A surge, but gentle this one, coated in a certain light which, if it does not dazzle us with its unseemly positivity, nevertheless calms us, came to my mailbox this week, in response to the call spear.
I say “surge” because of the number, first of all, since since the beginning of the adventure of this column, it is the call that has generated the most echoes, but also because of the feeling expressed of this ” finally” that you name with breath, like an ice jam that would let go, a sudden revelation, a possibility of becoming aware and of telling what was suffering, missing, somewhere on the side of our lives. “I wanted to scream, as much relief (to be heard, understood) as victory…” writes Aurélie.
The power of language always moves me. It has the potential to bring us back, sometimes violently, to the internal tremors that make us up, to our human nature, which is both so strong and so fallible.
Thus, touch, graze, exult, wander at will, offer your “profile” elsewhere than on the networks where you are scanned from left to right, tap your reflection in the mirrors before running to all the strange balls, surprising, sometimes disconcerting that the city offers you, seems to you to belong to a past which is becoming more and more blurred by the passage of time. You claim yourselves as social, tactile animals, dreaming of being carried again, cradled, contained, labored by existence, tired of this need to precede by thought all the actions of the day, less and less satiated by the empty calories that gave you a sense of control.
To offer us even more of this legitimacy, I reverberate towards you these words of the professor of psychology at the University of Sherbrooke Alfonso Santarpia, which perfectly summarize the fundamental character of touch in human life.
In his chapter with the magnificent title “The bodily inscription of being” of the book Introduction to humanistic psychotherapies, he explains: “Touch corresponds to the moment in which a human intention solicits the skin: the own skin, and the skin of others. It is universal. It exists in all cultures and in all species. […]. The skin, the organ of touch, is the oldest and largest of our sensory organs, as well as the first to develop in the womb. »
The work of Professor Santarpia and his colleagues on the links between dance, or the poetic narrative of the body, and post-cancer identity reconstruction, in particular, is worth the detour, naturally not leaving indifferent the survivor of a breast cancer that I am. This is the first time that reading scientific articles has left me so overwhelmed, that you can find poetry everywhere, even in evidence.
As the feast of an Eros disembodied from his mythological power appears on the calendar at the end of the week, you hope to taste again this rapture, created by the surprise, the breath taken by the outpouring of his presence which, often , happens in our lives “while we were busy with other things” as a certain Lennon said.
More than anything, you want to “recognize your life”, to make it yours again, as if, by dint of removing peels from what defined it in this way of inhabiting the world, you have the feeling of cross, more or less wandering, in this almost ghostly presence attached to the words “virtual”, “videoconferencing” and “distancing”.
But the layers of wool on top of the layers of skin, under the coat, place a certain sorrow on your impulses, as if you were quietly discovering that there are no more additional folds of being that would be bearable for you.
“I have perceived this body for a long time like a pear lying on the counter, a still life framed by my three and a half. I haven’t touched anyone for two years, except for the occasional accidental nudge from a dental hygienist, or my cat’s paws suggesting that I pat her face using reverse psychology,” says Annie.
Then, there are also all those who, conversely, narrate a body found “from the inside”, through this possibility offered of a slowing down of the outside world: “Paradoxically, although I am deprived of all these occasions when my life force can unfold, it seems to me that I have never been so intimately inhabited,” reports Richard.
“But the pandemic would keep me less sequestered among the remnants of my hopes than it forces me to encounter what in them is ordinarily denial. Of course it will be sweet to become one again with these bodies that I have only learned to fear. There are some who deserve it and with whom we will no longer want to find ourselves in the crowd or in cafes. I can’t wait, but I have one table left to strip and repaint. An intimate breath to restore. »
And you, how do you reinvest the world, what imprint do you keep of everything the body has become unaccustomed to during all these months?