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Show 69. come to know ourselves. Our torpid souls are hopelessly entangled with our torpid bodies, and not only is there a confused mingling of our own souls with our own bodies, but we hardly possess a separate existence from our neighbors. Sometime after he published this essay, Muir blotted this whole passage, and attempted to deemphasize the "capacity that our flesh has for knowledge," but he was deeply troubled, because sometimes he thought his body had been so completely and so mindlessly in control, that he trusted it against his own advice. His body acted intuitively, and seemed not to require that he scrutinize the rock, or exercise his will at all. The line between body and rock seemed to disappear, along with the separation of "objective" and "subjective" experience. His wild body was quite simply a part of the wilderness which he had learned to trust. But the wild body was a very special and highly attuned organism, not to be mistaken for the tame one. Wild legs could accomplish more in the dark than civilized legs in the day, even when "piloted by the mind that owns them." This fine tuning was the result of discipline; and it was only possible for the adjusted, experienced traveller who had left his fears behind. He could let his body go and flow through the landscape. This is by no means the typical backpacker's experience, as one can learn on any summer day by watching the long lines of over-laden and grim-faced hikers trudging down the trail from Tuolumne Meadows toward the lower canyons of the Tuolumne River. |
