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“The disembodied lady” is the third story of the book “The man to mistook his wife for a hat” The story is about the loss of proprioception: that continuous flow of sensation that muscles, sinews and articulations send to the brain allowing it to recognise and constantly adjust the position of the body, to control and generate motion and to ensure balance as well as the awareness of its position in space. To lose proprioception is therefore literally to get lost, in space, to be incapable of feeling oneself, to have no idea of where your feet or your head are. It is a totally unconscious sixth sense. Sack’s patient defined herself as “disembodied”, “deprived”. She was unable to hold her body erect or to perform any action, speech included. The only way of recovering her bodily movements was to shift the entire concentration of perception onto the sense of sight and substitute her lost co-ordination with real visual co-ordinates. The certainty of possessing a hand, its localisation, the ability of performing any action with it depends exclusively on the possibility of seeing it: watching her own feet and moving them one after another so as to walk, watching her own arm and being able to stretch it or opening and closing her hand to grab an object. Closing the eyes or entering into darkness meant inexorably losing oneself and falling, as if imaginary visual threads that guided action, that recreate the lost body were suddenly severed. I took this photography in September 1995. It is the only image I kept from six years of work (1995 to 2001). To convey the idea of disembodiment portraying a body or a part of it is impossible; no shape is perceptively empty. Therefore I have capsized the sensorial relationship. Having no perception of space is, to a certain point, like losing space as a location, not to be able to enter space and live safely in it. In a dark unfathomable place our perception is uncertain, a staircase in the dark is a deadly trap and the absence of limits and confines put all our sensorial abilities under stress. It is like stretching our hand out towards the infinite while being totally afraid and ignorant of it. |