Who are you? More precisely, what is it that constitutes you? This is the question that lies behind Daisy Hildyard’s elegant and probing The Second Body, published by the stylishly minimalist Fitzcarraldo Editions. We’re generally pretty confident to call our physical bodies part of ourselves even though they’re inhabited by a huge array of micro-organisms, and turn over actual material at an alarmingly fast rate. Hildyard’s alarming suggestion is that the various social, political, and physical changes our bodies exert on the universe are just as much part of ourselves. They are our second body.
You are wearing a pair of inexpensive gloves and a teenager in Calcutta is missing a thumb. The lungs of workers in Manila fill with toxic fumes emitted in the production of the materials for that phone in your hand. Species of Brazilian monkey are wiped out by deforestation to produce the palm oil that went into the chocolate you just ate. Those things – according to Hildyard – are part of you. They’re part of you in a different sense from the way your fingers, your earwax, and your pancreas are part of you. But they’re still part of you. Because when you zoom way out – she makes copious metaphorical allusions to Earthrise, a photo taken from the surface of the moon – what can be detected of you is less that space your first body literally occupies and more the worldwide, abstracted consequences of your being. It’s a powerful and very arresting image.
What’s less clear at first is why Hildyard reaches for the body as her guiding metaphor. A lot of her content was very new to me, not because it suggested that I’m responsible for the consequences of my consumption behaviour, but because it drew so direct a comparison between my (physical) body and those (equally physical) consequences. Christian theology gives us plenty of resources to suggest that I should notice and care about the things for which I am, however indirectly, responsible. (Michael Shluter and David Lee’s The R Factor provides a brilliant framework for thinking along this line). But I’m not sure I’ve ever heard somebody tell me that I have two bodies, in that sense.
This is how Hildyard justifies the comparison: “…the only way to truly experience the truth about your body is with pathological horror. The truth is that it does not have sealed boundaries and that objects pose a direct threat to your body – your car, for example, is invading your body. Your body is not inviolable. Your body is infecting the world – you leak. This is why I am speaking of a second body rather than of global connections or impacts.”
Truth be told, I found this very difficult to parse. When I drive a car (for me that still means L-plates and somebody who knows what they’re doing in the front seat), the way that I move my body moves also a gigantic frame of metal which poses an immediate lethal threat to pedestrians unfortunate enough to be nearby, and, via the smoky clouds it pumps out, a very long-term threat to all human existence. It’s not clear to me either that everything contained within the space my body occupies is me, or that the things which I do with a car are my body leaking, rather than some more disconnected causal chain like: I press down too hard on the accelerator; I have less time to react when a child appears from behind that Volvo; the car clips her left arm; she sprawls on the concrete. (This, be it understood, has never actually happened to me.) Hildyard’s lyrical, thread-weaving prose draws arguments from a disorienting array of disparate sources, and it’s possible that she has explained this but I lost it in the forest of her interviews with butchers and geneticists and her favourite Italian novels and her journeys to obscure German cities.
It has got me thinking, though, about the way in which the church is the body of Christ. (Apologies for what is perhaps a clunky but inevitable segue for one of these blogs). The Bible speaks often of how God’s people are His possession, His temple, His bride, and ultimately even His body (eg 1 Corinthians 12:12). I’ve been inclined to think of that as being strictly metaphorical and ideal, and so detached from the inscrutable complexities of Life In Practice. But it’s striking to me that Hildyard should alight on a very similar metaphor but with none of that detachedness – she speaks of a second body not just because it’s an arresting metaphor but because there isn’t a satisfying and comprehensive way of defining the first which doesn’t suggest the existence of a second.
Perhaps in some marvellous way beyond my comprehension, the ‘second body’ of Christ is the unity that his work establishes among his people. Good works done in his service and under his guidance are not isolated moral and physical realities, but wondrously somehow a part of his body. And just as the first of his bodies was raised to glorious life (physically at first, in an unmistakable statement of the goodness of matter), so the second – the church – will one day, in resplendent, material beauty, be presented to her glorious Husband, and united forever to him.
Yikeiatry 