-
Introduction. Into Between—On Composition in Mediation
- Utah State University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
i N T r O d u C T i O N Into Between—On Composition in Mediation anne Frances Wysocki These are physical things, he had come to understand, memories. All that we feel, pain and hatred and love and happiness, they aren’t some existential experiment of the mind, but they played themselves out in the body mainly, and the thoughts came after, a justification of what the body already knew. —Patrick Thomas Casey, Our Burden’s Light . . .There can be no history of the body that is not at the same time a study of the various media that constitute embodiment as such. —Bernadette Wegenstein, Getting Under the Skin The following writing, put down a few days after my father died, reminds me of hearing his last breath. He was in the family room, where we’d put his hospital bed; from his bed he could see out into the green and azalea backyard where, in earlier years, he’d moved and worked so often. This writing also tells me about ways I have learned to feel: Life leaving a body still looks like a leaving, like breath or movement or animation removing itself. The body does seem discarded, an emptied out shell or container or glove. No wonder we once said, “I have a body” instead of “I am a body.” Seeing a body go from alive to not, how can we then believe that bodies are other than things that hold us—some real us? How can we not believe that bodies are what keep us from being what we are meant to be? Seeing a quiet death of another goes a long way toward explaining Plato’s belief that our life’s task is to master the body so that we can attend to the internal . We are to make our bodies tractable rather than demanding; we are to focus on what within that body but separable from it seems most truly human. In the days following my father’s death, I would write at the dining room table, surrounded by varying numbers of family. I was trying to keep up with an online class and other work, and I was also writing to reflect and to plan, given my new familial responsibilities. In memory those evenings are silent and still, at least from my perspective, focused as I was on my writing while some jumble of my mother, my siblings, and my nieces and nephews chatted or made dinner. 2 composing (media) = composing (embodiment) In the days following my father’s death, I also made many phone calls. Months later, I can recite from memory the list of questions that the United States Social Security Administration asks, questions that can require almost twenty minutes of phone keypad letter typing and that can still end in frustration when the machine at the other end cannot translate 7-2-4-9-3-3-2 into my father’s mother’s maiden name. I can also still feel—my body remembers —my back slump when I had to redial and go through the process again. I still feel the delight of getting things set up right, finally, for my mother. n The protests in Madison, Wisconsin during February and March 2011 were primarily intended to insert views like those below into current political discussions. People were there to be to be seen together—and by being so unitedly visible, they were there to have effects on a legislature that otherwise seemed to feel no need to pay attention because (evidence suggested) those with much more money and so access were shaping the law. [54.159.116.24] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:20 GMT) Introduction 3 n n n Two related sets of assumptions about bodies and media ground this collection ’s essays. The first has to do with the first paragraphs above, about the feelings of embodiment; the second explores tensions between those feelings and the knowledge that we are also experienced from outside, observed and shaped as part of a culture and its institutions. I develop these two sets of assumptions in this introduction to explain how this collection came together and the ordering of chapters in its two parts and also to explain why we think considering composition through media and embodiment matters now in writing classes. aSSumPTiON SET 1: m Ed i a = Em bO d i m ENT As philosopher Merleau-Ponty argued, your body is your primary medium —taking...