Summertime, heat-rash time. I itch and scratch, with the predictable result that large areas of my skin turn blotchily red. My surface is literally irritated, and I feel irritable at this betrayal. That most intimate friend and the one I usually take for granted, my body, has let me down, but of course it is useless to tell the rest of myself that my body cannot help it. And, when faced with physical discomfort and this high pitch of body awareness, my spirit is just not interested, it is off on summer holidays of its own. This time last year, though, I was made aware of both body and spirit in quite a different way.
We are our bodies, as I am learning all over again while scratching moodily, but attitudes to that fact and to bodies themselves are greatly subject to change. The Victorians, for example, tried to achieve the absence of the live body: think of the covering nature of their clothing, the men’s beards and hats, the women’s dresses and bonnets, and the way in which certain words (leg, ankle, breast) were not supposed to be mentioned in polite society. Concentration on heart, soul and spirit were the thing. Yet said live body was not to be denied, and families were usually large, while the dead body was very much a presence at often splendid and always ritualistic funerals. Perhaps it is no accident that the modern Olympic Games, replicating the ideal of the perfectly-tuned body conjoined with the spirit to drive it, started in the late dusk of the Victorian age.
Today sex has replaced religion as an interest and hobby. Western youth are obsessed with the notion of the body beautiful: gyms, relentless exercise, power walking, power eating, power everything, are all designed to produce the perfect package, presumably for purposes of sexual display and not much else. On a Sydney beach a few years ago, a crawling nine-month old baby latched on to the wrong breast, a mistake easily made, I imagine, in a large field of topless bathers. Much hilarity ensued, and the hapless young woman speedily learned what breasts are really for.
But few people want to know about an old body, let alone a dead one. I attended my first funeral when I was 19: my grandmother had died, the coffin was closed, and in the non-conformist Australia of the day, the graveside