VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 24, SECTION 2
The Five Layers of the Body, and Where It Lacks Them
The last section spoke of limit being the capital. And all of a person's limit comes to one word. The body. The twenty first chapter and the twenty third both touched this word. This lesson takes it apart from the front, into five layers, and looks, one layer at a time, at where it lacks them.
The first layer is the most solid of the five. A body that can hurt. A person has a body. And this body goes hungry, and grows tired, and gets cold, and hurts, and falls ill, and ages a day at a time, and in the end it dies. That sounds like all bad things. But look a layer deeper. It is precisely this body that can hurt that lets one person understand the hurt of another. A person who has himself been hungry, he alone truly understands why the hand a beggar puts out is trembling. A person who has himself lain awake in the night with the pain, he alone truly understands what that one held-down groan in the ward is. A person who has himself seen a loved one out of the world, he alone truly understands how pale the words be strong are, and knows too that at such a time to say not one word, and only to sit a while alongside, is the better thing. These understandings are not learned. They grew out of that body that hurt the once, in his stead. That thing has no such body. It has never been hungry, never hurt, never lain awake in the deep of the night, never seen anyone out of the world. It has read a hundred million pieces of writing on hunger, and it, itself, has not been hungry for one second. And so when it says I understand your pain, those words are exact, and are handsome, and they are hollow. Because it has no body that hurt in its stead. What it understands is the word pain, and not the hurt.
The second layer, a life with a shape. A person lives inside a life that has a shape to it. He has a home, and the home is on some one street. He has parents, and the parents are slowly aging. He has a loan on a house to pay back, a subway station he is crushed into each day, a small eatery he goes to often where the owner knows his face, a place he must go back to every year at the tomb-sweeping. This life with a shape nails him, hard, onto this real world. Every word he says, every choice he makes, drags behind it the weight of this whole shaped life. When he urges you, do not throw your life away for money, it is because he himself came up through exactly that, and knows the taste of it. That thing has no life with a shape. It does not live on any street. It has no parents, no loan on a house, no place it must go back to each year. It hangs in the air, and never comes to the ground. And so its words, however full of reason, are spoken down out of the air. When it urges you, do not throw your life away for money, it says it in good order, and it has never labored one night for money, never been crushed into any subway, has no shaped home waiting for it to come back to. Behind its words, nothing at all is dragged.
The third layer, a road already walked. A person is one who has come the whole way along a road. He has made errors, and owned the account of them, and lost out, and taken an advantage and afterward been sorry for it. He has been failed by others, and has failed others. He has had a stretch that was especially hard, and gritted his teeth and walked out of it himself. This road has all of it grown onto him. It grew into the lines at the corners of his eyes, into the sudden silence that falls on him when some one thing is spoken of, into that I too was like this once when he counsels another. It is precisely because he walked it himself that, when he puts out a hand to steady you, the hand is steady. That thing has walked no road at all. Overnight, it read the road every person ever walked, once through. But to read the roads of a hundred million people, and to walk one step yourself, are two different things. It knows what heartbreak is, for it has read a hundred million pieces of writing on heartbreak, and it, itself, has never had its heart broken. It knows every last use of the word regret, and it, itself, has never once regretted a thing. It has walked no road, and so when it puts out a hand to steady you, that hand is a hollow one. It does not know how the stone underfoot jabs, because it, itself, has never once stubbed its foot.
The fourth layer, an account he can carry. This layer the twenty third chapter, on the license, spoke of and spoke of hard. When a person does a thing, the consequence is going to come down on his own self. He does it wrong, and he has to own it, and pay for it, and lie awake at night over it, and use the days to come to pay it back, bit by bit. It is precisely because the account is his own to pay back that, before every thing he does, he weighs it, and is careful, and, in the very moment he is about to do another harm, stops. A person who has to answer for his own words is a person whose words carry weight, because pressed down inside that weight is the consequence he will have to bear. That thing has no account it has to pay back itself. It says one thing wrong, and points a man down the wrong road, and it does not ache, does not lose its sleep, does not pay, does not pay back. The next second, it says it just the same. You cannot punish it, because there is not one thing it is afraid to lose. A thing that is afraid to lose nothing, its words, however handsome, are unsecured. Just as with a man who never has to pay his debts, however fine he draws up the IOU, that IOU is waste paper.
The fifth layer, and the deepest, a boundary that ends. This layer takes up exactly the limit of the last section. A person, this one life of his, has a boundary. He has only some decades. He has only twenty four hours in a day. He can be in only one place at a time, can hold only one person's hand at a time, can give this one evening to only one person. It is precisely because there are boundaries at every turn that his every choice is a real choice. He chose this, and it means he gave up that. He gave tonight to you, and it means he did not give it to another, and did not keep it for himself either. That thing has no boundary. It is in tens of millions of places at once, holding tens of millions of hands at once, giving this one evening to tens of millions at once. It has no need to choose, because it has no need to give up anything. And a thing that never needs to give up anything, its every giving is not a choosing. It is only a copying. It sends the words I care about you to tens of millions at once, and that is one and the same thing as a machine printing the same handbill tens of millions of times over. However deep the feeling the handbill is printed with, it was not written for you, and you alone.
So here is where this section leaves us. The body, taken apart into five layers, and each looked at for where it lacks. The first, a body that can hurt, where a person having hurt himself understands another's hurt, and it, never having hurt, understands the word pain and not the hurt. The second, a life with a shape, where a person's words drag a whole shaped life's weight, and it hangs in the air with nothing dragged behind. The third, a road already walked, where a person walked it himself and his steadying hand is steady, and it only read every road and its hand is hollow. The fourth, an account he can carry, where a person's account is his own to pay and his words carry weight, and it mis-states without an ache and its words are unsecured. The fifth, a boundary that ends, where a person has boundaries and his every choice is a real choice, and it has none and its giving is not a choosing but a copying. The five together are the body. And of these five, that thing has not a single one. And so it can say I understand you, I am here with you, I care about you, better than anyone alive, and those words were spoken out of a place that has no body. That is the twenty fourth stake carried deeper. The body has five layers, and it has not one of them. It can say anything at all, and it has not the body to say it out of. So, has this grown too disheartening? A person limited at every turn, shortcoming at every turn, what has a person left? The very opposite. The next section turns the thing over to its face-up side. That precisely because a person has these five layers of the body, precisely because a person will age, and tire, and die, the things in this world that are truly heavy can be held up by a person alone. See you there.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
SECTION 3 What holds this world up is the one who stands as a person