The Mind-Body Problem

With fearless, free ranging curiosity and nimble wits honed by years of karate practice Peggy Shinner explores what philosophers call the “mind-body problem”—that relationship, often vexed or adversarial between free-ranging consciousness, which is unbounded by space or time, and our earth-bound, time-sensitive bodies. To feel mortal is to acknowledge that we will die. Generally, Americans prefer to believe death is optional, that it can be postponed indefinitely through medical advances and healthy outdoor exercise until the cure is found, but occasionally reality breaks through and blithe denial gives way to heartfelt Kevorkian jokes. Often it’s the death of parents that leaves us feeling exposed and vulnerable, but sometimes it’s the coming of age. Turning 60, for instance. Ahead is darkness and predictable loss. Less dread and more curiosity, is Shinner’s recommendation. Keep an eye out for absurdity, especially when shopping for a cemetery plot with your lover. Ann’s choice is Graceland, the historic cemetery in their neighborhood. No finer requiem “outside the realm of music,” said Frank Lloyd Wright of the Getty Mausoleum, which is located in Graceland and was designed by Louis Sullivan, also buried in Graceland along with George Pullman and Marshal Field and some ordinary citizens with small, unremarkable gravestones. Shinner is less enthusiastic. “It turns out I’m sectarian in my burial leanings, although not, I might add, in my choice of aboveground premises or partner,” she writes. Graceland reminds her of the upscale restricted neighborhood her family would drive through to admire the Christmas decorations. No place she’d feel at home. Her parents along 46,000 other Jews (including Jack Ruby and two registered sex offenders) are buried in suburban Westlawn. “If I were to be buried there, I would be consigned to a long decline in an uninspired netherland.” She’s drawn to Chicago’s older Jewish cemetery because it reminds her of the shtetl, a place she’s never been and is quick, she admits, to romanticize. Together in life, she and Anne will be separated by death, in an eternity neither believes in. One of the many incidental pleasures of this collection is Shinner’s understated celebration of a domestic partnership of long duration. To be one’s authentic self in public and also engage with the wider world is perhaps the most fundamental of civil rights.

The place where one’s personal history joins the stream of world history is Shinner’s chosen terrain, whether her ostensible subject is being fitted for a new brassiere at the place where she’d been fitted for her first (“You cannot imagine wearing a pink bra in your dojo locker room where, in front of your training partners, it could undermine your already shaky self-image as an athlete;”) the ethics of elective surgery (“I want to be taken for who I am, but like…all the others who ‘suffered from a Jewish nose’, I don’t want to suffer too much for it;”) the politics of posture, the eroticism of kleptomania, or the flat feet she inherited from her father—low class feet, according to Shinner’s mother, whose arches were high. Family Feet, the first essay of the collection, introduces us to Shinner’s preoccupations: the unexpected couplings of body and history; Jewish identity and assimilation; and her parents, both deceased—the father she misses and the mother who remains a mystery. Viewed through Anne’s eyes, the Shinner’s feet are downright endearing. Who knew that flat feet were considered Jewish? Noses, sure but feet? “Since the Middle Ages, the Jewish foot has been characterized as ugly, misshapen, flat, even cloven, like that of the he-goat and his close relative, the devil,” she writes. “…I never understood my body as Jewish, a racial construction,…a parody, and the view is unsettling.” The granddaughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, born into Post-War America, she had little personal experience of Anti-Semitism but some of the stereotypes had...