insult to injury

I was thinking the other day of a possible blog called "insult to injury" about aging and being in your fifties. Part of this was a cyborg reflection that aging is a software and hardware issue, and that a lot of cyborg narratives are driven by a human desire not to age as quickly as we do. 


So part of my fifties is being an athlete and beginning to get injuries based on this aging of the body, with the concomitant knowledge that my own inability to shift practices as my body changes is partly to blame for two torn muscles, a messed up knee, some emerging back issues (twice I've frozen up like some great insect with a carapace instead of a flexible spinal column). 


This would have to include the phrase fiftying it, a phrase Will Forest and I have developed. Fortying it meant you did something you used to do easily (make sharp field cuts, jumping with power, etc) and getting hurt. Fiftying it meant you did nothing noticeable and yet you STIILL GOT HURT. 


I've fiftied my ankle and my back, and I've spent four months in PT coming back from a two week span of trashing my knee (stuck on a mountainside above Desolation in Tahoe with a full pack trying to get down dead ends and free climbing pitches; drilling my knee on rebar and doing stupid Bike tricks that put too much jolt on my knees at Burning Man), and I've learned that the PT you are doing to get back function is actually the practice you ought to do anyway to retain function at this age.


And so the insult to injury is that it implies you have not, even now, learned your body very well, or well enough to avoid injury. And that a cleverer approach, a more disicplined approach, might well result not only in strength and lack of injury, but also...new/old body knowledge.


My friend Cat says that with our bodies now, everything old is new and everything new is old. She's right about that. 


And on top of all this, one has merely to look at one's desk (if one has a Memento Mori on it as the medieval philosophers did; mine is on my window ledge next to a spiral shell and a cup of pens) to see that these bodies that are no longer new also have a shelf life, a strange number which indicates the years this body will have this or that function, be able in these ways and less in those ways. Death is the whisper behind injury, is the spectre haunting the self we've cobbled together out of learning and myth, impulse and repetition, allegiance to some social norms and inevitably resistance to others.

Kelsey my neighbor said tonight in the hot tub that balance is the result of failure as well as success; each stumble is a chance to learn that balance. She is young and very immortal feeling, just out of college and on her way. She had her head back and knees up and looked very Maxfield Parrish. My brother Peter added that most adults are not really as shaped or formed as they appear; he quoted Louis CK: one of us is 5, and one of us is 8, and one of us is 37, but usually we are all down on the level of the 5 year old. 


And so we have failing and still capable and desired bodies, many of us. We think we should know more by now and we are right. The insult of lack of self knowledge is added to the injury of aging.


And yet...I sometimes think I always always knew it would be like this. Somewhere when I was 13 I was also 56. And so far 56 has felt wide open; what is old is new and what is new is old. I can sit at a computer that wasn't even a glint in Eniac's eye when I was 13 and remember 1967,  


It turns out that most of us do not learn along some nice curve. At least we don't for many of the most important challenges facing us as crazy monkeys, a species on the brink. 


I believe all the important questions have a location along the interface between body and world. And that body is linked to body and bodies, and bodies are linked to bodies that include machines (computers are a clear but not the only example of networks of humans and machines, with the networks and the humans doing real work to continue the life of the network). 


The pendulum swings from the philosophizing of the fifty year old to the fifty year old body and the self wound around each other like DNA strands. We talk about global warming and then about the confusions of gender, of power, of communication, of media, of humans cut off from feedback loops and thus unaware of the shit that is about to hit the world's fan. 


So perhaps once in a while one's body must be injured, so that the insult of not knowing is again felt, like a hot lash, a slap, a wakeup call. 


PS when I searched for a Parrish image of Kelsey I found this as the caption:

Barn's burnt down --
now
I can see the moon.

  Masahide