TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown. 

I think a lot about the human body and what it makes possible: the experiences I’m able to have because of my physical form. I wasn’t an athlete growing up; I was in my own head a lot instead. So I’ve always felt like the real “me” isn’t my body, but my mind—my thoughts, my feelings, my perceptions, my memories. But without my body, what thoughts, feelings, perceptions, or memories would I have? I feel joyful walking on a warm day, because I can feel the sunlight on my skin, and see the trees and the sky, and hear the birds and the cicadas. I’m having those sensory experiences thanks to my body and my brain. 

I know we often think of our intelligence as being related to our brains. Smart people are called “brainy.” Wise approaches to problem-solving are called “mindful.” But the body has its own intelligence. Some things we know, because we intuit them—as we say, we feel them in our gut. I sense when I’m in danger, or when someone is lying to me. I might get a prickle on the back of my neck, or a speeding up of my pulse, or an uneasy feeling in my stomach. I sense when I can trust someone, too. My nervous system relaxes around them. 

Our bodies sometimes know things first, and it is our brains that need to catch up. 

One of the things I’m most wary about when it comes to technology, and to “AI” specifically, is this lack of embodiment. What is a brain without a body? Without sensory experience? Without pleasure and pain, both psychic and physical? Without sense memory, or grief, or romance, or deep longing? We need bodies for all of that. The kind of wisdom we can access as full human beings—with brains and bodies—is the kind of wisdom I’m interested in. Anything less is just partial. It feels flimsy. 

Today’s poem reminds me to be grateful for my body and my mind, because both are temporary. Aging teaches us this, again and again.

My Body Knows Its Limits
by Page Hill Starzinger

My vista is not a line of pine trees aging
in front of me. It is the infinity of the
internet. A blue jay’s cry shatters the 
landscape like an opera singer—then,
silence, or what has come to mean 
silence. The forest recombines. As if
time—yours and mine—could be
splintered and sutured back with blue 
feathers. As if we could revisit the past
whenever we wanted. And now
studies show brain cells live beyond
death—revert to an embryonic state,
spike in activity after the heart stops.
As if we’re able to circle to the end,
beginning, and future simultaneously.
Leave it to bacterial microbes to show up
like clockwork—scientists estimate
organ failure to the day, hour, depending.
I say to myself, I know what to do. As if
there’s anything to do. I mean, who leaves
the house, without taking their body?

"My Body Knows Its Limits" by Page Hill Starzinger. Used by permission of the poet.