Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [55]
What had happened to my body—I hadn’t known it before, until my attempts at stretching made it obvious—was that I had been braced from my knees up to my solar plexus, like a football player, I imagined, braced for a body blow. I carried myself like someone who expected something to come hurtling right into his stomach, knocking the wind out of him, someone who didn’t want to fall down.
The class did release tension. Some nights I fell asleep right there on my mat while everyone around me moved into increasingly elongated, birdlike incarnations of graceful flexibility. Some nights I felt relaxation and a sense of relief. The postures began to provide me with another sort of metaphysical vocabulary—the steadfastness of “the Mountain,” for instance, feet firmly anchored on the earth, the spine elongated, pressing up from the crown of the head, body extending from earth to heaven. Sometimes when I wasn’t in class, when I needed to feel it, I could call upon the firmness of “the Mountain,” and recall in my body that stability and sense of scale. And I loved the noise-making: the forceful expelling of air from the gut into a HA, the loud sighs and exhalations which signaled muscles lengthening and letting go.
The class made me realize I had no idea then—maybe I still don’t—what it means to “let go” of a person. How can we, when someone is bonded to us, welded into the mesh of ourselves? The dead live on in our bodies, in the timeless flux of memory, inseparable from us. You’ve got to let go is the popular prescription for grief, but what does it mean, and how is it to be done? Whatever has been, we can’t undo it; isn’t every gesture we’ve ever made, every one that mattered, part of the stuff of selfhood? Isn’t the past the soul’s deepest possession? If I were to “let go” of Wally and Lynda, would they die to me again?
But I did learn to perceive tension in my body more clearly, to feel how I “hold on,” and to feel a muscle’s welcome lengthening and release.
But not enough. No amount of stretching seemed to defuse, finally, the pressure that was mounting in my back. After that unlucky reach out the car window to the ATM, I couldn’t even stand up straight. I’d hobble, face to the earth, hunched and clenched, unable to even straighten up enough to look at the sky. I feel more profoundly misaligned than I ever have, literally bent out of shape, my parts in a jumble of unhappy connections.
A week of rest and I am at least walking, slowly. Crunching myself into the position required to ride in a car, much less drive one, is out of the question, so I walk carefully to an appointment with my sweet masseur, Glen, whom I’ve seen a few times this spring to try to undo some of the winter’s icy block of tension and stress. I am making my way up my street when I run into a woman I know slightly, a health care administrator who’d known Wally. She notices my snailish pace—I am holding myself like a delicate construction of glass and string—and I explain.
“You know,” she says, “it’s all emotional.”
And I’m furious. It’s a thirty-second diagnosis, completely out of context. How does she know what’s going on in my body? She seems to deny the physical reality of my problem. She’s a representative (off duty, admittedly, but I am in no mood to let her off the hook) of that useless bureaucracy of “providers”—their own bland language, soulless as they sometimes seem to be—who have no call to be claiming expertise with something they don’t understand. I’m taken back to the kind of blanket, casual diagnoses Wally’s doctors used to make; confronting a symptom they clearly didn’t understand, they’d confidently say, “It’s the virus.” Or, in a phrase which became a kind of bitter joke with us, anything they didn’t comprehend and couldn’t treat they’d label “viral activity.” Wally’s life