Mind and Body

OH, BRING back the touchy-feelie days of elementary school, when education had smells, colors and texture. Elmer's glue. Candles and crayons. That heady Magic Marker buzz.

My education has detached itself from physical moorings, set adrift in disembodied lecturing voices and reams of silent pages. I miss construction paper and scissors; science fair projects and fieldtrips. Those things kept my senses alive; involved my body in the invisible struggle of 11-year-old neurons.

Now I sit blearily in morning classes, peering at a white expanse of notebook, the professor's voice floating invisibly above my bowed head. Immobile hours in front of black strings of print straightjacket my nerves. I walk out of the library dazed, moaning like a dead Boris Karloff, text-book scraps and computer paper fluttering from my mummified shell.

DAVE, A suitemate, escapes this deprivation. Hulking and sweaty after soccer, he hunches over a row of glass vials, peering carefully at the bird bones clinking inside. Making a choice he pours a crisscross pile of bones into my hand. They're a creamy pebble grey, polished and crisp. Dave explains the significance of each tiny detail as I tick a fingernail across notches and etched grooves. My fingers and eyes draw me into a miniature world of texture--a jagged cave about a millimeter across signifies a breast bone; a ball-bearing sized nub, an ankle.

Dave, a.k.a. "Birdboy," spends hours with these toothpick bones, sorting and classifying, scratching his fingers as he polishes and examines. Eventually these ossified puzzles flesh out as the vivid watercolor aviary that decorates his room. I envy his tangible academic world--intellectual pursuits he can touch and feel.

Before college, even papers were a physical experience--ink smearing under my dragging hand, thumb cramping, tossing paper basketballs. Now it's efficient electronic blips and whirring magnetic fields, all hanging on the precarious edge of malfunction and evaporation.

WHAT OUR "liberal education" lacks is tactile experiences. Our schooling enforces the classic mind-body split; there is no effort to integrate the two, through craft or application. All our mental activity, focused on two-dimensional ink and paper, leaves the body stranded.

Abstraction is unavoidable, but a constant barrage is numbing. We need to revive the often-ridiculed visual aid. Dave--Birdboy--kept himself happy and sane during a word-processor stint for a Shakespeare class by scrawling verses from favorite plays all over his soccer ball. We laughed at him, but kicking and bouncing Mid-summer's Night Dream around the room kept the computer from sucking Shakespeare dry.

Movies and colorful maps, exhibits and concrete experiments, are like CPR for the senses. Without them, nothing one does with the eyes and hands involves the brain. Education should bring the physical and the mental together. Otherwise the physical becomes something separate, sensory but senseless. We all recognize the dangers mindless physicality: body worship, the descent from the erotic to the obscene. But the mind, separated from the body, also diminishes; intellectualism blurs into asceticism. The isolation of senses from thoughts is as dehumanizing in philosophy as in pornography.