Last week two different guys gestured toward my cane and asked, “Is that permanent?”
I don’t know how to answer anymore, because I don’t know if this condition lasts for the rest of my life. Will my abject weakness, this lack of mine, always mark me, define me, by forever limiting every movement I make?
By now I can fall and expect to get myself up off the sidewalk if there’s something vertical I can crawl to and use my arms to leverage my legs. I can approach any curb, venture even flimsy chairs, climb most stairways, although I have to make certain forensic calculations beforehand and have a grip on the cane or the seat or the handrail as I commit to the close observation and tightly coordinated motions these mundane objects—mostly invisible to normal people—still require of me. To stand with my shoulders back, to look up and see the sky, just to walk down the street, these are difficult propositions that I have to think about before engaging the appropriate muscles.
My body is then in a constant state of alert, of preparation for my next move, because my mind is: I’m too self-conscious to be at ease, let alone nimble or graceful. I’m always on the lookout for an escape route, an easier way to navigate what the foreshortened horizon holds. But when alarm sets in, as when, for example, a deranged homeless man tries to collect the ransom on his kidnapped soul from me, or a car isn’t slowing down at the intersection even though the light is red and I’m in the middle of it, or a gaggle of high-spirited teenagers knocks me sideways on the subway platform, my instinctual response isn’t fight or flight. It can’t be, because my instincts are useless—I know I can’t stand my ground, and I can’t run. All I can do is turn away, get out of the way of he world, and hope for the best.
In this elementary sense, I can’t use the most basic instrument of liberation available to human beings, mere physical mobility, to protect myself, or, more to the point, to separate myself from others. Even before we realize that words can differentiate us from the external world, by naming and categorizing things, collecting and sorting the artifacts at hand into, say, this kind of tree and that forest—even before language teaches us to retrieve the parts of our experience that we once perceived as indissoluble dimensions of our own bodies—we can move in such a way as to place distance between ourselves and the invasive, omnipotent creatures who keep us, and, if we’re lucky, care for us.
First we crawl, then we walk, then we run, and we do it out of fear, to begin with, of absorption or obliteration by these god-like giants. The fear passes, but the urge to separate ourselves from Others never goes away, and it manifests as the restless urge to get away from them. That spastic urge is the bodily expression of both the desire for and the realization of freedom. It still informs the modern liberal notion of liberty as the individual’s freedom from any and all prior or external constraint.
It’s an inadequate notion, of course, because it is among other things both contemptuous and corrosive of the traditional social bonds—we’re now accustomed to calling these “norms” because they seem at once so necessary and so quaint—which keep civilization intact. But its irrational roots in the desperate need for physical mobility remain as the proximate cause of our adherence to individual freedom as such.
I feel this need, perhaps now more than ever, but I can’t act on it. I’m a prisoner of my own body. That’s not the complaint of someone slowed down by an aging body, who has noticed that it’s been a while since he was taking the stairs two at a time, or that the last time he took a jump shot it was 2012 and there was nobody to witness its perfection. It’s the complaint of someone who has to wonder if this new, seemingly absolute inertia is permanent.
Next time somebody asks, I guess I’ll say, “Yes.’