to be a curse. Plato's saying that the body is something that nails us to the slimy earth, or whether it's, you know, Socrates saying, give a cock to Aesculapius because I'm finally escaping the prison of the body. Getting my PhD in philosophy against that kind of tradition. I've always been fighting for kind of a recognition that we are embodied creatures and to realize what a gift and what a privilege, which I would like to talk about in a second. But I want to give one other autobiographical comment, which is when I was a teenager, I read Thornton Wilder's Our Town. It's a wonderful play.
And in the play, the people in the cemetery, they're looking down at the town and they're very sad because they say the people down there, they don't realize that they're alive. They don't realize, you know, what a miracle life is. And isn't it very sad? And that play really struck home with me because I felt like when I looked around at people, they weren't really here.
So many of them. And it really, I think, has to do with how one not just thinks about the body, but how one lives the body, how one takes up the body. One other biographical fact about me is as a philosopher, I've always been in love with the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, which you well know, Adrian.
He's most famous probably for his masterwork, The Phenomenology of Perception. But he's been kind of my guiding spirit throughout my life. And he was the philosopher of the body.
And so what he said is that one of his opening remarks is, the body is our way into the world. And that's very much what I feel like. Our sense of interconnectedness with all the beings around us, with the trees outside my window, with my wife downstairs, with my dog, you know, who's lying on the carpet there.
All of that happens because I have a body, because the body is the way of going beyond itself and being enmeshed with other bodies.
Whereas a mind pulls back from everything and goes to some place that's detached, that's outside of space and time, which is, you know, what so many religions and so many philosophers have said is the really real place, this special place outside of space and time. But I think it's our privilege to live in space and time and to feel interconnected with everything. And that enmeshment means that, this could either be exciting or depressing, but to me, it's exciting that you never get to the bottom of things.
There's always more to that connection that you can go deeper and deeper into. So the sense of your life, the sense of the world, the sense of reality, you never get to the bottom of it. And that's a mystery. And that mystery is, to me, wonderful, not something that's frustrating, but it's an opportunity that whenever you think you have the answer, you don't. There's always more to find, more to discover. But also for a mind, and I guess, again, having gotten my PhD in philosophy, I was very aware of this.
The mind is great for logic and reasoning and categorizing and ordering things. But to me, the way to understand the world is through emotion, imagination, through the fact that if I look at that chair, it has all these memories attached to it. My bodily kinetic sense, these other intuitions, which I can't even put labels on, all these are the way I really know who I am and know the world.
And they're all from the body. They're not from the mind. I mean, the mind is a wonderful thing.
I wouldn't have a PhD in philosophy if I didn't also appreciate it. However, it's something that comes along afterwards. And that afterwards is so hard to articulate.
There's an immediate sense of things, an immediate sense of Adrian looking at me and looking at his facial expression and seeing his smile now. I mean, I get that immediate understanding of him and that immediate connection and that immediate opening to explore more. And the mind is great.
It's sort of filling in things and ordering things and adding to things, but it's not our foundation. And so it's scary to me that what I find is a disembodied culture, a culture that's so busy with its mind strategizing, planning, worrying, ruminating, manipulating, that people aren't more in touch with their immediate imperceptible sense of things, because that's what really gives them the knowledge. But it's more than the knowledge.
It's an understanding. It's a connection. It's in the end, I think also the basis of love and friendship.
And that those things get warped sometimes by our mental interference with those things and putting them in categories that are really not appropriate to our immediate experience. So you can see already that for me in my life, being so interested in the body really led me to Buddhism and to meditation. And also I became a marathon runner because we all get a body for free.
That's what it means to be a human being. However, it's an achievement to become more and more embodied. And we all become more or less embodied at different times in our lives or different points in the day.
Doing things like exercising or being aware of one's body or meditating and following one's breath, all those things take one into a more immediate and fulfilling and full experience of your body and also help clear the mind. Because I do agree with Buddhism that we have this monkey mind. We have this mind that plays tricks on us, that takes us away from our immediate connection, where even ethically, I would argue that ethics is a great thing.
I don't want to do away with it. To have all these rules of conduct and all the ideas about what's right and wrong, whether it's religious, whether it's social contract, whether it's utilitarian, I mean, they're all necessary and helpful. But again, they're guides that come afterwards.
If you don't feel that immediate connection with other people and what the Buddhists call spontaneous right action, all those other rules are sort of makeups, trying to somehow make up for the fact that you don't feel that empathy with the other person, that you haven't entered into their experience and seen the world from through their eyes and through their body. You can try to make up for it with all these rules, but they never quite do the job. But one very poignant instance that given the current world situation, I don't know, at least a decade ago, the Palestinians and the Israelis tried this program on a very limited basis.
And it was very successful, but it's not the kind of thing that has a place to happen very easily in our current world. They brought Palestinian and Israeli children and some of their families and brought them to the beach. And they spent the day swimming together and playing in the water and enjoying the sun.
And that kind of created a different kind of bond that you're never going to get sitting negotiating at a table together unless you have that felt connection first. So many ethics in the Greek to European tradition tell you to distance yourself from your body or to take control of your emotions. I would say just the opposite, that the real basis for ethics is getting in touch with your body and feeling deeply, which makes you feel the interconnection with other people and makes you really enter their world.
And even ecologically, I've written a lot about this. I mean, you can have all the concerns you want about global warming and its effect on the economy and all its other dangerous effects. But if you don't feel the connection to the environment, if you don't feel the wonder of the trees that are blowing in the wind out my window, or you don't feel the wonder of the plants and the earth and all these other things or the creatures around us, again, you're trying to make up for some deficit that you'll never be able to make up. And we'll never really care for the earth in the way we should.
And then, okay, there's a couple other things though. You asked this question to a philosopher!
Another problem I see in our culture is our individualistic sense. And that sense that we are alive, we feel, we think, we imagine, that comes through, again, the body. Biologists have talked about the mirror neurons that give you a sense of the other person.
But I think on a more holistic sense, it's all of our embodied experiences of others that tie us to others and with others, that we're interwoven, we're inseparable in some way. I mean, in some way, we're separable, but it's kind of an overlap of our beings. We're social beings.
And that only, again, comes really through our bodies, through touch, through a glance that's not a kind of gaze that's objectifying. But, you know, they talk about a soft glance that, you know, is somehow itself a kind of caress. In general, and I was going to start out this way and now I'm coming all the way back to the beginning that I never did.
There's a difference between sensation and sensuality, which is so important to me. We tend to think of the body as having sensations, hot, cold, warm, bright, dark, fuzzy, tickly, whatever. And Merleau-Ponty starts out as his famous book, Phenomenology of Perception. On the fifth page, he says, there is no such thing as a sensation. He says, it's an intellectual creation, a recasting of our experience that on an immediate level, we have sensuality. And sensuality means that I don't just see a blotch of red.
I see red that's vibrant, that's fiery, that has memories of red, as he says, red dresses and red earth and the Russian Revolution. And it has depths of anger and it has passion. And that's just a piece of red, let alone something more interesting and complicated.
We have a sensual experience of the earth, which means that you can't really separate what we would call the sensation from the memory, from the emotion, from the imagination, that it all comes together in a gestalt, in a whole and that we experience as a whole. And we tend to break it up into different parts. And then we struggle how to connect them. How do I connect this feeling with that sensation or this thought? I would say that if you're really in touch with your body, there's some kind of integration, which is, again, our gift of being embodied. The more you get in touch with your body, the more integrated your feelings and thoughts and imaginings and memories are. And I think that's another thing that the Buddhists were very aware of, that this sense of disintegration, of falling apart, is really the product of being out of touch with your immediate embodied experience.
Which again, by the way, is a misunderstanding of Buddhism, because a lot of people think of Buddhism as you're detaching from the body in this meditation, but it's just the opposite. The simplest way to meditate is just to follow your breath all the way down and then all the way out into the world, into time and space, and then bring it all back into your body. And then to feel that ebb and flow and inseparability.
And they say, by the way, which I agree, that if you do that, the one feeling which wells up inside of you is compassion, a feeling of oneness, but not just oneness, of warmth for everything around you. Okay, but now I've got to get to one more topic that's become my focus of all my writing and my interest in the last couple of years, which is animals. And if you notice, all the definitions of human beings, starting with the rational animal and the historical animal and the playful animal and on and on and on, they all have animal, but we never pay attention to the second part of the definition of human beings.
And I think we need to pay much more attention that we are animals. I'm currently writing a book that is meant to take our tradition and totally turn it on its head, because our human excellences, whether they're love or reason or mathematics or whatever, they're all seen as coming from some metaphysical place outside of space and time. Or at least in the last couple of decades, we've started and there was this hierarchy, these higher powers were on top and we were in the middle and the animals were below us.
At least that's gotten better in the sense that many people in the last couple of decades see that we're on the same level as animals, that at least we might have different capacities, but those capacities have their own excellences and at least we're on the same level. However, I want to say that our true embodiment, our primary sense of the world is through our animal body, the body we share with animals. It's not what we have to transcend to get to our human excellences. It's the source of all our human excellences, even language. I'll take the one that has been often used as the counterexample to this and even language. I mean, we're discovering more and more every day how communicative all animals are.
I'm not going to say all animals and maybe I'm not because we don't know all animals, but at least the ones that are close enough to us that we can examine them and get a sense of their lives much better. Whether it's a prairie dog having 20 different signals, barks to other prairie dogs to let them know whether it's a hawk or a sparrow or a fox or whatever, or whether it's realizing that birds aren't little machines, have a recording, but they actually improvise their songs and change their songs and copy their songs. In all these different ways, we're really realizing how expressive animals are, but I would say that's true too for their feelings, for their imaginings.
In all these different ways, and you'd have to read the book I'm working on, I'm trying to show that all our human excellences really come from our animal bodies. There's a book that just came out called The Imaginary of Animals by Annabelle Dufourcq. She's one of the people who I feel most share the most common interest with.
She ends her book by saying that not only are our imaginings and our imaginations interwoven with animals, which is why they show up in our imaginations so much, but that if we don't get in touch with the imaginary as experienced through animals, we're really impoverishing our own imaginations. I think she's right about that too. I guess to sum up then, I think we need to start thinking about our bodies not only as gifts and not only as something we can become detached from and therefore really impoverished, but to think of it as something that's more or less, and that we can keep increasing our sense of embodiment if we find the practices that bring us to that.
There are so many practices. This is Adrian's speciality. There are so many practices now to be more embodied, but I certainly will say that if I didn't run every day, I'd be a very different person.
For me, as well as my 50 years of doing zazen, those are two of my ways of becoming more embodied, as well as spending hours in my garden and hiking and sailing and other things. But I guess I got my first job in philosophy by doing an impromptu lecture. One of the most famous horror films was Night of the Living Dead.
I said, well, that movie is scary, but what's really scary to me is the Day of the Living Dead. The Day of the Living Dead, I think, is a culture that's really out of touch with its body, just like Thornton Wilder said, where those people are not really here. I think it's a source of a lot of violence in our culture, too.
If you're not really here, you can do terrible things to other people, to the environment, to animals. It made a lot of sense to me when I found out that the SS troops, before they would like machine gun the Jews at Babi Yar, or before they do other horrible things, they had an unlimited budget for liquor. They could get so drunk and were so out of touch with their bodies that they didn't really know what they were doing.
I think that's kind of a paradigm for the Day of the Living Dead, that so much of the violence that occurs is people who are not in their bodies, feeling their interconnectedness, feeling the pain of the other person. One more story. I once was at an Esalen conference on the body, and there was a woman there who'd interviewed every single serial killer, which is a horrifying task to do, but she had the courage to do it.
She said the only thing that she really came away as being true of every serial killer was their sense of not being present, their sense of not being in their bodies, their sense of not being here. I think these are lessons for our culture. We could have a much more loving, much more ecologically sound, much more ethical, and a population that didn't struggle with depression and being hassled 24 hours a day, that would feel more alive, that would be here in a different way if we really embraced our embodiment.
That's what the body means to me.
Adrian
All of that resonates with me so strongly, and this real sense of how absolutely vital it is that we become more aware of our embodiment. It's not just about the environment. It's not just about ethics. It's about coming into our wholeness as human beings. It's just so fundamental.
Glen
Yes. Heidegger says we're the beings that dwell on the earth, but we don't dwell on the earth unless we really get in touch with our bodies. Then we can become, then we can come home to the earth.
But I would say right now that we're in danger of being homeless insofar as we are a disembodied culture. Homelessness isn't just people who don't have a literal dwelling. It's all of us who don't feel in touch with our bodies and interconnected and enmeshed in the rest of the bodies.
Yes, which means we'll come home to the earth and come home to each other and to our animal and other natural friends.
Adrian
Wow!That was very exciting.
Glen
I'm so happy you invited me to do this. This is such a pleasure.
Adrian
It's been such a rich experience talking to different people about this question and such a variety of different perspectives and yet common themes coming across. I think you've summed up that beautifully in the sense of we need to come home to our bodies. Yeah.
Wonderful. Thank you very much, Glen.
Glen
Thank you very much, Adrian.
Be well. Be embodied.
Adrian
I will.
Glen
Thank you. Bye-bye.
