When Mind and Body Become Foreigners

by Shaili Shah

While reading L’Intrus I kept thinking about metamorphosis. We start out together, a mind and a body somehow joined. However, as time goes on, we begin to change independently of each other and develop our own memory. In a way our selves are constantly being transferred into different versions of our bodies. One example I have of this is when I hit my growth spurt the summer after the 8th grade. Though I had been with my body the whole time, my mind had to adjust to my new proportions. I tripped over my own feet and when I played tennis, I kept hitting the frame of my racket instead of the strings because I wasn’t used to how long my arms were. My body knew it had grown because it could physically be seen, but my mind still thought nothing had changed and I was the same size. Though no external intruders were introduced to the relationship, the mind and body had become foreigners to each other. In L’Intrus, Nancy was struggling with this same concept. After having trouble with his heart, he began to question “to what degree was it an organ of ‘mine,’ my ‘own’.” However, in his case, there was an external intruder introduced. The heart he was given had its own life before joining his, it was completely unknown to his self and his body. As his son said, he had become “the living dead.” The history experienced by the past life, the new heart, was just as important as the future it would have in his body.

At the same time there is a metamorphosis on what it means to be human. As technology advances our bodies become a piece of machinery that didn’t even exist until recently. Nancy writes, “had I lived earlier, I would dead; later, I would be surviving in a different manner. But ‘I’ always finds itself caught in battlements and gaps of technical possibilities.” As technology progresses and our understanding of sciences expands, I wonder if this increases the gap between what we understand as mind and body. Does the ability to mix and match our organs and introduce inorganic replacements into our bodies make us more detached to our physical being? Or does it make us appreciate them more because they can help us understand each other better? These are the same questions we ask when determining whether an artificial extension on our lives are worth the new problems it may cause. In a way our knowledge has given us the ability to choose our intruders. The effects may not always be welcome, but we have a preconception of what they will be like. “Man becomes what he is: the most terrifying and troubling technician. . . He who is capable of the origin and the end.”