Bodies of Thought

We speak of the dog with the sore foot or the bird with the broken wing. But the dog does not think of itself in those terms, or the bird. To the dog, when it tries to walk, there is simply , I am in pain, to the bird, when it launches itself into flight, simply I cannot.

With us it seems to be different. The fact that such common locutions as "my leg," "my eye," "my brain," and even "my body" exist suggests that we believe there is some non-material, perhaps fictive, entity that stands in the relation of possessor to possessed to the body's "parts" and even to the whole body. Or else the existence of such locutions shows that language cannot get purchase, cannot get going, until it has split up the unity of experience.

Diary of a Very Bad Year, J.M. Coetzee

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