Correlations have been observed between psychological conflicts and somatic illness. Links between suppressed emotions and physical health problems are recognized. Accept a holistic view of the individual.
As you eliminate your body on the web, you recuperate it in your physical location.
Sometimes you have a body, sometimes you don’t.
If you don’t have a body, you’re not there.
If you have a body, you are so there that your relationship with the world is what I call proprioceptive. It’s tactile. It’s not visual as it was during the Renaissance.
In the Renaissance, what was your identity? It was the outer limit of skin, a head that processed information, a dumb universe shown as a spectacle.
Identity became a point of view.
Today, identity is a point of being. We add the new possibilities of mixed identities, collective identities, just-in-time identities, fabricated identities.
There’s great flexibility, but the core business of self remains, just extended all over the planet by electronic extensions.
pro·pri·o·cep·tive – relating to stimuli that are produced and perceived within an organism, especially those connected with the position and movement of the body.
One hundred twenty loops around the glowing orb are what we get – give or take a decade or 10 depending on how well you attract lightning.
And that’s a generous estimate, mostly reserved for women living on some isolated island in Japan or Italy with simple diets and a daily glass of vino.”
My sensations were strange. Let me try to explain them.
When I was a child, I well remember a somewhat similar circumstance that befell me; whether it was a reality or a dream, I never could entirely settle.
The circumstance was this: I had been cutting up some caper or other–I think it was trying to crawl up the chimney, as I had seen a little sweep do a few days previous; and my stepmother who, somehow or other, was all the time whipping me, or sending me to bed supperless,–my mother dragged me by the legs out of the chimney and packed me off to bed, though it was only two o’clock in the afternoon of the 21st June, the longest day in the year in our hemisphere.
I felt dreadfully. But there was no help for it, so up stairs I went to my little room in the third floor, undressed myself as slowly as possible so as to kill time, and with a bitter sigh got between the sheets.
Moby Dick, CHAPTER 4, The Counterpane by Herman Melville