Temple

One of the things you learn, by my age, is the absolute priority of the body. Gone are the fantasies of trumping its exigencies by will and imagination. Its rule is total. Its judgements can't be appealed.

The freedom left by this realization is shaped differently, but it is really no less spacious. The fourth wall here is death: it is the audience we play to, and never acknowledge, but never turn our backs on. Wall and doorway, barrier and opening. It's where the meaning sits, inscrutable, beyond the footlights.

I let someone trim my beard, for the first time in my fifty-five years, yesterday. She had me sit on the edge of the barber-chair, and scrutinized my face. Her eyes were screwed up, and her lips were pursed and wrinkled like a rose, and she darted at me with the clippers, shearing here and there with sudden darting moves. Like a hummingbird. All the while careful not to do the obvious and easy thing, which would have been to stand between my legs.

I have to be careful not to touch people, nowadays: I am so used to it in my work, that I'm at risk of forgetting to observe the taboos properly, like the foreigner  in the Dilbert comics ("My people have no personal space!") who stands nose-to-nose with people. ("Oh, I get it, your pockets are for your use only?") I am impatient, sometimes. If it's a temple, then why don't you honor it? You can't have it both ways. Sacred is sacred.