I was watching “The Twilight Zone” marathon on the Sci Fi channel this evening with my daughter. An episode came on that tugged at my memory and heart: “I Sing the Body Electric.”
I wasn’t much concerned with the episode, which is not giving as much credit to Ray Bradbury’s writings as I would otherwise like. Rather, it was the Walt Whitman poem I hadn’t thought about in years, not since my undergraduate years as an English major at UNCW:
(from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman)
I SING the Body electric;
The armies of those I love engirth me, and I engirth them;
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the Soul.
Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves;
And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?
And if the body does not do as much as the Soul?
And if the body were not the Soul, what is the Soul?
Whitman had on the nose in 1855 what we as a scientific body and society are only beginning to embrace now: that the body is not an object to be defiled. It is, in fact, an energetic expression of our soul’s mission here — and if we defile our body, we defile our souls.
Whitman was not talking about baseless morality — rather, a denial of the wonders of the natural world starting with appreciation of the one and only apparatus that will carry us through our life experience this time around.
When we look in a mirror and say to ourselves, “ugh, I’m so flabby…I’m so old…I’m so plain-looking,” that is the very definition of defiling. When we stuff ourselves with pseudo-food and ply our symptoms of illness with artificial chemical compounds, we are defiling ourselves. When we refuse to correct the subluxations we collect in our spines and bodies with senseless excuses like, “‘Chiropractic doesn’t work.” or, ” My doctor told me chiropractic wasn’t a real science, that it wouldn’t help me,” or, “I don’t like to go to anyone for help,” we are defiling ourselves.
I sing the body electric! I’ve made it my life’s mission to sing the body electric! I am called to arms by my brothers and sisters to never leave them alone until I help them undefile themselves through the art, science and intelligence of chiropractic!
If any thing is sacred, the human body is sacred,
And the glory and sweet of a man, is the token of manhood untainted;
And in man or woman, a clean, strong, firm-fibred body, is beautiful as the most beautiful face.
Have you seen the fool that corrupted his own live body? or the fool that corrupted her own live body?
For they do not conceal themselves, and cannot conceal themselves.
O my Body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and women, nor the likes of the parts of you;
I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of the Soul, (and that they are the Soul…)
It is my firm belief that the body is the temple in which the soul comes to worship life. I believe we are in the midst of an exxagerated corruption cycle, in which we are pushing the very limits of nature with our contempt of ourselves.
As a planetary body, we have nothing but contempt for our environment. We exhaust the earth in our quest for her resources, we terrorize the countryside with war machines of our own making, we throw sophisticated waste into the belly and bloodstream of our mother, stuffing her with chemicals she never intended to create and has no means of digesting…we treat the earth the way we treat ourselves!
I am a chiropactor on a mission, and it is a very personal mission. I want this planet’s hospitable habitat to exist for my child and her children. I order to make that happen, I have to do everything in my power to help us embrace the body of the earth the way we embrace our own bodies.
The way I see it, we don’t do the latter any better than we do the former.
Enough! We must all sing the body electric! We must all embrace the sacred truth of our lives and our connection with the earth and all our creature brethren. We must stop the psychotic hatred and contempt of ourselves, of our species, of other species, of our planet, of our very existence!
And it starts hand by hand. One pair of hands on another’s body, to help them clear themselves of the interference they have collected in their lives, to clear themselves of the pain of living so they can appreciate the ecstatic pleasure of life!
I have started this blog as a cry of pain and a cry of love. I will be sharing with you the symptoms of our dis-ease in our world, and the underlying causes of our dis-ease. I will be sharing the Truth of healing, and the beauty of the reconnection with the divine through connection with each other and our world.
Enjoy! For the love of the gods, for your children, and for yourselves, enjoy!
The curious sympathy one feels, when feeling with the hand the naked meat of the body,
The circling rivers, the breath, and breathing it in and out,
The beauty of the waist, and thence of the hips, and thence downward toward the knees,
The thin red jellies within you, or within me—the bones, and the marrow in the bones,
The exquisite realization of health;
O I say, these are not the parts and poems of the Body only, but of the Soul,
O I say now these are the Soul!
Thank you for inviting Walt Whitman into our modern world so beautifully.
Maybe I am reading what I want into what you said. I am chewing over how moving beyond dualism– of body-mind and of self-others– is central to understanding the macro levels of social change.
Julie Gold’s song “From a Distance” (sung by Nancy Griffith and Bette Midler, etc.) talks about how, from far away, my enemy is my friend. Maybe that dualism does not truly exist, either.
I know this sounds fairly philosophical or abstract. But to me there is urgency and electricity about leaving a survivable world for your daughter, my sons. And an immediate embarrassment that forces of the “left”– towards life not death/destruction– are so ineffective and we will be left with more of the same, despite the opening of Obama’s election.
A theory of who we are? a theory of social change? a theory of humans within Gaia? A theory of who/what destroys human health (who defiles our bodies)? and a theory of practical healing and action?
Excuse my wanderings; thank you for your inspiration.
I reread your post:
The question for Jan. 20th you answer with fervor– “do you have a mission on this earth?”
Hinted– abuse by others we re-create in self-abuse. Question– how to break cycle? Answer for you– hands on chiro. Other answers are useful I think.
Headlined- abuse of earth and abuse of self cannot be. No moral relativism on that! These go together.
Your cry of love and pain; my image is St. Valentine as a saint of torture and love, they go together in divers ways. But forthrightly, love must be called forward. I see it as love vs. power but that is too simplistic also.
Whitman–“The armies of those I love engirth me,” What more comfort than that– I remember a workshop entitled “Bathing in the joy of ???” that left a similar safety and caring charge.
Again, welcome to this day and thank you.