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Conclusion: The Body Mutinies In a collection of poems from her book Decreation, the Canadian Catholic poet and essayist Anne Carson reflects on time spent with her elderly mother, who suffers from both an aging body and mind. In the course of fourteen pieces that constitute the opening pages of Carson’s complex text, the poet’s mother appears in various guises: from a woman who worries about running up the bill on long-distance phone calls to one who no longer remembers to pick up the phone at all; from a bedridden lady ‘‘gripping a glow-in-the-dark rosary’’ to a frail body looking for all the world like ‘‘bent twigs.’’1 The ‘‘speaker’’ in these poems—one assumes it is Carson herself—is unabashed about her feelings for the person who binds these different figures together. Her mother is, quite simply, the ‘‘love of my life.’’2 Yet we cannot help seeing how each manifestation of Carson’s mother differs from the next, a phenomenon that the poet underscores by crafting links across her texts that highlight both the similarities and differences in this otherwise consistent figure.3 Ultimately, what binds these images of the poet’s mother together is the very aspect of her life that separates them in the first place: the body. When the shared love between mother and daughter—‘‘that halfmad firebrand’’—is loosed from its tether and left to ‘‘race once around the room / whipping everything,’’ what brings it to rest are the bodies that also share a common space, each of them ‘‘living moving mourning lamenting and howling incessantly .’’4 When the jumbled thoughts of the aging mind echo the ‘‘sound of oars drawing away from shore,’’ it is, the poet admonishes her mother, ‘‘time to fly back to where they keep your skin,’’ to the flesh that provides some harbor for the memories and thoughts that otherwise drift aimlessly.5 In this cycle of poems, as in the entire text of Decreation, Carson repeatedly explores uneven dualities or pairings of concepts and then views them from the unexpected perspective of the term less used. Thus, in this opening series (a ‘‘start’’ ironically called ‘‘Stops’’) Carson initiates a discussion of the 166 Conclusion: The Body Mutinies 167 dualism between her mother’s mind and body from the perspective of the woman’s flesh. In a later series entitled ‘‘Gnosticism,’’ she will explore the ancient dualistic model of the tangible and intangible from the side of material existence, challenging a long history of privileging the spirit. These perspectives will open for Carson a via negativa wherein the poet favors the things of this world both for their substance and for the traces they leave behind: ‘‘a dust / an indentation, stain / of some guest / centuries ago.’’6 Even the title of her collection, Decreation, invites readers to take more seriously the interplay between the promising beginning of a spiritual Genesis and the final threat posed by the vivid imagery of Revelation. The body plural—youthful and weary, tangible and intangible and, as Mary Gordon’s Pearl might say, ordered and chockablock—both evolves and comes undone. The generation of Catholic writers to which Carson belongs discovers, even celebrates, God in the midst of this plurality. But because these writers encourage readers to think about the human body as a site, in fact the site, where God and human beings interact, the divine presence carries the traces of its medium: it is known through the tensions, conflicts, and complexities that define physical existence. Although they represent the body in different ways, these writers all insist upon its inherent value and authority; in so doing they dramatize a crucial reality for Catholic theology: namely, that the body will not yield readily to intellectual categories or paradigms that do not acknowledge its foundational role. For this reason, these writers use ideas and terminology from the rich tradition of Catholic sacramentality, especially as it was articulated in the documents of the Second Vatican Council, to describe their insights. In this way, each of these authors challenges the Church to take its own tradition very seriously. All would agree with Elizabeth Johnson, for example , when she refers to Gaudium et Spes and argues that Vatican II considered as ‘‘basic doctrine’’ the call for ‘‘equal dignity of both women and men created in the image of God, redeemed by Christ, and graced by the Spirit.’’7 That doctrine and the ‘‘social obligations’’ it advanced constitute nothing...

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