Hello, everyone.
Since last year, I’ve been writing a series titled “My Thumbs Are Missing.” I’ve decided to revise that series and post it here as “In Search of Lost Thumbs.”
The first three will be available in English for free. But number four and on will require a subscription. Please register if you find them interesting.
All right, first let’s ease our way in with a quick anecdote, what in rakugo they call a makura.
Missing Thumbs
It was back in March of 2020 during a talk with Asa Ito, who wrote Domoru karada (A body that stutters) and Kioku suru karada (When a body memorizes), that I came up with the phrase, “My thumbs have gone missing.” This is what I said:
“My knees, elbows, shoulders, and so on all have things to say. It’s always so noisy. Like there’s a meeting going on in my brain.
“My thumbs tend to go missing, so I can’t grab cups very well. Every time, I have to ask, ‘Where’d my thumbs go?’ It requires a conversation.”
I was giving a rough sketch of my everyday experience, but Ito and everyone in the audience had question marks on their faces. Or rather, their entire bodies were question marks as they looked back at me. That’s when I realized, “Oh? So that’s not how it is for everybody?”
I have a lot of bugs. Formal words like “mental illness” or “impaired physical function” can’t really encompass the issues I experience on a daily basis. So I’ll just describe the kinds of things that happen to me:
*Everyone can mount a bike that they’re used to riding. I think I can, too, and yet once every few times I try to get on, I misjudge the distance and bang my shin on the frame.
*When transferring an empty cup to the side of the table, I’ll knock over the wine bottle and other glasses.
*Or I’ll bump the cup I’m holding into something and break it.
*When I’m mincing something, I’m liable to slice into my finger at full speed.
*When I hand-wash towels or T-shirts, I end up ripping them while wringing them out.
*Even on a path where there is plenty of room for two people to pass by each other, I’ll end up bumping into the other person. Or, I’ll try to get through a gap that is obviously too small.
Writing this is bringing back a lot of memories. In middle school, when I was in judo club, we learned a choke hold. I did it on myself till I blacked out and collapsed. When I regained consciousness, an older kid in the club was annoyed with me. “Normally if it feels that bad, you let go.”
As you can see through these examples, I have trouble controlling my actions. I tend to over- or under-do things to the point of being awkward.
Why do I move in such a disorganized way? Because I have the sense that my body is variously sticking out, retracting, hurting, or being distant—a sort of emptiness. That gets in the way no matter what I do.
Fingers and Feet Have Things to Say
I said, “My body is variously” because words like “parts” don’t capture it, and because it’s been suggested that perhaps it would be better not to say it that way.
If you ask me who gave me that opinion, I’d answer with a straight face, “My fingers, feet, and so on.” It’s my fingers and feet and so on who made the request. You may wonder what I’m talking about. I’ll explain more later, but for now, let’s clean up the topic of “parts.”
For example, there are many people with stiff shoulders, but there’s no one who is sore only in the section of their body called the shoulder, right? In the first place, it’s not as if a shoulder can be removed cleanly from the body as its own part. In the same way, there are no dotted lines forming the boundaries between shoulder, chest, and arm; they’re smoothly connected.
But that doesn’t mean your shoulder is your chest, and the fact that we have different words to talk about them means they are distinct; we don’t confuse them. They’re connected but separate.
The view that leans on this separateness makes convenient use of the word “parts.”
If it hurts, you massage it, or put a compress on it, paying attention only to that part. It seems to me that dividing ourselves up like that is related to the way we learned to look at the human body via the knowledge gained by studying anatomy.
These days, it’s common sense to see the body as a whole made up of parts. But that makes us sound like cars, where broken bits can be popped in and out and replaced as necessary; the natural result is that our bodies are treated as objects.
Isn’t That Alienation?
We don’t feel great when people treat us like objects. If someone says, “You’re replaceable!” you get angry and feel insulted. “I’m not a thing! I’m a person!” you might protest.
Being treated as an object is enough to upset us, but for some reason we turn around and treat our own bodies as things, ignoring what our shoulders, feet, and the rest are telling us.
“No, I listen. When they say they hurt, I go to a specialist for treatment,” some might say.
But really, doesn’t that mean you’re having someone else handle your hurting body and ignoring the direct complaint? Of course, there’s nothing wrong with going to a specialist for advice.
But if someone asked you, “How am I lately?” wouldn’t you think, I have no idea?
“I’m not you, so I don’t know,” you might reply. Isn’t it the same thing to hold out your hurting body and say, “This is in pain, so please take a look. What do you think?”
Body Diversity
I’m sure many people have had a massage that felt good at the time but didn’t actually resolve their stiffness or swelling. There are probably any number of reasons one could offer for that, such as stress or slouching at your work desk.
But the underlying reason is that despite the necessity of the pain, you didn’t listen to the complaint, so it won’t go away.
It hurts, but you ignore it. Or maybe you try to suppress it, thinking, “I need to be tougher.” That’s incredibly unfair, and I think ignoring it on purpose is torture.
You separate the spot that feels buggy and treat it as a broken part that isn’t related to you, “a healthy person.” The pains are actually a demonstration against the unfairness of being treated as parts.
But when consciousness is in charge and we think, “My body should work how I want it to,” the protests annoy us and become the target of suppression. What an undemocratic, nondiverse view of the body.
Instead of thinking of a body that can be smoothly controlled as what it is—an impossible ideal—we call it fitness.
To appear healthy, the system run by our consciousness works day and night to erase any little oddities or pains. In response to such treatment, the body variously complains in quiet voices: cold fingers, an ache like a thorn that can’t be removed—things that may not be immediate problems, but nonetheless chip away at our happiness in daily life.
Then the I of our consciousness reacts by quarantining the owners of the little voices as “sick things.” Smooth control doesn’t lend an ear to the voices that pop up as you make your way through the day.
Well, my childhood was devoid of anything approaching a smoothly controlled body. I was awkward and disorganized. With a heart and body that seemed ready to go flying apart, there were even periods during which I was incapable of talking to people.
A consciousness that wanted smooth control met a body that was clearly not going to obey so easily. I was on both sides, stuck in the middle for a long time.
But now I tend to favor the disorganized, awkward side. That bias ensures space to listen to all the voices inside me.
Trying to Live Naturally Unwieldy
At some point, my thumbs went “missing.” Making a fist was really hard—my thumbs wouldn’t come in. It’s still like that. The feeling is that they’re sticking out, always flushed with warmth. Every time they move, there’s a hitch.
I can’t do a thing about it. And I realized that it isn’t just my thumbs—my body sticks out all over, trying to move in a different direction than I have in mind. The past few years I’ve realized that it’s telling me, “No, not like that,” or, “Pay more attention to this.”
Before, I used to try to get my unwieldiness under control with the self-righteousness of a government man. When I stopped doing that, I began to hear the voices of my pain.
This series of essays is about accepting your unwieldy body as unwieldy instead of trying to control it. What does that way of looking at your body do for you?
Some people may worry that leaving unwieldy things as they are will lead to chaos. But life in the universe has probably never once been chaos, so I believe that no matter what happens, until we die, we’ll be here living.
Translated by Emily Balistrieri
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