ON THE BOOKS: The “ strength ” is to let go

We are all divided.

You are in my head, assisting as I write these words. You’ve traveled back in time for a few days, or maybe months, even years if you’ve come across this piece in an electronic archive somewhere. Anyway, right now, every time you do, you read my mind.

But there is another you, the one who sits down and maybe holds a cup of coffee.

People call this dilemma, this duality of self, the mind / body problem. Or body-mind dualism. Or a number of other things. Body and soul, if you wish.

Ren̩ Descartes thought about it a lot in the 17th century. He identified the mind as something outside of the brain Рthe mind was not subject to the laws of physics, it was not a spatial entity that could be located. He could float around the universe; he could imagine a private cosmos. He was not limited by any physical limit, not even that of our own body.

that’s a big question. And I’m reviewing a picture book, a graphic novel by designer Alison Bechdel, who used to draw a comic that was published in alternative newspapers and produced two virtuoso graphic memoirs. : “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomedy”, about his closed father and his suicide, and “Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama” from 2012 which focused on his relationship with his mother.

His new book is “The Secret of Superhuman Strength” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $ 24) and the easy thing to say is that this is about his long-standing obsession with fitness and its fashions.

What it’s really about is her struggle to integrate her mind and body and how the physical exertion has helped her.

Bechdel alleges that she is not an athlete and that her goals were never cosmetic. What she pursues is what many of us who have spent time in gymnasiums and on the courts from time to time glimpse: that certain emptying of the ego, the blissful nothingness that athletic effort sometimes can resend. The “high” that runners sometimes report, the sense of well-being that can envelop you when self-awareness wanes.

This is sometimes seen more easily in others than in us, because when you erase yourself, you erase yourself. You become, as sports broadcasters say, “unconscious”. But maybe you live with someone addicted to exercise. Maybe you’ve seen them run or ride a bike or an elevator and you understand that when they’re in the moment they’re not on the same plane as the taxes and the underwear and the Zoom calls and parking tickets. They escaped self-awareness.

As a child, Bechdel discovered that she could achieve this kind of trance state by throwing a tennis ball as high as she could and catching it.

“Over time, I learned that the secret to mastering the Woolly Orb was not to try. Do not think about it. Don’t think at all, ”she wrote.

And that’s the key, isn’t it? What your trainers, senseis and gurus have always told you, to relax you and let your mind go blank. Not only not to try so hard, but not to try at all. And not to try so hard to try not to try. Recovering from yourself: this is the answer.

Bechdel discovers another path, skiing or cycling or running beyond the point of exhaustion.

But this isn’t one of those hippy-dippy self-help manuals; he does not value training for the purpose of losing weight or sculpting the body. There is a seriousness in his search for strength. She wants to be strong and is open-minded about how she does it. She is fascinated by the advertisements of Charles Atlas on the back of the comics; she watches Jack LaLanne on TV, forgiving him for his sexist chatter about his “cantaloupe biceps”. It takes its title from an unfathomable pamphlet that she sent as a child: “The Secret of Superhuman Strength”.

She ages and accumulates material, eventually abandoning LL Bean for Patagonia, sturdy natural fabrics for high-tech ones. She reads “The Dharma Bums” by Jack Kerouac, her tale of a mountaineering trek with poet Gary Snyder, and, despite her impatience with her “macho” bs, envies the way her ego is receding. And, as her sexuality freezes, Andrienne Rich: “Two women, eye to eye / measuring each other’s mind, the other’s desire / limitless, / a whole new poetry that begins here. “

It’s a lovely book and true as far as I know of the hunt for nirvana. And I didn’t even mention the artwork, which is remarkably appropriate, and precise in the way some comic book artists have of connoting which is specific and eccentric but universally relatable. I regret reading the book so quickly, because you can miss things in the margins. “The Secret of Superhuman Strength” deserves careful consideration and read.

And, as befits a comic, it’s funny. Bechdel – who is best known for giving her name to the Bechdel test, a measure of the representation of women in fiction that asks if the work features a conversation in which two women talk to each other about something other than a man – has a dry and dry humor, and never takes the ego that she tries to erase it all seriously.

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