Youth cannot imagine the anguish of the body, the alienation one feels inside one's own skin as the fragile vessel of mortality begins to crack around you. One experiences agility and grace as an extension of the limber intelligence of the mind. The disruption in this affinity, this divorce between the body and the brain, is a fundamental realignment of identity. The very nature of one's being decomposes in one's understanding. Corpses keep the garden fertile.
How will this reconstitute?
Perhaps it is a kind of gift: as the body struggles, weakens, begins to wither, a space is created in one's idea of self that--for the first time--really makes room for the idea of a soul. Once molten gold and sinew, the muscles begin to seem the sagging fruit of vanity. The body is but a husk, a container; and a container by definition must contain something, even if its only possibility.
"But I am in here..."
"By 'I' do you mean your brain, that twitching organ?"
I shake my head. A bit uncomfortably I have to admit that it is not my brain, my mind, or my intelligence that persists self-consciously in this paper wrapper. "But is it a soul? Let us call it the lifeforce or let us call it the is."
(the is of oz is the is that was when what was will be what is)
