Body memory

Grief is such a strange thing. This skin-wringing emotion that pulls you out - toe end to scalp - and literally empties you. Then you rest. Then some time later, after gathering in pools you can't see, it wrings you out again.

Grief makes me believe or understand or more importantly FEEL that time is not linear. Instead, it's a woven thing. Today, we went to see Walking the Line. Yep, we're in Rio without having to work too many hours, Luca is in school in the afternoons, so I am determined to see all of the Academy Award nominated films this year. Why not? We all need goals.

Anyhow, today we saw Walking the Line. I knew nothing about Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash before seeing this film (I know, I still might not know anything, but I imagine that I do). In high school I had the album "Live at Folsom Prison" and listened to it until it was worn transluscent but I didn't pay much attention to the life of the singer. The early part of the film deals primarily with J.C's relationship with his older brother, Jack. When he was 12 or 13, Jack died horribly and suddenly in a buzzsaw accident. His father was a drinker, had no emotional skills, Johnny felt guilty his whole life, bla bla bla, that part isn't that important. Right after Jack dies, there is a scene with the young Johnny in bed and crying, "Jack, please don't leave me alone." And that was it. Wham-o, right in the kisser.

Warp and weave and time twisted and I was missing my brother horribly. My brother, PJ, died when he was five and I was seven. We were both in a car accident - our whole family was in a car accident, but that's for another blog - and PJ and I were thrown into a river, I tried to pull him out but couldn't (I think he was already dead as his eyes were closed but will never be sure), he drowned.

I don't usually miss PJ. I most often miss my father - he died at the same accident. But this afternoon, I could FEEL PJ. My body knew him. My arms could feel the soft of his pyjamas when I was hugging him, I could smell his hair. It felt that real, something that happened 35 years ago felt that absurdly completely real. As real as Rocki holding my hand, as the sharp edges of the balled up popcorn bag in my other hand. And the grief that came along with the memory - is it as strong as grief so many years ago? I don't know, these things don't compare - but I cried in that bone way.

I think this is some of my current obsession with trying to understand the biochemical piece of emotion. I believe in bodymemory. When neuroscience now says that you don't "think" with your brain, you think with a cognitive system that includes your brain, your lymph system, your glands and that these are connected to every cell in your body. That your cells can and do have memory and your cognition system's role is to turn that memory (color, sound, smell, touch, pacing) into a narrative that you then "understand": well, it makes me breathe easier. Rocki keeps asking me why I put so much stock in science, when all along I "knew" this was true in that I perceived it to be so. Suddenly, though, "science" puts the great big check mark on what I have already felt and I breathe comfortably. It's like, the books I am reading give me a map and a language, one where I can say, "oh, yes, I've visited here before, Didn't know the history or why the buildings were built the way they were, but I've certainly seen it." It fleshes things out - pun intended.

I am reading books on neurochemistry and the cognition system, the history of storytelling and the history of myth, a wee bit of highly pedestrian quantum physics, rereading Hannah Arendt's work on totalitarianism, and somewhere in all of this, there is something I am supposed to understand. Karen Armstrong - one of my favorite authors, she's a religious historian - was once asked after all of her work on the three primary monotheistic belief systems, which one does she feel the most connected to. She neatly sidestepped the question by replying that she has become more herself - spiritually, intellectually, emotionally - through gifts she has received from all. Then she said that the gift she gained from Judaism was to have a deeper understanding of what it means to be a "People of the Book." "When I am lost," she said, "I start to read and I read and I read and I read and in the middle of all of that reading, I make lots of time for silence. Sometimes, in the midst of all of this, there is a light that comes, an understanding that goes far deeper than understanding, than anything of the intellect, and at that moment, I feel God."

I'm just trying to understand something - and missing my brother today - well, it's all in the same territory.