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<\/p>\nBy Sam Glover.<\/p>\n
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In being granted a body I\u2019ve come to feel in some way wronged. No. I\u2019ve always felt as though in being given a body I\u2019ve been wronged. No. Whoever provided me with a body has wronged me in some way. No. Over time I\u2019ve come to feel that my body has wronged me. No. Since infancy my body has excelled in doing me wrong, outdoing itself with the years. No. I cannot formulate it properly. Let me reduce what I am trying to say to its most rudimentary form: me = body = wronged. <\/em>This is still not right. There is something missing. Scrap that equation. It is not that my body has wronged me, it has no ill intent, it is behaving as programmed, it is secondary to the matter at hand, yes, it is not my body that has wronged me, but who or what granted or provided or gave me one. They are the culprit. The blame lies with them. I\u2019ve known it since I was a child, when I burnt my hand trying to take hold of the flame of a candle. I remember it was the only lightsource in the room, how strange dark and orange everything looked in its glow. My shadow on the wall. My infant brain took the flame to be something solid, like a bead or a stone, which could be grasped. I reached out to hold it and seared my palm, extinguishing it, plunging the room into darkness, the sound of my crying. I knew then, and it has only become clearer since, that I had been wronged, or tricked, by whoever it was that had provided me with this physical form, this outfit of flesh and feeling. But who is to blame, who granted me this, has become no clearer to me. You might say that my parents provided me with a body, or that their bodies combined to create mine; more specifically you might say that my mother granted me a body or, yet more specifically, that my mother\u2019s body granted me a body, but you would be wrong. My parents were a pivotal link in the chain, but they were only go-betweens, middlemen, as it were. They too had been wronged in their own way. No. Who or what provided me with a body preceded them, pulling the strings. Who or what had provided me with a body had provided them with bodies, too: they were likewise tricked. At night I would try and look at my body but it defied exploration, always appearing to me from the same angle. I could never look at it in its entirety, even with the aid of mirrors. I began to realise I could not see or touch my body because it was my body that was doing the seeing or touching. I would catch a glimpse of my body and say that\u2019s not me<\/em>, my body\u2019s not mine, in being given this encumbrance I\u2019ve been tricked, but by whom, and who or what am I without it?<\/p>\n It was then that I was provided with another body, a second body, an assistant. To the eye it looks no different to the first, having the same features, the same ailments, the same peculiarities, the same drives, the same hungers, the same thirsts. But through the eyes of my second body I am able to observe the first. I have been able thereby to gaze upon my body from a distance and say without discomfort that\u2019s not me<\/em>, knowing I had an assistant beside me, a backup or reserve anatomy. Through this intermediary I can pose questions to the first body, I can cross-examine and investigate it. But it has never returned me an answer to any of my questions as to who furnished its form, its bones and organs. It couldn\u2019t provide me with an answer as to who had provided me with this thing that was not me but from which I could not separate. My assistant began to grow frustrated. It wanted to know just as I did how and why I had acquired this skeleton and what this acquisition implied. But with time I began to feel much the same about the second body as I did the first. It was an additional encumbrance, making things not clearer but more obscure. The problems it attempted to solve it only multiplied. I was doubly tricked. But now that I had been granted a second body I was unable to get rid of it. What would I become without its assistance? And yet it only replicated the initial problem. When I was in my second body, observing the first, I was unable from that vantage point to observe my second body in its entirety. The problem had only been deferred, or displaced. Whenever I was inside the second body it would withdraw from my inspection, it would recede, occluded, always on the margins of my perceptions, a partial glimpse on my visual periphery. In fact it became more of a burden than my original body. In being granted a body I had been wronged, as my parents had been wronged in being granted theirs, but in being granted a second body with which to better observe this wrongdoing I had been wronged once more. The longer I dwelt within the shell of the assistant or attendant, orbiting the figure that had been my initial dwelling, the less I could deny that I needed another assistant, a third body, with which to examine both the second and the first. Of course the conundrum of this succession could easily stretch out infinitely. I would need a fourth to observe the third and a fifth to observe the fourth. There was no limit to the extent that I could externalise myself. But there was another process underway, adjacent but not reducible to the issue of my being wronged.<\/p>\n As I looked for ever greater durations through the eyes of my assistant, I found it increasingly difficult to re-enter my original body, to regain access; it became so distant that I no longer recognised it as the body I had been provided with. I no longer had such drive to question and observe it. I no longer felt wronged by it, because it had been discarded; in fact I came to feel as though I had wronged it instead. My attention turned solely upon the attendant who had been my accomplice in discarding the original body. I laid blame upon the assistant and was granted a third body with which to conduct an investigation into the crimes of the second. Together we assembled the evidence and charged the second body with an offense, the principal actor in a murder. We handcuffed its wrists and led the body into the interrogation room and from there into a holding cell. The questioning was protracted, circular, and drawn-out night after night, extending into the early hours, and even though the process tired everyone involved, it seemed as if there could be little doubt that the court would issue a guilty verdict when the time came for trial. The trail of violence that brought us to this moment was too evident to be denied, the first body discarded somewhere, the second body imprisoned, myself wronged and my thoughts no clearer as to the nature or identity of the wrongdoer, and the third body, my most recent assistant, now under suspicion for the use of heavy-handed interrogation techniques in extracting the confession. At some point in the investigation we both realised that little progress could be made without subjecting the second body to pain. Observation would have to be replaced with dissection. But whereas I approached this fact with reluctance, my assistant leapt at it with eagerness. It pleased him to bruise the second body. But now that this torture has come to light, the entire proceeding has been called into doubt. The court cannot convict an accused individual based on forced confession; our once unassailable case is falling apart and in fact we now face an investigation into our investigation. It may end up with the second body being exonerated and the assistant being charged with me as an accomplice. I came to realise, too, that while there was a thrill in hurting the second body, just as there had been in discarding the first, I couldn\u2019t commit these acts without damaging myself. While we were ostensibly separate beings, we were not unlinked. I found bruises on my own body after the assistant damaged the flesh of the second. Similarly, I was in custody with my assistant, sharing his cell, just as I was lying in the ditch beside the discarded remnants of my long-lost first body. We were all webbed together. Meanwhile the wrongdoer who had provided me with this body, with these bodies, was somewhere out there in the world free and unpunished and unscathed, continuing to plot against me. Only recently have I received one of its threats: namely that if I have been so wronged in being granted a body, the only way to correct that wrong would be to deprive me of one entirely. Its tone has grown impatient. And yet is it so na\u00efve of me to think of this as a sincere attempt to redress my<\/em> grievances? I can only wait for the moment when this body that I was given will be taken away. Perhaps then I will come to understand for certain whether my suspicions were well-founded, whether being granted a body was truly the basis for my condition of being wronged. I know that it will happen, but I do not know when.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/glover.jpg\")
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