(d) The Human Body as Primordial Place
The body is the place that the ego inhabits as the gatekeeper between the
inner and the outer worlds and so it is useful now to consider the way that the body
inhabits place. Body awareness of place is visceral and neurological and knowledge
of place may be carried in the bones and muscles and it undoubtedly played a
greater role in the life of the individual prior to The Great Transition described in
Chapter 2. Body memory, the belief that the body itself is capable of storing
memories as opposed to the brain, may well be the ‘blood consciousness’ that D.H.
Lawrence refers to (Lawrence, 2004:xxiii). David Malouf provided some insight of
this phenomenon when he said:
... the way in which the body, that small hot engine of all those
records and recollections inhabits a house [ read place] ... may be
as mysterious as the way in which we say the spirit inhabits the
body (quoted in Kiernan, 1986:28).
I n An I maginary Life (1986), Malouf’s Ovid opines that “ ... the spirit
experiences what the body does but in a different form” (Malouf, 1986:142) and
later in the same work opines that “ ... we are continuous with earth in all the
particles of our physical being, as in our breathing we are continuous with the sky.
Between our bodies and the world there is unity and commerce” (Malouf,
1986:147). Mythopoeic writers seem to understand this connection, inevitably
alluding to it in their work. For example, James Cowan ponders the issue in A
Mapmaker's Dream (1996) where he suggests that the nude body is our primary
presence, the first land we encounter when we enter the world (Cowan, 1996:123),
and that:
... the natives [ read archaic man] used their bodies as veritable
spirit maps on which they used to draw the place where they had
been conceived. These people expressed the land in which they
lived as symbols daubed all over their bodies ... the idea of a body
map ... rather than carrying about with them an elaborate piece of
parchment detailing the earth’s contours and coastlines, the
natives had chosen to use their own bodies to express what they
had discovered about their homeland. They had made their
bodies a projection of their world .... each native torso became the
embodiment of a sacred landscape (Cowan, 1996:121-122).
Similarly, Queequeg, the noble savage or archaic man in Melville’s Moby Dick
or The Whale (1851) is tattooed in just such a way by which a sort of participation
mystique occurs, his tattoos reflect a complete theory of the heavens and the earth