Thoughts 1: Why I Study Biblical Bodies?
It’s the summer of 2024. I have been writing in Aptos, El Cerrito, Santa Cruz, Orland, Chico, and Oakland, California while my family of four souls visits friends and places we have lived and love.
My summer is thick with memories, times, forms of life, and fertilities of growth. The summer began with my pushing myself over a long-felt hump into a specific domain of my past. I began writing about my encounters with/in evangelicalism for my Psalm 23 series. Deeper into the summer now, I managed to write out a few important things about my academic and my personal motivations for studying bodies and health discourses.
Since time is cyclical, I will keep its tracks: I “officially” decided to focus my academic work on bodies and health discourses in the summer of 2012 — when I first left academia and moved to Oakland, California. (I had already decided to focus my personal mental health work on body practices, probably around 2006 while living in Atlanta, Georgia).
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For a while now, in my academic life, I have been thinking about how to understand the body and health discourses in ancient Hebrew scriptures. I often look for the quickest and punchiest way to explain this interest, but it’s a lot richer, entwined, and multi-dimensional than an elevator pitch.
I might say, “The Hebrew words for soul, heart, and spirit look really different when you’re not steeped in bio-medical models of post-Enlightenment bodies — For example, the “soul” is not the source of human consciousness or a chimera of the eternal self, but comes much closer to what we mean by social bodily experiences of wellness.”
To my frequent Christian or evangelical conversation partners — I might say, “You know, the Hebrew Bible never mentions heaven as a place that souls go after they die. I want to understand the pre-Christian meaning of words like soul, which has much more to do with bodies in this world, not your individual ghost in the next.”
I have sometimes attached these interests to bigger, interdisciplinary questions — like the history of the self. Why did European-American cultures develop their concept of an individual self? And more to my point, how did we inherit such isolating, interior concepts of ourselves? Long inspired by Michel Foucault’s writings on clinics, bodies, the soul — I am especially interested in the histories and cultural genealogies of Psychology — How did there come to be an entire branch of knowledge about individual “mental” health? If I may, I would like to quote myself:
The soul has been central to Western theorizing about the self. Genealogies usually begin with Greek philosophy and the Christian immaterial soul, proceed through the Enlightenment’s mentalist transformations of the self, and arrive in the modern world with its intense interest in cognition on the one hand, and social, fragmented, or interpersonal selves on the other.[4] The heritage of the soul in the Hebrew Bible is not typically a part of this story.[5] (Lilly, “The Corporeality of the Self,” 2021).
[4] Martin and Baressi, The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self. M. James C. Crabbe, From Soul to Self. Stewart Goetz et. al. A Brief History of the Soul. George Makari, Soul Machine.
[5] Martin and Baressi is a good example of a history of the soul that includes the Hebrew Bible, but never explores the term nefeš, an anemic examination that merely discusses the “image of God” (Gen. 1:29) and the heritage of Israelite monotheism. Martin and Baressi, The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self, 29–54.
My big contention in the academic field of Hebrew Bible is that a relatively new area of study, first millennium Babylonian medicine, can shed sometimes drastically new light on the body and health discourses in ancient Hebrew writings. I think ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, Akkadian, and multi-lingual exorcist scribes got very creative with medical practices, genres, and discourses — inventing a virtual poetics of individuation, a medical theory of editing, and speculative knowledge about affective magico-religious territories inside the autonomic, interoceptive, and enteric body. I think the Hebrew scriptures had a far greater influence on the invention and early “history of the self.” Those claims are obviously for other essays.
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But my big contention in life is that living in my body, theorizing embodiment, and analyzing all the non-biological aspects of wellness helped me loosen, disinvolve, and hold myself differently within the structures and flows of power that were feeding my adult depression. I came to agree with cultural critic Ann Cvetkovich who calls depression a public feeling (2012). My initial sense that depression opened up a chasm inside me seemed like a personal condition, an isolating mental disease, a feature of my sick brain, and a broken thing inside my self. This model of depression as an interior, individual malfunction was so natural at first, it took a lot of time, experience, support, and analysis to see it any other way.
James Baldwin said “it took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.” (“They Can’t Turn Back,” 1960). When Fanny Lou Hamer said, “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free” — and when Audre Lourde said, “so long as we are divided because of our particular identities we cannot join together in effective political action” (“There is No Hierarchy of Oppressions,” 1982) — and when Sonya Renee Taylor wrote “the body is not an apology” and set off a movement of free poetics:
The body is not an apology. Let it not be common as oil, ash or toilet. Let it not be small as gravel, stain or teeth. Let it not be mountain when it is sand. Let it not be ocean when it is grass. (tumbler post, 2013)
…and when Édouard Glissant said:
The Plantation is one of the beIlies of the world, not the only one, one among so many others, but it has the advantage of being able to be studied with the utmost precision. Thus, the boundary, its structural weakness, becomes our advantage. And in the end its seclusion has been conquered. The place was closed, but the word derived from it remains open. (Poetics of Relation, 1997, highlighting mine for Psalm 23 series).
and when I kept reading and reading and reading — I understood that I could relate to James Baldwin’s many years of vomit. And the specifics are what matter. In my case, white, blonde, female, American depression was not so much food poisoning in my stomach as a dense set of scaffolds stitched into my back — pressing me down into my personal, interior chasm. When thinkers like Cvetkovich helped me see depression as a cultural and political phenomenon that was connected to other public struggles — I started to see how many built structures scaffolded me — both down and up.
Yes — “healing” would involve the scaffolding that both pressed me down and that held me up.
A Short Reflection on Writing with Temporal Cycles and with California
I am not yet sure why I wrote the above on the same day as I wrote the below. I think the below is an example of the above — an example of the poetics of struggle that I am writing about with Psalm 23 — exploring the above: depression, scaffolds, magico-religious territories inside the body — and the below: specific contexts of writing, aesthetics, experience, and what Glissant calls solidary/solitary poetics — especially of other people’s suffering.
Photograph I made in Lassen Volcanic National Park on July 24th, 2024, the day the Park wildfire began.
We drove to visit Lassen Volcanic National Park on the same afternoon that the Park fire began. But this was before we even knew there was going to be a huge wildfire that night.
We were driving up to Lassen — through the National Forest and then the National Park — talking about the sweeping burn marks on the landscape. I now think they were from the Dixie Fire about three years ago, but we hadn’t read up on the wildfire history of the region, and our phones had no cell service. So, we decided to notice as many signs of fire as we could, wondering how experts interpret them to calculate the exact length of time since a fire burned here.
I have been struck by how I am experiencing wildfires on this trip. As a girl born in Boston and then a Mainer, wildfires will probably always feel exotic to me. When I lived in California, I only ever lived through the smoke pools of northern California wildfires that poured into the Bay Area. In the thick of unbreathable air, I immersed myself in maps, news reports, and personal accounts of wildfires. I can still recall an insomniac night of reading stories by people who had often barely survived the Camp wildfire in Paradise (2018). So many of these accounts described harrowing escapes and lost loved ones — like the couple who submerged themselves in their backyard pool all night while the fires roared around them. One of them survived. One of them died. …of smoke inhalation only a small, countable number of moments before rescue. Breathing the smoke of Paradise while reading these stories engulfed me in an embodied, affective connection to poetics that I have never before experienced.
The ghosts in the poetics of suffering quite literally entered my lungs as I read about survivors of Paradise while breathing the smoke of those that were destroyed. Six years later, today in Chico and Orland during the Park wildfire — I am actually physically closer to a wildfire than ever before — as another kind of witness.
It’s remarkable how close. Scott and my daughter saw the fire begin in a meadow of Upper Bidwell Park. He was picking her up from her earthbound skills camp in middle Bidwell Park and they drove past a hillside just starting to burn. They stopped and talked about it. As I write this, I am ten minutes away from her back at camp in lower Bidwell Park — ready to jump in the car in case the evacuation call comes.
We got a good look at the Park wildfire. Last night, we drove out to Black Butte for a sunset swim, and then drove up to the dam to look at the stars, the milky way, and the Park fire by night. We saw the entire north-south length of glowering smoke from the 164,000 acre fire — and with binoculars, we could see hot red flares shoot up now and again. It was beautiful and eerie. I knew I was watching human suffering (130 structures burned last night). As for my eyes, they saw incredible color, breathing lanterns of smoke, a striking horizon. Beauty is sometimes shockingly divorced from moral feeling.
But I will say, this beauty, this gazing in fascination on destruction and human suffering, is thickly haunted.
A photo I snapped of Park Fire’s plume of smoke over Orland, CA (July 25, 2024)
I made this image right before driving to Black Butte to go sunset swimming — and once it was dark, to watch the fire at night.
