a body undone living on after great pain

“I’m afraid I’ll stop grieving and equally afraid that I’ll never stop grieving. She takes us to the chasm of our essence.įinally, I present the following, a nuance on the binaries we are forced into during life. The body became “undone”, yet language became complete as Crosby discovered, through the paradox of the paralysis of the body, what it means to truly experience the vulnerability of being human. “We speak of being in a body, as though the self were somehow contained inside a bodily exterior” (p. Her voice resonates in the observation that: As is clearly evident throughout the narrative, it is Crosby’s masterful skill of language that navigated this transformation. Instead, it is about the body transformed. A Body, Undone is not a book about paralysis, about the loss of feeling, the inability to feel physical pain. I experienced a transcendence while reading the book. Her words helped me to regain a sense of living. Crosby’s resonated with me as her words created echoes and magnified the dusty corners where I have been living within myself.

The way we treat our vulnerability, then, is a marker of how we find our completeness.Ī Body, Undone spoke to me. This is the vulnerability of our lives that Crosby sees as signifying our incompleteness. Crosby’s accident shows the fragility of life, and also reveals how our lives can be filled endlessly with triumphs and tragedies, and that these events can happen in any order, at any time, and at any cost. We know that we are living in a new dimension-a different time and space to where we once walked and talked and wrote and sang, and celebrated our stories. We need new concepts, new identities and new sensations to experience the life that we are continue to breathe. We must embrace the fact that we are now in a new territory. We must accept that we can no longer look behind at our past.

We must leave the comfort of our previously held thoughts and beliefs. The book requires the reader to become a traveller. The journey stopped being a physical endeavour, instead reaching plateaus and crevices that became Crosby’s new lived experience. Three miles into the 17 mile bicycle ride that was woven into a larger tapestry of 1000 miles to commemorate her 50 th birthday, the fateful accident occurred. The scene shared is that of Crosby on a cycling ride. There is a paradox in Professor Christina Crosby’s biography A Body, Undone: Living On After Great Pain–the paralysis that constrained her body so suddenly seems to have freed the language that we all possess and contain but which is generally consigned to a particular place in space and time.ĭetails about Crosby’s accident are astute, acute, and actual-there is no reflection, reliving or ruminating.

Christina Crosby, A Body, Undone: Living On After Great Pain.

A body undone living on after great pain