The Pious Body: A Meditation

The language of the body is a language permeated with the divine. Whether it is the gaunt scaffolding of the Buddha or the battered flesh of Christ, we accept that the body is a receptacle of earthly suffering with an inherent capacity for facilitating transcendence. We say, "My body is a temple." What would an offering to this temple be, or what would its prayer sound like? No doubt healthy foods factor, but this is metabolized quietly. I am wondering what the equivalent of Homer's famished bonfires would be, what could match their gravity and loud cackle. The gods willed Achilles cut, Hector's back broken, Ulysses' beard to forever be with the seafoam. Be it the offering of one's body for salvation (a gift in waiting) or glory (a gift for now), I feel like the body may as well become a plinth before death. We must, as Atlas or relentless Sisyphus, persist in a strength so complete that it is invisible.

This is the destroying breeze in Mishima, his inwardly crushing muscles lacquered by the fading sweat. Though I attempt to gesture away from contemplative abstractions here (a logical syllogism is quite different from a sword in your face), an analogy with the state of enlightenment comes to mind. Enlightenment is said to dissolve the self, involve a union, the tipping of a code sequence from 1 to 255 as we move backwards. In the destruction of the one, you become all. Could it not be the same with the body, that in moving close the height of bodily wholeness one ends by being a charged void?

I think of Aeneas, who left burning Troy. The virtue of Aeneas is his pietas (piety, kindness, devotion, but also patriotism, loyalty). It is this virtue which has him guide young Ascanius by the hand and carry the father Anchises on his back out of the ruptured city. He retreats to find his wife Creusa, but she has become a shade; Troy is hell, and Aeneas but a second Orpheus. His body becomes the vessel of his fate and the proof of pietas; with his body he mobilizes love of family, love of country, courage, and, yes, violent atrocities and later lust for Dido in Book IV. It is no coincidence that his depravity in Book IV is a corporeal one as he languishes clothed in luxury. Do note the passage's coded language that such luxury implies femininity, realize that all bodies hold the capacity for validity, and shift the argumentum against that "unspent body" into the channel of primary concern: by staying in Carthage and embracing luxury, Aeneas is refusing his gods-given fate. The outward tokens do not honor the inner virtue and the seed of possibility, and this is something that we all possess, man, woman, or otherwise.

So finally I wonder what a body of pietas (a pious body) may achieve. There is an ephemeral appeal of this life, especially given the variability of health. But strength too is how we hold hands, kiss, make love, and help others to their rest. We learn by these actions that a self-serving strength is of no use, and that a form which embodies no ideals is a crumpled parish.

When my Abuelo Israel passed away in 2016, I dreamt of him that night and awoke to a pillow of tears. In dream, as in life, he embraced me with Herculean strength. He jubilantly says, "I love you man," and holds me as if the seams of the world were about to fray. This is the body of values I seek, and the virtues which are set to endure.

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Image: Aeneas carrying Anchises, early 6th century BCE, Louvre