In his Analecta, Paul Valéry argues that we have four bodies. The first is the one we experience in fits and starts, the bottom of our foot on pebbled stone or someone holding our hand. It is the physical one, but somewhat nebulous, as our relationship to it is always a little more foreign than we believe it to be. Unlike the octopus, we have no mind in our limbs, and proximity can feel like infinity. Touch your hands together and tell me what the one hand knows of the other. Each hand is as foreign to the opposite as it would be to some other person’s hand. The same goes for that feeling in your foot, of those pebbles, which we sense all at once, and with more feeling and reality than we do our eyebrow, which is ostensibly closer to what registers feeling and reality in us. In some ways that Taoist koan about the sound of one hand clapping should not be surprising: we are always experiencing that lonely sound because this is how we experience our body, one spot at once, the sensation of our limbs emerging like the curl of an octopus tentacle breaking the water’s surface.
The second body is what we see in the mirror and what others see when they see us or what we want them to see when they see us. It is the personality of the whole, a form we give to the world as ourselves and come to believe to be ourselves. As with the first body, its stability is never as perpetual as we imagine. In fact, it’s the very thing that allows us to pretend that the first body is stable, formed, and this sense of its active reimagining of what it cannot not know disturbs it, adds to the anxiety of it itself being largely dependent on circumstance, both its own body and other bodies and other imaginations of that body. To assuage this tension, we erect ever more mirrors, as if we might trap the idea of us with enough portraits and selfies. And we are mostly successful. Our names stay the same through our life. I am me. You are you. It works as long as we direct our attention outward, away from the first body.
The third body is the body of science. It is the objective body of cells, organs, and tissue. It can be and often is subdivided and cut open to heal the other bodies, but its success is somewhat constrained by those same bodies, which always get in the way, and refuse in our experience of them any kind of happy organization or coherent form.
Military science, which in large part parallels the development of the modern biological sciences, does what it can to make this body our only body. Like all science it succeeds in fits, the current move toward LLMs and mapping algorithms being the most recent success, a minutely divided scale that flattens reality in order to understand and control it and save these other two bodies from themselves. Slowly but surely we give ourselves over to this hive mind, which is, quite literally, a hive, with a collective center we fly away from yet remain half present inside. It is no coincidence that drones —emphatically insectoid and dimly conscious—are the most successful synthetic androids so far developed.
The fourth body is more complicated, or less, depending on your perspective. It is probably best to give an example.
Towards the end of U.S. Army Ranger School, in the final month, the Florida or “swamp” phase, we spent a week at the barracks prepping for our final field exercise. Those who hadn’t been recycled were, at this point, not necessarily unhappy, or uncomfortable, just broken down to the point of a kind of abject, idiotic presence. We managed the weapon cleaning and barrack inspections as first-generation synthetic automatons might, approximately, fumblingly. It wasn’t that we had become true soldiers—whatever this means exactly—we simply had slipped out of ourselves, like a child hiding in a tree as invaders destroyed its home below. We still believed that if we held out, we could make it to the end and come down to the wreckage and still be ourselves.
Likely I was thinking of something along these lines, warming myself at the last embers of my idea of me, when a ranger instructor sensed my distraction and decided to point out my shambolic packing, what I had forgotten, and how I arranged what I had remembered in sad little heaps next to my deflated rucksack. He could have picked anything: my incorrectly bloused uniform, my posture, my face. It didn’t matter. What mattered was he chose me because he felt that my imagination at this moment had slipped too far away. How he guessed this I can’t say. Rilke has a line about the vagueness in the faces of pregnant women. Perhaps my face had this look. Or perhaps it lacked it.
Whatever the case, I could hardly hear him, only just make out the outline of his gestures—furious, overwrought, a pantomime of a pantomime—and his threats on my stupid, wasted life. It reminded me of the night in the second Ranger School phase, in the mountains, when we all wore night vision goggles and the sleep-deprived cadets walked into trees and fell down laughing, hysterical, drunker than they had ever been from alcohol. For some reason I didn’t feel tired then, and I held the other cadets’ hands like lost children, taking them back to the fire positions. I wanted to help this unhappy ranger instructor in the same way, to take his hand, to lead him back to wherever it was we went from to become so unhappy, to some original vain notion of me and us.
But this desire, however it manifested physically in me, only proved to him that he had been right to single me out in the first place. He yelled louder, his face loomed closer, and the spittle and litany of “fucks” broke my fugue state entirely. I experienced sharply his features, the Florida sunlight, the rubbery MRE bags and 550 cord splayed over the grass like the body parts of a murdered American military, the entire American project. My stomach ached. My belt bit into my flesh just above my hip.
He shouted again and again about pride, about self-respect. He wanted to know if I knew what I had done, if I had any idea what this training meant.
I rolled my eyes.
Deployment would bring with it many dangers, but I still think this might have been one of the most dangerous things I did as a soldier. He could have punched me, probably very much wanted to, but I wasn’t worried about that. It still terrifies me to think that he could have kicked me out of formation right then and there, recycled me, sent me back to the beginning of Ranger School, condemned me to wait for the next group to come through to try again.
This would mean two more months without a place for my mind to see itself clearly as a mind, without any way of experiencing my body as a body. Without anything but men like this instructor telling me what to do day in and day out and short nights staring at the dark ceiling left with nothing to think about but the next day and how to do better at it within these barracks that extended all the way to the end of time, which was, if you thought about it long enough, one giant barracks, a vast training grounds preparing us for death.
For a moment, I worried he might very well have a stroke.
I also, slowly, in fits and starts, began to understand why. Everything, all of our ideals, all our remaining American hopes, found their meaning for him in this training before our deployment to Iraq, the current war. Bunker Hill. The Constitution. Capitalism. Civil Rights. Tom Hanks. Due Process. Even the future—the next twenty years, as the country spun further and further into a travesty of whatever we imagined it to be in 2005—found an answer in these routines, this scientific conditioning of a dying body into a kind of eternity, maybe the only transcendence left to people in a data-driven, computer-imagined body politic.
All of it dismissed with my eye roll.
I almost apologized, but that would have made things worse for him and me and so I stayed silent, at attention, waited for him to walk away without a word, as he did, perhaps struck dumb by the sheer scale of geological time and the quaint impression mankind would leave in the fossil record. Then I gathered my heaped belongings from the grass and shoved them into my rucksack, peculiarly aware of the sun, the way my palm created tiny shadows over what I could control and could not.
A pain in my shins woke me up a few days later. My leg slammed against another cypress root disguised by the black swamp water we trudged through. And another. I had legs again. The pain in my back, caused by loose rucksack straps, dissolved into oblivion. My mom, now in her eighties, says that growing old is just pain shifting around from one part of the body to another. In less than a year I would know soldiers that went to the burn units in San Antonio. Perhaps they alone experienced pain everywhere at once. I hope not. I hope they escaped the body entirely, as often as this is possible. Of course, I did not think of them or this as I waded through the dark, glassy water under trees that once stoically watched comically armored Spanish conquistadors drown beneath them, but I did grasp that we have little sense of our bodies as bodies, and even less sense of the self that forms in the gaps between these moments of pain and breaks from pain.
The march stopped abruptly. Some-one had tumbled into the water. We stared dully at the slumped shoulders of the person directly in front of us as those much further into the shadows and the water struggled to rescue the ranger candidate. I shivered and missed the sun that I knew I would regret when it became too hot and thought of how little I thought of snakes and alligators or love and music. Only that bleating pain in my shin and the invisible knobbed root architecture under the water’s surface, dividing me from the end of this instruction, and the shambling motion of our strange procession as it began, and stopped, again.
Valéry calls the fourth body the body whose knowledge would answer the problems implied in the other bodies. It being implicit in them. He also says the other three bodies do not have a ghost of a meaning without admitting a certain inexistence surrounding them. In this view, the fourth body is the very incarnation of the problem presented by the endless questions inspired by the other bodies to cohere. Everything that is, he says, masks necessarily and irrevocably, something that might be.
I hadn’t read Valéry that day in Florida, but I think I felt somehow what Valéry meant by this, what this absence was, the thread holding together all the other three bodies—moments and shapes and mutilated abstractions—bounding them like that swamp did us, a kind of womb of shadow and pain, with our mind, what has not happened yet, and what did not happen, what could still happen, what keeps things happening, looking out from its center.
Michael Carson deployed to Mosul in 2006 with the U.S. Army and now teaches community college in Baytown, Texas.