Doctoring

I am finally reading 'On Living' by Kerry Egan after hearing about it on the radio over a year ago. I saw a link between what the theatre company I was observing was doing and what Kerry Egan, a hospital chaplain was doing with her patients.

I thought, that returning to it, the link I had originally seen might be tenuous but I think it still holds. In fact it acted as a little key to unlocking something I was looking for.

What I had seen before was the value of the act of 'being present with', how this simple act can be enough to provide people with reassurance and calm, even resolve the big issues of their lives. This same act I had seen at work with Pelle, the director of A Doll's House, with the actors and audience. How the act of 'being with' in a space can transform behaviour, make the space come alive, even transform it, make you feel it differently.

I was calling it focus and awareness of, but the word 'attention' then emerged. The act of drawing attention can make you feel a space differently, see things you didn't see before, smell things, hear things. It is a scenographic act because it transforms the space, makes you see it differently.

It comes as no surprise that being a mother, being present with a child does the same thing, space is transformed, not just practically, for example, where is save to explore, where can I get the buggy through, but also temporally. You spend longer in a space, examining the dynamics of a space, your relationship to it, its material substance, how it feels, how it makes you feel.

To return to the book. There is much to take from it. My favourite chapter is 'If only I had known I would have danced more.' in which dying patients talk about their awareness of the value of being in their body.

"I am going to miss this body so much," a different patient, many decades younger, said. She held up her hands in the dim light that seeped through the sunshade on the window. She stared at them as though she had never seen them before. "I'd never admit this to my husband and kids, but it's my own body I'll miss most of all. This body danced and swam and ate and had sex and made babies. It's amazing to think about it. This body actually made my children. It carried me through this world."

She put her hands down." and I'm going to have to leave it. I don't have a choice. And to think I spent all those years criticising how it looked, and never noticing how good it felt. Until now when it never feels good. "...

It isn't just health they wish they had appreciated. It is embodiment itself. Its the very experience of being in a body, something you might take for granted until faced with the reality that you won't have a body soon. No matter what you believe happens after death, whether it be an afterlife, reincarnation, or nothing at all, this remains : you will no longer be able to experience this world on this body, ever again. People who are dying face that reality every day.

So they talk about their favourite memories of their bodies. About how the apples they stole from the orchard on the way home from school tasted, and how their legs and lungs burned as they ran away. The feel of the water the first time they went skinny dipping. The smell of their babies heads. The breeze on their skin that time they made love outside.
And dancing. So many stories about dancing. I can't count the hundred s of times people - more men than women - have closed their eyes and said, when describing US O dances during World War  2, or shagging at South carolina beach houses, or long exuberant nights dancing at roadhouse a and discos and barns and wherever else there were bodies and music, "if I had only known, I would have danced more."