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Teens stitched together a self from commodities owned and brands worn, producing a body with sufficient social and sexual capital to compete for status and belonging. It was also sociological: adolescence in late ’90s middle-class America was a late-capitalist bourgeois exercise of self-representation. This sensation was partly developmental: the slowly emerging prefrontal cortex and its more sophisticated cognitive functions kick into high gear during adolescence.
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Somewhere in adolescence, that natural embodiedness seemed to split apart like a husk and fruit, into a body and mind. I didn’t stand apart from these physical experiences as a detached observer I was woven into them, born into what Merleau-Ponty calls a “primordial communion.” Amidst the typical ordeals of childhood-the sibling skirmishes, the nerves that accompanied moving or starting a new school year-a sense of belonging created a steady background for the freshness of new encounters. Remembering these childhood moments is an act of re-membering the sensory qualities of these experiences reassemble themselves effortlessly, imbuing my nose, my ears, my eyes, my skin, with a dim but tangible vitality.Ī unity of sensation and consciousness, emotion and thought, the world around me and myself, pervaded those first years. My earliest memories are saturated with sensation: enjoying the warm sunshine on my bare legs as a summer breeze rustles the folds of my pale blue dress the golden hour settling like amber honey on the trees above the creaking swing set the jewel-like colors shining out of a gumball machine gifted at my birthday. When I consciously live in embodied presence, I am more alive to the luminous beauty and the generative frictions of being a particular physical body in a shared material universe. In the natural embodiment of childhood, the disembodiment of adolescence, an over-bodied season of mental illness, pregnancy, and childbirth, and an ongoing re-embodiment mediated by relationships, I have come to feel the resonance of Joseph Smith’s material sensibilities and to sense the divine tutorial in our embodiment. I recognize that some forms of embodiment are conducive to life, and others lead to death, both physical and spiritual.
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When I understand embodiment as a task rather than a state, I affix intentionality to its givenness. A compelling tale can be told about the latter’s complex theological and historical legacy, but there’s a personal one as well: it’s a tale of conversion, in a sense, from my own conflicted relationship with the body to an awakening to embodiment as a fundamentally spiritual task. I didn’t always grasp this “great principle.” In fact, it took years of immersing myself in the study of baroque Catholicism, with its embodied extravagances, to recognize the early Mormon romance with materialism. “The great principle of happiness consists in having a body,” he exulted: a physical body with enduring particularities, enmeshed in salvific interdependent relationships, and capable of infinite generativity. Embodiment enabled our progress and empowerment, Smith claimed-but it also, principally, promised our joy. To the scandal of deists, secularists, Protestants, and Catholics, Joseph Smith claimed that the body was not something to be abstracted, exploited, or transcended to Latter-day Saints, embodiment was, as one observer scoffed, “a necessary step in their progress towards perfection and divinity.”Joseph Smith’s claims about the embodiment of God and the thoroughly material nature of existence were widely recognized by contemporary observers as striking theological innovations. The more I excavate the historical and theological significance Mormonism grants the physical body, the more insistently the question presses on me: what if being embodied is a task, and not simply a state we inhabit?