Barbara PerezTHE BODY IS EVERYTHINGOn occasion, the body is inescapable. The wrong synaptic memo, and I fall convulsing in the midst of a crowd or bash my jaw on the bathroom sink, or worse, slap a twitching fist against a chalkboard while a classroom of teenagers watch. Each time, I face or wake to a person far more confused by the seizure than I, but always present is the audience facing some part of the unknown, a profound perplexity, perhaps from having witnessed the indiscriminate suddenness with which the body can fail. Epilepsy is a disability of paradox: buried lifelong unseen and rearing its head in ostentatious surprise, a defect of the physical brain as means to understanding the mind, a disability of the fleeting moment acting as representation of a greater, permanent philosophical sickness. In 1993, I had my first grand mal in the center of a middle school classroom. From second hand account, I'm told that I clutched my desk and shook it, the clatter of its legs startling those around me. I'm told that I couldn't be roused, even when the teacher screamed my name. I'm told the story of these lost moments, but even now I cannot know it. From that day, the greatest damage was not to my body but to the certainty with which I claimed knowledge. In hindsight, I see that having the phenomenological rug pulled from under me was instead a privilege. A seizure was a sign that something was wildly wrong, not with my own body but with the way in which I had long understood the world. Post-diagnosis, I feared that any moment could end in either the exact alliance of will to action or their severance from each other. Walking down stairs, holding the handle of a saucepan, ambling in the shallows of a river—the domestic and mundane became charged with little dangers and new perceptions of even the simplest of acts. Each movement became a precious, determined desire. Though soon I realized that even intention stemmed from the physical world. Over the next several years, I noted the seizure as reminder of three things. First, of course, is that action does not presuppose will. Second, that perception and knowledge are owed to a delicate, flawed web of axons. Third, that with a simple flick of a synaptic switch, there is nothing. In Phaedo, Socrates tells Cebes of the body's betrayals and imperfections, and warns, "While we live, we shall be closest to knowledge if we refrain as much as possible from association with the body and do not join with it more than we must." Certainly, the longer I endured movements that weren't my own and along with them blocks of missing time—every now and then, seconds of blank life that could not be recovered—the further I felt from the corporeal and the more I pondered seceding the self. I'd found I could no longer trust the body, as it was the very source of my disorder. This begged the question. Identity, consciousness, existence—these relied on the same defective brain that now and then flickered in its physical sureness. I could be certain of nothing as long as the "I" was also suspect. Like Socrates, I feared that knowledge, true perception, was "impossible to attain" as long as I was allied with the physical world. Either out of irony or further suspicion, this was a conclusion for which I could only thank the body—a conclusion that the body and all its perceptions are flawed, a conclusion thanks to the flaws of the body. And so it still goes. With each seizure comes an unsteady flailing in the darkness. Physical sureness, empirical knowledge, thought and reason, each undermined one by the other until the body itself means everything and nothing.
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