I once had an unforgettable sense of embodiment, when my teeth smashed through my lower left cheek. I was a professional skater training to qualify for the X Games. I quickly skated down a long ramp, slipped on some water and landed Supermanning 10 feet in the air before hitting my head against the side of a skating ramp. I went to the emergency room, got stitches, and went back to the game. When I look at my scar in a shop window or mirror, or feel it from the inside with my tongue, I don’t perceive it as a place of trauma or disfigurement. I remember the joy and excitement of flying through the air.
I am undoubtedly in the minority with that. For most, a beautiful body is a healthy body, and the joys of treating the body well – massaging, cleansing, moisturizing, resting – are seen as an end in themselves, a sure source of calm, confidence, love and joy.
But there is a limit to the happiness we can find in maintaining what is generally accepted as a healthy or beautiful body: if you are lucky enough to live a long life, your body will fail. And it’s not just age that can take its course with our bodies. Illness, accident or disability can quickly put an end to that physical source of happiness. What then?
As a professor of philosophy, I explore important life questions with my students – most of them young people whose view of the world is shaped by social media and corporate messaging rather than the occasional philosophy course – this is one I return to often : How can we come to understand the full range of the body’s aesthetic potential and power?
I like to tell them about Henri Matisse.
Around 1940, when Matisse, the revolutionary French painter, was 71, his doctors discovered he had an abdominal obstruction (a result of a hernia he had as a child) and a possible cancerous tumor in his colon. They assumed his condition was fatal, but hoped for a risky surgery. It worked and gave him 13 more years of life.
However, those years would be very different from the previous 71. After the operation, his mobility was severely limited and he spent a lot of time in bed. He suffered from fever, exhaustion and the effects of various drugs. All this made painting almost impossible. These physical difficulties were accompanied by the doubts he had about the direction of his art. Feeling that he had gone as far as he could with oil paintings, Matisse found that everything in his life was an open question.
At the time—long before progressive ideas about disability became widely accepted—Matisse might have been expected to view his new condition as something of a tragedy, a reason to give up. He didn’t. Instead, his loss was transformative: “My terrible surgery has completely rejuvenated and turned me into a philosopher. I had prepared myself so fully for my departure from life that it seems as if I am in a second life.”
Matisse transformed himself by transforming his work and turning to collage. With the help of assistants, he applied paint to paper, cut out the pieces and arranged them into works that ranged from small to almost monumental, abstract to symbolic or representational. Matisse called them ‘gouaches découpées’ or ‘gouache recesses’ (gouache is the type of paint). He considered them the pinnacle of his artistic life: “Only what I created after the illness forms my real self: free, liberated.” His body’s new limitations became an opportunity for renewal. With paint, scissors and paper he drew, carved and constructed a new self.
There is a lesson here about what it means to take care of the body, to inhabit the bodies we have, not just with acceptance and love, as we are often rightly advised. It’s a lesson learned when we live through our bodies as vehicles of beauty, as channels for aesthetic engagement. It’s a lesson learned when we practice a radical aesthetic openness to our bodies, to what it can do and produce when time and chance inevitably transform us.
Through our bodies we show a lot of who we are: through voice, calmness, clothes, tattoos, piercings, outfits, make-up, hairstyles, shoes, glasses, songs, books, skate tricks and scars. This is how we communicate and fan out from the world into, in, on and with other beautiful bodies.
I recently added a brand new scar to my collection just below that on the side of my face. While my son was in the birthing intensive care unit with a mysterious fever, I got the results of an MRI scan I needed for an old neck injury (from ice skating). It revealed a large asymmetrical growth on my lingual tonsils, a sign of lymphoma. Urgent surgery removed a plum-sized lump of flesh that was blocking most of my airway. I have now met the oncologist and heard the results. It was caused by a serious bacterial infection and there are no signs of cancer, just a starting scar and a hellish sore throat.
Here I am recovering, in pain, sitting in the strange and welcome light of knowing that I (and our baby) will be just fine. I will not fly up and down slopes or through the air, but like Matisse, I will sing through the scar. I will pick up my sons. I’m going to cook for my friends. I will help my students marvel at the complexity of philosophy. I will write about this beautiful body.