Bernard Cooper’s “Maps to Anywhere,” a compilation of creative essays from his own life experiences, is so full of brilliant writing that it is only prudent to discuss his work for the second week in a row. This time I zeroed in on a specific essay entitled Temple of the Holy Ghost. It’s fascinating how he tells a story in the first paragraph about a childhood project that his mother thought him too young for, the assembly of a body with all its organs showing, and then uses that story to illustrate his feeling of inferiority in his own skin twenty some years later. The model was called the Visible Man, and “he was meant to be assembled by an older boy. Or at least a boy of ten who wouldn’t lose patience inserting the brain, pinning the lungs like wings in the chest, finding a place to fit the heart” (Cooper 83). Like the Visible Man he yearned to be free from the body that holds him together and would “…brace [himself] against the bed and didn’t want to be in a body, even a young one” (83).
Sometimes I find my own body confining because it is so weak in nature, not as strong as I would wish it to be due to a chronic illness, and limiting because it has lost the youth it had only a few years ago. At twenty five years old this is disconcerting. The funny thing is, is that Bernard Cooper didn’t even want the young body he had, perhaps not in the literal sense, but in the sense that he wished to exist outside it for awhile, outside his life that came with certain predictabilities. He stands in front of his mirror as a grown man and imagines his skin disappearing, or rather becoming translucent to all that exists beneath it, and he “says [his] name and want[s] to be contained within that exhalation, traveling up the esophagus, escaping out of [his] own mouth, disembodied at last, a pronunciation, a vibration rising in the room, and assuming, everywhere, the shape of air” (Cooper 83).
To be air is to be free. To dwell within a body is to dwell within all that makes up the person: mind, body and soul. It’s interesting that Cooper entitled this essay Temple of the Holy Ghost because nowhere in the text is there reverence for his own body that from a Christian perspective houses the Holy Spirit after salvation in Christ. He would rather exist at times outside himself, which he clearly explains would be an escape, even as a small child. He would rather not have the responsibility of caring for his temple; instead he would rather have the freedom to exist as unhindered as he can, even though we all know that is not fully possible outside of death, when we inevitably shed the body we are born into and take on eternity with it left behind.
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