Bodywork

I recently watched My Left Foot for the first time. And it has caused me to start seriously thinking, in odd ways, about the titular appendage on my own body. About the things I do with it, day in and day out.

After much contemplation, I have concluded that the activities it carries out can be broken down into three main groupings (including estimates of the time dedicated to each activity, which, my maths being awfully shaky, have mostly just been plucked out of the ether):

1) Tapping idly on the ground whilst I sit behind a desk (roughly 60% of the time I'm awake).

2) Walking from room to room, including up stairs (roughly 5% of the time).

3) Tapping idly on the ground whilst I sit on the sofa (roughly 35% of the time).

I don’t, however, use it to take vinyl records from their sleeves and drop them into place on the player, as Daniel Day-Lewis (as Christy Brown) does in the film. Neither do I use it to write, either simple messages or poetry. Or to paint. Or to turn the pages of a book whilst I am reading. Or even really to play football, these days – I am indeed struggling to recall the last time I kicked a ball in anger, or in wonder, or simply out of a passionate need to be part of that game, that sport.

Of course, they do say that necessity is the mother of invention, and perhaps the chief reason I don’t do any of those things with my own left foot is because I don’t have to. Unlike the late Christy Brown, I do not have a condition which renders it most practical to employ my left foot as the chief instrument of my physical work.

And, yet, I haven’t really been doing any of those things with other parts of my body either of late. The record player in my house does not currently work – a fact I could use as a handy excuse to get around this act of laziness – although I doubt I would have used it recently even if it did. Maybe this is down to the fact that the vast majority of my music collection is now located on my computer, available to me at a few clicks of a mouse button. But I don’t think that excuses me either. In fact, I think it makes the situation worse, because I find myself these days constantly choosing the options in life which involve the least movement (well, in most cases…). I find it easier to e-mail a message than to write out a letter and walk to the nearest mailbox with it swinging in my hand. I find it easier to move a couple of analogue joysticks and push a few buttons to shift players around a not-really-there field than to go outside and have a kickabout with an actual football. Granted, again there are probably other reasons I could give for that, such as the fact that it seems unimportant to do so now because a fair percentage of people playing actual football at my age are getting paid metric shitloads of money to do so.

But that isn’t a good enough reason. That is, in fact, the problem.

It just doesn’t seem enough to want to do things, even little things, purely because of the enjoyment you get out of it anymore. It’s not enough to want to use a record player because your dad has an awesome selection of vinyls and because lifting then dropping the needle feels kinda like opening a door at a concert hall, making the music-listening experience feel just that little bit more immediate and visceral and real. Or because you love those first few scratchy sounds before The Beatles’ Hard Day’s Night album starts playing. Perhaps it’s part of being an ‘adult’, especially one so financially challenged as I, but I am beginning to find it increasingly difficult to look beyond those factors, that not-enough-anymore business, when I’m considering what I’ll actually get out of an action. Perhaps the bottom line of such thinking is: if I’m not going to get any reward for this, monetary or otherwise, then why bother?

Why not go the easy route instead?

Why not find everything I need outside of food and drink on the Internet, the great Information Superhighway?

After all – I feel like I’m always telling myself on some strange kind of tape loop – that’s what most other people out there are doing. Because it’s easy.

To be sure, the world of Christy Brown was a very different one in a lot of ways, his life starting in the 30’s in and amongst the backstreets of Dublin, and the reason he felt, and continued to feel, like such an outsider due to his cerebral palsy was perhaps because that world was primarily a physical one. No Internet. Not nearly as many phones. No video games. Just the walls of a house and then the cumulated housewalls of a street. Real fresh air and real raining sky looking down. Real mud. Real bruises from a punch or a bad tackle. Real kisses and real hugs whenever there were kisses and hugs to be had. None of this xoxoxo bullshit. No instant messaging being pulled off the bench as a substitute for proper conversation, that with face to face and eye to eye. Mouth to mouth.

Maybe that’s why Christy Brown felt so compelled to try as hard as he did to find his voice, to undergo seemingly endless hours of speech therapy; to agree to go in goal when his brothers were playing football and use his head to stop any shots that came his way. It could well be that, born today, he would simply have resorted to using computers and the Internet as a means of communication, might never have painted out of frustration or of anger or of love. Might never have written all those poems.

The way that Day-Lewis plays him, though, and the way that he himself comes across from the things that I’ve read, I don’t think that would have been the case. I’d very much like to think it wouldn’t have. Because My Left Foot is one of those rare films that, for me, achieved the glorious feat or being properly inspirational, just through the unvarnished way in which it seeks to tell of one man’s life, in which it educates the viewer as to the complexities of Brown’s existence. It is not simply a standard triumph-over-adversity tale. It is a case of a triumph over normality, of a man wanting at first to be accepted and to fit in, despite his condition, but then finding that his talent allowed him to transcend the norm, allowed him to communicate in more powerful ways ( I haven’t yet checked out too many of his paintings, but his poetry is extraordinary). And, most importantly, despite dark periods, he didn’t let those talents go to waste.

Now, as I’ve said, it’s possible that his physical drive and ambition to communicate more fully with the world was, in some ways, down to the conditions of the society in which he lived. Was because outside is where most of the action was. After all, we humans are, to admittedly varying degrees, products of our environments. That being said, it seems that, these days (a term I am perhaps overusing in this piece, possibly suggesting an oldness, and a grumpiness, that is not entirely mine), too many things take place online, that too much of ‘socialising’ is conducted through social networks, that sites like Facebook, for example, are becoming the hang-out point of choice for a great many people of an evening. Don’t get me wrong, there are advantages to such social networking – the ability to ‘poke’ your friends whilst you chat to them is certainly one. As is the ability to click endlessly through pictures of old nights out with good friends, instead of doing your damnedest to arrange another one. Of course, it is far cheaper than actually doing anything for real, and, if you accidentally say the wrong thing during a ‘conversation’, you can always blame it on your little brother getting on your computer whilst you were elsewhere, using your left foot (and your right one) to walk to another room and fix up a drink. And did I mention ‘poking’?

I’m a hypocrite, though, and I’m sadly, painfully aware of it. I’ve spent a lot of time lately bitching (to myself, mostly) about the Internet, and Facebook in particular, and yet here I am, posting on my blog and no-doubt soon linking to this page on FB. Because the Internet is what is was established to be, more or less. An easy, convenient means of communication. And FB is the main way in which I can (hopefully) keep in touch with a lot of people I might otherwise lose contact with. So, in spite of my ranting and frustration at the system, I will most likely persist with my current level of usage. I will most likely continue to send e-mails, rather than writing out letters, because it is more simple, and allows for messages to reach the intended recipient almost instantly, as opposed to a time-delay dictated by the actions of the postal service, exactly as it was designed to do.

I do want to strive, however, to do more things out in the world, to actually achieve some things physically for a change. Even if, at first, it’s only handwriting more articles before typing them up. Handwriting more of my own poems, so I can get to work compiling another collection following the planned release of my first at the end of this month. Even if it’s just walking outside in the autumn rain more often, coming back cold, wet, miserable and happy that I’ve still got a body to get soaked to the bone.

Because that’s what this is all about, really. I need the actual flesh of my body to feel necessary again. I need to make it work, and then work harder. I need to know and remember my left foot and my right foot and my right shin and my left shin and my knees and thighs and dick and hips and my stomach and chest and left shoulder and right shoulder and my arms and hands and fingers and mouth and tongue and eyes. And I need to make them work.