The tyranny of physicality
When days are hard, when Linus is difficult or I feel overwhelmed by the drudgery of it all, I find the greatest comfort in consideration of death. Not just death, but execution, by hand-gun usually, but sometimes by blade or somesuch. There's something so soothing about the idea of the blood seeping out as consciousness leaves.
I think it's a return for me to a time when I mistrusted my body. I've never been terribly comfortable with my body, but I had a few years during which it didn't seem to hold me back that much. Now that my body is such a dominant feature of what my life is, I long for my body to disappear, to watch my physical self unhinge from my actual self.
I was thinking about this during last Sunday's Mad Men. Peggy walks in the bathroom and runs into the maiden (defined by her youthful body) and the mother (defined by her uterus). It struck me that Peggy is the crone. I remember being very young, in my early teens maybe, and telling my father than I couldn't wait to be old. But that's not it, is it? Being a crone is not about old age, it is about outliving the tyranny of the feminine body.
Incidentally, Aquarians are seen as the crone of the Zodiac. The year begins with Aries, the infant, obsessed with its own navel, and ends with the transformation of death, Pisces, the creature of water. Just before the transformation of death is the crone, the Aquarius, wisdom of age when physicality has become beside the point but the body has not yet unhinged. Aquarians are said to be a strange mixture of the child-like and the wise, the two periods of asexuality.
I meditate on Prometheus. It's one thing to roll a rock up a hill, but another to wait for death that never comes.
I think it's a return for me to a time when I mistrusted my body. I've never been terribly comfortable with my body, but I had a few years during which it didn't seem to hold me back that much. Now that my body is such a dominant feature of what my life is, I long for my body to disappear, to watch my physical self unhinge from my actual self.
I was thinking about this during last Sunday's Mad Men. Peggy walks in the bathroom and runs into the maiden (defined by her youthful body) and the mother (defined by her uterus). It struck me that Peggy is the crone. I remember being very young, in my early teens maybe, and telling my father than I couldn't wait to be old. But that's not it, is it? Being a crone is not about old age, it is about outliving the tyranny of the feminine body.
Incidentally, Aquarians are seen as the crone of the Zodiac. The year begins with Aries, the infant, obsessed with its own navel, and ends with the transformation of death, Pisces, the creature of water. Just before the transformation of death is the crone, the Aquarius, wisdom of age when physicality has become beside the point but the body has not yet unhinged. Aquarians are said to be a strange mixture of the child-like and the wise, the two periods of asexuality.
I meditate on Prometheus. It's one thing to roll a rock up a hill, but another to wait for death that never comes.