The body is cup. The cliche vessel. A soft conglomerate of fluids and spongy masses: a biological machine. In itself, its incredible, impressive, but pretty meaningless. The only thing that makes it anything but a robot is a completely in-tangible quality. Call it life? call it will? call it a soul? Minus the religious connotations if you want. Flesh, no matter how much we obsess over it, is really only a container for whatever lives inside. A container for souls.
Maybe thats the reason we obsess about it so much. Because we want our outside to look like–or at least correlate in some way to–what our soul/mind feels like. We’re upset about getting older because we still feel like we can conquer the world inside. We style our hair a certain way because it makes us feel stronger, or peppy-er, or more attractive. Closer to the way we feel inside. But this is inevitably frustrating. Flesh can never truly map something as nebulous as a mind. The same way that a map can never completely represent the geography that you experience in real time, or that exists in a historical context. A body, by its very presence, sets us up for failure.
I saw a documentary on PBS a while back, and I’ve also heard this in basic psych classes…that evolutionarily, women unconsciously look for men with the best genes so that their children will be strong and healthy. There are a bunch of physical traits that make these biologically/genetically superior men more attractive, this embedded chip is there to make sure that the human race continues to progress and live longer each generation, and there are supposedly a bunch of studies to back up this claim, (which of course I plan to go into in more concrete terms).
It seems that this stems from the same old idea: that we equate external appearances with what they contain. We’re attracted to people physically because we believe that that glint in their eye, that smile, that dimple, that facial structure, that physique somehow represents who that person is inside the casing. And that their attractive genes will make them good DNA sources for offspring, if you’re into the evolutionary explanation of life (i know some people still haven’t jumped onto that bandwagon)…But regardless of political, scientific or religious views, flesh is deceiving.
And some people learn this and accept this, and move on, others don’t. But every day, people stay with, marry, have children with other people that have either serious illnesses in their families, or debilitating illnesses themselves, and I’m no exception to that. The guy I’m pairing myself off with comes from a family with just about every health problem in the medical books.
My question is: Is love getting in the way of evolutionary wisdom? Or does this point to an underlying knowledge that there is something more important than the propagation of a more perfect fleshy being each generation? That ultimately, maybe progress is not all that important because we’re going to go one way or another, whether it be heart-attack, cancer, organ failure—and what’s more important is the relationships we have while we’re still here.
But knowing that I’m setting up my future children for horrible illnesses due to picking a mate that has these genes (combined with the defaults I bring with me), what kind of future mother does that make me? By going with what my mind and soul tells me, am I ultimately betraying the flesh of those to come?
This is all pretty nebulous. I’m going to pare it down a bit and figure out where the heat lies, but these are just some thoughts I’ve been shooting around for the past week and a half.
Bres
