Ramblemuse Touch Points

In my upcoming Massage Today Column for June (as in up any day now), I was writing about embodiment and refer to the philosophical framework of Merleau-Ponty. In my starting post here, I referred to things that are liminal (neither this nor that) and of a threshold. I noticed a book chapter abstract by Gilsenan Nordin that takes these concepts into a discussion of the poetry of the Irish poet Eiléan Ní­ Chuilleanáin. By another coincidence, the Swedish site is in Dalarna, a source of a number of traditional Scandinavian dances I’ve danced over the years.

The idea of the body as a vital component of existence and an important means for the articulation of experience is the theme of Irene Gilsenan Nordin’s essay, “Betwixt and Between” The Body as Liminal Threshold in the Poetry of Eiléan Ní­ Chuilleanáin.… Drawing upon Merleau-Ponty’s ideas of embodiment, and Kristeva’s concepts of the semiotic and the symbolic, Gilsenan Nordin explores the notion of the body as a liminal threshold in Ní­ Chuilleanáin’s poetry. The essay explores the interaction between self and world and argues that in challenging unitary conceptions of space and time, Ní­ Chuilleanáin shows how the body, or “flesh,” to use Merleau-Ponty’s term, acts as a transformational site between thought and language, self and world, the subject and the unnameable other. Gilsenan Nordin argues that Ní­ Chuilleanáin in her poetry shows that the speaking- subject is an embodied subject, firmly situated at the point where the mind is inseparable from our bodily, physical nature. Thus the poetic voice gives articulation to the interconnectedness between the physical and spiritual dimensions of human existence. In giving expression to the silent forces of desire Ní­ Chuilleanáin’s work can be seen not least in an ethical sense, as giving voice to the silenced, unspoken voices of bodily experience.

My sense is that massage can play a significant role as a facilitation or support for the senses of embodiment and existence, particularly for those in who this sense has been weakened. My other sense is that this is nowhere on the radar of most of those defining massage therapy as a profession. Perhaps this is simply a reflection that we need a distinction between a profession and what might be defined as an endeavor of service that enhances the human in us.