‘Thanks for Life, Mere Life’ : The pursuit of physical perfection is a ritual of faith in science. It leaves us unprepared for the ultimate life experience.
“I sing that body electric,” proclaimed a youthful Walt Whitman. “That of the male is perfect, and that of the female is perfect.” Writing his sublimely optimistic poem just before the Civil War put everything in doubt, Whitman asserted that the great new country of the United States required healthy bodies to safeguard its Constitution. The elimination of disease and infirmity must be a free people’s first obligation, he suggested. And not just white bodies; at a slave auction, Whitman sees and celebrates with egalitarian fervor black bodies that are “the start of populous states and rich republics.” Here, we feel, is the true American Dream, this liberation of the body from degrading social taboos and from the bigotry of lawmakers.
In this country we like to think that declaring something to be true makes it true (“We hold these truths to be self-evident . . .”). Looking back on Whitman from our decade, when the care and feeding of a healthy body has become one of our most sacred virtues, we credit him with announcing a triumphant new civil religion. He inherited the outworn Puritanism that condemned the body as a cesspool of sinful appetites and re-imagined it as a glorious temple pure in every part. Yes, he deserves credit, but as his choice of metaphor implies, technology was on his side. Everything “electric” had a bright future after 1855.
What Whitman foresaw when he read about the experiments of Volta, Davy, Ampere and Faraday was that electromagnetism would become the means for defining what human beings essentially were. The processes of sexuality and digestion, the brain’s creative impulses, the flow of the blood, the amazing maneuverability of the skeleton--all of these and more were to be understood as conductors of the dynamic electrical current passing through and animating all natural things. The result was a democratic vision of harmony dependent on technological progress. When Edison and his followers transformed the world by their inventions, they re-invented human nature as well, in ways that we have been trying to comprehend since the American Century began.
The body electric was gradually reconceived as a machine, like the automobile and the radio. Keeping the human machine in repair became a high value of the new society, not just for economic reasons but because the body had become--as Whitman prophesied--the only version of the soul that most people could understand. As the notion of an afterlife receded from view, driven to the margins of consciousness by the wonders of science and technology, the obsession with repairing bodily dysfunction and forestalling death became one of the chief forces in modern culture.
As the clergy of this new religion, physicians became the central figures of our secular society. Their miracles have sustained our belief in progress even as other fields of technology have brought disillusionment and threats of catastrophe. The doctor is so honored because he can keep the machine running; and run it does, incessantly. High school students pump themselves up with steroids or starve themselves until they resemble the media imagery of robust health.
Government agencies enforce increasingly tougher health standards which frighten some, or many, into neurotic anxiety about looking good and feeling better. Carlyle commented that the healthy know nothing of their health; only the sick know of their sickness. He was wrong; the healthy in a health-conscious society can never stop thinking and talking about their diets and exercise regimens.
The fatal encounter of Alzheimer’s disease victim Janet Adkins and suicide doctor Jack Kevorkian was the inevitable culmination of such a cultural mentality. This woman who, a week before her death, had beaten her grown son at tennis, who was happy in her marriage, happy in general, could not tolerate the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. She apparently suffered from the devastating illusion that a life not enjoyed with perfect consciousness and perfect physical robustness was not a life worth having, not for another minute if she could help it. Armed with this dangerous notion of corporal perfection, she located an angel of death who could administer the corrective fix.
Medical students learn very early the classical myth of Asclepius, the god of healing, who was killed by Zeus because he could bring the dead back to life. Death is God’s province, not man’s, is the point of this myth. But what of the inverted form of the story, as Dr. Kevorkian embodies it? Should a doctor succumb to his patient’s arbitrary misgivings about the body’s weakening current of life? “The preserver of life has often been exempted from normal limits of behavior,” notes Dr. Willard Gaylin. “Whether he is called priest or physician . . . both have literally gotten away with murder.”
Whether Janet Adkins’ death is murder or suicide will be decided in the proper forum, but her recourse to the good doctor’s “suicide machine” must be seen as the result of a social pathology that defines the body electric too narrowly, too exclusively. The relentless biological fate that overtakes us all has always seemed terrible, but people who have made the adjustment to waning power and increasing pain have sustained happiness in ways that need to be publicized widely and continuously. If the National Endowment for the Arts is looking for uplifting art to subsidize, it could do worse than to broadcast the affirmations of those whose experiences stand apposed to Janet Adkins and Dr. Kevorkian.
Perhaps we should remove the Olympic champions and movie stars from posters for a while, and put there Whitman’s inspiring poems of old age. “The body wreck’d, old, poor and paralyzed . . . The burning fires down in my sluggish blood not yet extinct, The undiminish’d faith,” he wrote, and later, “Thanks in old age . . . for the midday sun, the impalpable air--for life, mere life.”
