Anatomy

"If you are not the body why should I enrich scenes before your eyes? why should I sweep away thorns from the path where you walk? why should I always make things, which you touch, tender? why should I block raucous sounds coming to assail your ears?"

"Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God? You are not your own"

"Every morning I wake up with the news of bloodshed. I feel my body, desperate to know whether I’m still alive."

"The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband. And in like manner the husband also hath not power of his own body, but the wife."

"We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one."

"My body glistens on the flesh of the great gods."

"Yea, much more those that seem to be the more feeble members of the body, are more necessary. And such as we think to be the less honourable members of the body, about these we put more abundant honour; and those that are our uncomely parts, have more abundant comeliness. But our comely parts have no need [...]"

"Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind."

"If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know. Is there any other way?"

"At twelve I looked like a girl of seventeen. My body was developed and shapely. I still wore the blue dress and the blouse the orphanage provided. They made me look like an overgrown lummox."

"Sex is full of lies. The body tries to tell the truth. But, it's usually too battered with rules to be heard, and bound with pretenses so it can hardly move. We cripple ourselves with lies."

"The body is meant to be seen, not all covered up."

"Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul."

"There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy."

"A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercises, I advise the gun. While this gives moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be your constant companion of your walks."

"A person must take care to exercise moderate discipline over the body and subject it to the Spirit by means of fasting, vigils, and labor. The goal is to have the body obey and conform—and not hinder—the inner person and faith. Unless it is held in check, we know it is the nature of the body to undermine faith and the inner person."

"If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour?"

"Just as a man would not cherish living in a body other than his own, so do nations not like to live under other nations, however noble and great the latter may be."

"Life without liberty is like a body without spirit."

"The main purpose of life is to live rightly, think rightly, act rightly. The soul must languish when we give all our thought to the body."

"It is a great thing to take a human body. Whoever comes to the earth must do work."

"A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history."

"Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees."

"“.... Don’t you dare take one look at my body and try to re-write my story. This body is strong, capable, and worthy. This fat body has endured abuse, survived trauma, healed itself, and continues to carry me through my journey,...Fat people can’t run? Oh honey, running is the least interesting ability this fat body has! But for the record I can run! I can dance, love, explore, create, fight. I can do absolutely whatever I want to! Don’t you dare put me in a box. Or her. Or him. Or any of us!""

"Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day."

"A person will sometimes devote all his life to the development of one part of his body - the wishbone."

"A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body."

"It takes more than just a good looking body. You've got to have the heart and soul to go with it."

"Spiritual relationship is far more precious than physical. Physical relationship divorced from spiritual is body without soul."

"Emotions are shown primarily in the face, not in the body. The body instead shows how people are coping with emotion. There is no specific body movement pattern that always signals anger or fear, but there are facial patterns specific to each emotion. If someone is angry, his body may show how he is coping with the anger. He may be tense and constrained (tight muscular tension in arms and legs, stiff posture). He may be withdrawing (a particular retreated position). There may be verbal attack (certain types of hand movements with his words), or the likelihood of physical attack (posture, orientation, hand movements). However, any of these movements can occur just as well when a person is afraid as when he is angry. Body movement reveals, of course, not just how someone copes with emotion, but also what a person’s attitudes, interpersonal orientations, etc. might be."

"The role of American feminism in developing a “political” understanding of body practice is rarely acknowledged. In describing the historical emergence of such an understanding, Don Hanlon Johnson leaps straight from Marx to Foucault, effacing the intellectual role played by the social movements of the sixties (both black power and women’s liberation) in awakening consciousness of the body as “an instrument of power”: Another major deconstruction [of the old notion of “the body”] is in the area of sociopolitical thought. Although Karl Marx initiated this movement in the middle of the 19th century, it did not gain momentum until the last 20 years due to the work of the late Michel Foucault. Marx argued that a person’s economic class affected his or her experience and definition of “the body.” . . . Foucault carried on these seminal arguments in his analysis of the body as the focal point for struggles over the shape of power. Population size, gender formation, the control of children and of those thought to be deviant from the society’s ethics are major concerns of political organization-and all concentrate on the definition and shaping of the body. Moreover, the cultivation of the body is essential to the establishment of one’s social role. Not a few feminists, too, appear to accept this view of things. While honoring French feminists Irigaray, Wittin, Cixious, and Kristeva for their work on the body “as the site of the production of new modes of subjectivity” and Beauvoir for the “understanding of the body as a situation,” Linda Zirelli credits Foucault with having “showed us how the body has been historically disciplined”; to Anglo-American feminism is simply attributed the “essentialist” view of the body as an “archaic natural."

"Possession, outward success, publicity, luxury– to me these have always been contemptible.I believe that a simple and unassuming manner of life is best for everyone, best both for the body and the mind."

"In the latter two essays dualism is explore not only via gendered representations but as a more general contemporary construction of self that shapes male experience as well as female. Dualism, of course, was not invented in the twentieth century. But there are distinctive ways in which it is “embodied” in contemporary culture, giving the lie to the social mythology that ours is a body-loving, derepressive era. We may be obsessed” with our bodies, but we are hardly accepting of them. In “Anorexia Nervosa” I consider the way in which anoretic’s sense of embodiment, as well as other obsessive body practices of contemporary culture. My aim, however, is not to portray these obsessions as bizarre or anomalous, but, rather, as the logical (if extreme) manifestations of anxieties and fantasies fostered by our culture. I develop this theme further in “Reading the Slender Body,” where I decode the meanings of “fat” and “thin” in our culture to expose the moral significances attached to them, revealing the slender, fit body as a symbol of “virile” mastery over bodily desires that are continually experienced as threatening to overtake the self. This construction of self is then located within consumer culture and its contradictory requirement that we embody both the spiritual discipline of the work ethic and the capacity for continual, mindless consumption of goods."

"In the morning a man walks with his whole body; in the evening, only with his legs, the trunk is carried along almost motionless."

"You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind."

"Feminists first began to develop critique of the “politics of the body,” however, not in terms of the body as represented (in medical, religious, and philosophical discourse, artworks, and other cultural “texts”), but in terms of the material body as a site of political struggle. When I use the term material”, I do not mean it in the Aristotelian sense of “brute” matter, nor do I mean it in the sense of “natural” or “unmediated” (for our bodies are necessarily cultural forms; whatever roles anatomy and biology play, they always interact with culture._ I mean what Marx and, later, Foucault had in mind in focusing on the “direct grip” (as opposed to representational influence) that culture has on our bodies, through the practices and bodily habits of everyday life. Through routine, habitual activity our bodies learn what it “inner” and what is “outer,” which gestures are forbidden and which required, how violable or inviolable are the boundaries of our bodies, how much space around the body may be claimed, and so on. These are often far more powerful lessons than those we learn consciously, through explicit instruction concerning the appropriate behavior for our gender, race, and social class."

"Plato, arguably (and as another example of the historical range of Western images of the body), had a mixed and complicated attitude toward the sexual aspect of bodily life. In the Phaedo passion distracts the philosopher from the pursuit of knowledge, but in the “Symposium” it motivates that pursuit: love of the body is the essential first step on the spiritual ladder that culminates in recognition of the eternal form of beauty. For Christian thought, on the other hand, the sexual body becomes much more unequivocally the gross, instinctual “bear” imagined by Schwartz, the animal, appetitive side of our nature. But even within the “same” dominating metaphor of the body as animal, “animality” can mean very different things. For Augustine, the animal side of human nature-symbolized for him by the rebelliously tumescent penis, insisting on its “law of lust” against the attempts of the spiritual will to gain control-inclines us toward sin and needs to be tamed. For the mechanistic science and philosophy of the seventeenth century, on the other hand, the body as animal is still a site of instinct but not primarily a site of “sin”. Rather, the instinctual nature of the body means that it is a purely mechanical, biologically programmed system that can be fully quantified and (in theory) controlled."

"At different historical moments, out of the pressure of cultural, social, and material change new images and associations emerge. In the sixteenth century the epistemological body begins to be imagined not only as deceiving the philosopher through the untrustworthy senses (a Platonic theme) but also as the site of our “locatedness” in space and time, and thus an impediment to objectivity. Because we are embodied, our thought is perspectival; the only way for the mind to comprehend things as “they really are” is by attainment of a disembodied view from nowhere. In our own time (as another example of the emergence of new meanings), the “heaviness” of the bear has assumed a concrete meaning which it probably did not have for Shwartz, who uses it as a metaphor for the burdensome drag the body exerts on “the self”; my students, interpreting the poem, understood it as describing the sufferings of an overweight man. For Schwartz, the hunger for good is just one of the body’s appetites; for my female students, it is “the” most insistent craving and the preeminent source of their anger and frustration with the body, indeed, of their “terror” of it."

"The body as animal, as appetite, as deceiver, as prison of the soul and confounder of its projects: these are common images within western philosophy. This is not to say that a negative construction of the body has ruled without historical challenge, or that it has taken only one form, but the imaginal shape of the body has been historically variable. For example, although Schwartz employs Platonic imagery in evoking the distortions of the body, his complaint about the body is quite different from Plato’s. Plato imagines the body as an “epistemological” deceiver, its unreliable senses and volatile passions continually tricking us into mistaking the transient and illusory for the permanent and the real. For Schwartz, the body and its passions are obstacles to expression of the “inner” life; his characteristically modern frustration over the isolation of the self and longing for “authenticity would seem very foreign to Plato."

"Not all historical conceptions view the body as equally “inescapable.” The Greeks viewed soul and body as inseparable except through death. Descartes, however, believed that with the right philosophical method we can transcend the epistemological limitations of the body. And contemporary culture, technologically armed, seems bent on defying aging, our various biological “clocks,” and even death itself. But what remains the constant element throughout historical variation is the “construction” of body as something apart from the true self (whether conceived as soul, mind, spirit, will, creativity, freedom …) and as undermining the best efforts of that self. That which is not-body is the highest, the best, the noblest, the closest to God; that which is body is the albatross, the heavy drag on self-realization."

"I drink to separate my body from my soul.”"

"QI comes into existence in ZHONG JIAO and concentrates in the region of lungs. QI moves on the surface of the entire body and inside of it, day and night without stopping for an instant. QI is also motive power of blood circulation. XUE, blood, is the quintessence of water and cereals diluted in the spleen and the stomach. Blood concentrates in the heart and from there is supplied to the kidneys and the lung from a signal sent by the liver. Blood circulates throughout the whole body, it includes red and white components. The eyes, having received blood, can see. The ears, having received blood, can hear. The hands, having received blood, can take. The feet, having received blood, can walk. It means one should accumulate QI and feed the body with blood XUE."

"To practise Gong Fu means to train QI. During training time QI sets into motion XUE and it circulates throughout the entire body. In such a way, step by step, you become strong and firm. You will be protected against epidemics of dangerous diseases, you will not be afraid of cold and heat, you will get out of any mess with confidence and overcome any difficulties. But for it you must strain every effort. QI should be trained to such a level that it could concentrate in any part of your body by an order or your will - from axillary ribs to finger tips. At the same time breathing volume (the volume of the chest) increases, appetite becomes better. From day to day your health, mind and will are improved. A well-trained man has a good health and strong will, therefore he can control his destiny."

"What is the relation of gender to this dualism? As feminists have shown, the scheme is frequently gendered, with woman cast in the role of the body, “weighed down,” in Beauvoir’s words, “by everything peculiar to it.” It contrast, man casts himself as the “inevitable, like a pure idea, like the One, the Al, the Absolute Spirit.”(3) According to Dinnerstein, as a consequence of our infantile experience of woman as caretaker of our bodies, “the mucky, humbling limitations of the flesh” become the province of the female; on the other side stands “an innocent and dignified ‘he’ . . . to represent the part of the person that wants to stand clear of the flesh, to maintain perspective on it: ‘I’ness wholly free of the chaotic, carnal atmosphere of infancy, uncontaminated humanness, is reserved for man.” The cost of such projections to women is obvious. For if, whatever the specific historical content of the duality, “the body” is the negative term, and if woman “is” the body, then women “are” that negativity, whatever it may be: distraction from knowledge, seduction away from God, capitulation to sexual desire, violence or aggression, failure of will, even death."

"Begin to see yourself as a soul with a body rather than a body with a soul."

"Always keep your mind as bright and clear as the vast sky, the great ocean, and the highest peak, empty of all thoughts. Always keep your body filled with light and heat. Fill yourself with the power of wisdom and enlightenment."

"Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life - think of it, dream of it, live on that idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body, be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success. This is the way great spiritual giants are produced."

"The moment I have realized God sitting in the temple of every human body, the moment I stand in reverence before every human being and see God in him - that moment I am free from bondage, everything that binds vanishes, and I am free."

"The human body has two ends on it: one to create with and one to sit on. Sometimes people get their ends reversed. When this happens they need a kick in the seat of the pants."

"The gendered nature of mind/body dualism, and its wide ranging institutional cultural expression, is a recurring theme of many of the essays in this volume. In “Are Mothers Persons?” I explore how-despite an official rhetoric that insists on the embodied subjectivity of all persons-Western legal and medical practice concerning reproduction in fact divides the world into human subjects (fetus and father) and “mere” bodies (pregnant women). In “Hunger as Ideology” I consider how representations of men and women eating (for example, in contemporary advertisements) exhibit a dualistic pedagogy instructing women and men in very different attitudes toward the “heavy bear” and its hungers: women’s appetites require containment and control, whereas male indulgence is legitimated and encouraged. In this essay, in “Anorexia Nervosa,” and in “reading the Slender Body,” “the devouring woman” is seen to be as potent an image of dangerous female desire (particularly in contemporary culture) as the sexual temptress. I explore, as well, the social contexts that have encouraged the flourishing of this imagery."