Thanatology

It’s a week late, but here my halloween blog.

Halloween came and went with all its trappings. The donning of costumes, consumption of sugar, and the ritual smashing of pumpkins to ensure a blithe year to come. More seriously it is a time when we can peer into our shadow a bit deeper than usual. Some combination of discarded dead leaves adorning our path and the loss of ego that comes from wearing a costume instead of our everyday uniform allows us to explore the darker edges of our reality. So in that spirit let's delve down into the shadow of massage.

Massage is ultimately is a small subset of biology, unless there is some post mortem modality that I am appreciative ignorant of. Massage only concerns itself with what alive. It grows out of medical traditions of nearly all cultures. There are people from all cultures who learn to facilitate health through touch. Over the years massage has blended into our western allopathic path of medicine. Most massage therapists today, myself included, want to have practices grounded in science.

One of the darker elements within the scientific approach to medicine is how reliant it is on cadaver studies. We obviously can learn much about bodies by observing the physicality of their structure in a way that until recently could only be done through cadavers. We can chart out where various organs are and approximate the physical nature of various tissue. But aside from being macabre, I do believe the dead are playing a trick on us.

The dead can't teach us biology the study of life precisely because they are dead. Living tissue is very different from what is essentially meat. Trying to understand what exactly makes something alive is a Sisyphean task. Any defining charismatic of life we may find all seem to have some weird exceptions that will send us back to a state of bewilderment. If I had to philosophize as to what makes one thing alive and one thing not alive I would speculate it has to do with communication.

Being alive allows us to respond to things beyond what the laws of physics dictates of us. We have a choice. In our pre cadaver state, our bodies are constantly interacting with our environment. We are negotiating reality with all the organisms that surround us, most of which we are unaware of. Every cell in our body is negotiating some reality with each other. Cells arrange themselves into organs. Those organs form systems which all depend on other systems. When all these perpetual interactions aggregate itself our consciousness forms, creating life on some level.

I believe when we study bodies devoid of all this interplay we skew our version of reality. We end up with a toxic mimic of biology. We end up mechno-morphing our bodies into machines composed of independent clockwork components.

Within this frame of mind, it is easy to forget how dependent every aspect of our body is to every other aspect. We cease to remember that any part of our body part can be rightfully classified under any system of the body. Our respiratory system would do little if it weren't for our blood, arteries, and heart. But we don’t classify these body parts as vital pieces of our respiratory system as crucial to the distribution of oxygen as our lungs.

The knowledge that the dead provides us isn’t wrong but it is disconnected. It can only teach us so much. What separates massage from other medical techniques is that it almost exclusively learns from the living. That said just as each facet of our body influences each other modern massage for health and illth carries some weight of what the dead have taught us. And we should remind ourselves of that once in a while.

Anthony Bruni