What Her Body Thought: Susan Griffin

This is a brilliant book about the ways the body thinks, what it feels, what it remembers, and what it wishes for.

Susan Griffin writes about repressed memories from childhood,  how healing it is to bring them out of repression, into the light. But the memories that contributed to her debilitation illness are not repressed at all; she remembers them in her mind and her body.

She also writes about suppressed memories--the things a person actually remembers but chooses for one reason or another to keep to herself.  She was abandoned by an alcoholic mother.  The memories were too shameful to share at the time they were happening and for many years afterwards.

The body of a democracy experiences desires as well.  (I'd never thought of it like that before.)  After describing the trauma within her body and within her family, she writes:

"I can feel it in myself now. A longing in my body for a kind of fluidity, a relaxation of boundaries, for trust to be the medium of my existence.  A desire for commerce aimed not at profit but as a way of being, as in the ecology of the forest, a valley, or the larger body of earth, which contains us.  Can a political body long too and, even unaware of its wishes, consume itself chasing phantoms of desire?"

What affects the individual body shapes the way it moves about in the world.  The diseases it is prey to, its gestures and postures, its voice.  What it chooses to do for pleasure; what it avoids.

Imagine that that may also be true of a nation's body, or a village's, or a continent's:  the boundaries we erect, the injustices we accept or overlook, how the powerful regard and treat the less powerful, the collective vision we carry about who we are.

I will be thinking about these pages for a long time, and I'll read certain sections again.  In some places,  Griffin's writing style borders on tedious, but overall, it is a profound, haunting, and unforgettable book.