Whoever recommended several years back that I read Gretel Ehrlich's memoir of being struck by lightning, A Match to the Heart, thanks.
She makes a compelling case for the materiality of experience, though there's never a sense of reductive determinism. That is, her story walks through the physics, the chemistry, the meteorology, and the biology of her subjectivity after the lightning strike; yet it allows for a spiritual read of things. Often, her language matches both the physical and the metaphysical, and her metaphors for cardiovascular function and for the role of electricity in the body work. That's not to say that a few sentences weren't exhausting. I got tired of trying to figure out this one: "At the beach, Sam [her hero dog] lay in elliptical slices of shade cut out of dark air by returning swallows" (181).
Connecting the autobiographical body, experience, memory, and a sense of self capable of fashioning all of that into a thoughtful text stumps plenty of memoirists. This instance feels successful, though.
Without comment for now, three passages to which I want to hang on:
How odd that we walk around with these bodies, live in them, die in them, make love with them, yet know almost nothing of their intimate workings, the judicious balancing act of homeostasis, the delicate architecture of their organs and systems, or the varying weathers of their private, internal environments. Up to this point my living and breathing had been an act of faith. I existed but I didn’t know how. I was a stranger to the body whose consciousness said, ‘I know myself,’ which meant only that I had decoded the brain's electrochemical message that told me to think such a thought.I lifted the bedsheet. All I saw as I looked down was a pale container, skin whose bruises and cuts were only ornament, ruby and onyx jewels. How could I have been so uncurious? If I held a match to my heart, would I be able to see its workings, would I know my body the way I know a city, with its internal civilization of chemical messengers, electrical storms, cellular cities in which past, present, and future are contained, would I walk the thousand miles of arterial roadways, branching paths of communication, and coiled tubing for waste and nutrients, would I know where the passion to live and love comes from? It is no wonder we neglect the natural world outside ourselves when we do not have the interest to know the one within. (27)
In the aqueous territory of the synaptic cleft, transmission occurs: the release of calcium activates an enzyme called calpain, which eats into the membrane of the adjacent cell body, changing the shape of dendritic spines and, in the process, creating a physical memory. New neural pathways—new brainscapes—are made each time a memory occurs. (70)
I dreamed that the shape of this book should be a convection cloud, a rising bubble swarming with up and down drafts of electricity, moisture, and air. Inside, the narrative would zigzag like lightning and the pages would be laid end to end to resemble a tree trunk, a channel down which fire suddenly flows. Once the book had been read, the top of the cloud would explode leaving the reading holding a burned shell. (161)Posted by dave at March 14, 2005 6:16 PM | TrackBack