What I Loved
long. I noticed a few partly burned rags and picked one up, part of an athletic sock. Green shards of a broken bottle were scattered among bits of paper, and then I saw a piece of the incompletely burned box—the empty doughnut box. I could still read a few letters on the label: ENTE.
Mark had lied to me. He had quoted Violet so smoothly. He had smiled so easily. It had never occurred to me to doubt him, but even more curious was the fact that if he had told me he had eaten the doughnuts, I wouldn't have cared. When I bought them, I had been thinking of him. I held the bit of cardboard in my hand and looked over the bleak landscape of lower Manhattan's roofs, with their rusted water towers and peeling tar. A wan sun was trying to break through the clouds and a wind had started to blow. I swept the ash and glass into an old grocery bag someone had abandoned on the roof, and as I watched my hands turn gray from the ashes, I had an unexpected feeling of guilt, as though I were somehow implicated in Mark's lie. When I left the roof, I didn't add the piece of burned box to the bag with the rest of the garbage. I walked downstairs and carefully deposited what was left of it in my drawer.
I said nothing to Bill and Violet about the fire. Mark must have been glad that I didn't mention it, must have felt he had an ally in Uncle Leo downstairs, and that's how I wanted it. The fire incident receded the way dreams often do, leaving behind it no more than a sensation of vague discomfort. I seldom thought about it, except when I opened my drawer to inspect my collection, and then I wondered why I had decided to keep that piece of cardboard.
I didn't move it, however, and I didn't throw it away. Some part of me must have felt that it belonged there.
In the fall of 1991, the University of Minnesota Press published Locked Bodies: An Exploration of Contemporary Body Images and Eating Disorders . As I read Violet's book, the missing doughnuts and the burned box floated back into my consciousness from time to time. The book began with simple questions: Why are thousands of girls in the West starving themselves now? Why are others gorging and vomiting? Why is obesity on the rise? Why did these once rare diseases become epidemics?
"Food," Violet wrote, "is our pleasure and our penance, our good and evil. Like hysteria a hundred years ago, it has become the focus of a cultural obsession that has infected huge numbers of people who never become seriously ill with eating disorders. Fanatical running, the rise of the health club and the health-food store, Rolfing, massage, vitamin therapy, colonics, diet centers, bodybuilding, plastic surgery, a moral horror of smoking and sugar, and a terror of pollutants all testify to an idea of the body as extremely vulnerable—one with failing thresholds, one that is under constant threat."
The argument continued for almost four hundred pages. The first chapter served as a historical introduction. It ran quickly through the Greeks and the ideal bodies of their gods, lingered for a while on medieval Christianity, its female saints and cult of physical suffering and the broader phenomena of plagues and famines. It touched on neoclassical Renaissance bodies and then the Reformation's suppression of the Virgin and her maternal body. It galloped through eighteenth-century medical drawings and the dissection obsessions born of the Enlightenment and eventually made its way to hunger artists and to the starving girls of Dr. Lasègue, the physician who had first used the word "anorexia" to describe their illness. In passing through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, Violet noted Lord Byron's fasts and binges, J. M. Barrie's intractable self-denial, which may have stunted his growth, and Binswanger's case study of Ellen West, a tormented young altruist who died of starvation in 1930, when anorexia was still considered extremely rare.
Violet insisted that our bodies are made of ideas as much as of flesh, that the contemporary obsession with thinness can't be blamed on fashion—which is merely one expression of the wider culture. In an age that has absorbed the nuclear threat, biological warfare, and AIDS, the perfect body has become armor—hard, shiny, and impenetrable. She marshaled evidence from exercise tapes and advertisements for programs and machines, including the telling phrases "buns of steel" and "bulletproof abs." Saint Catherine starved against church authority for Jesus.
Weitere Kostenlose Bücher