It's getting harder to filter this experience into words, written or spoken. On the one hand, I'm getting clearer on exactly what it is that grabs me about this work, this stuff, this body, and this life. On the other hand, the stuff that grabs me is the stuff for which there often are no words. The mystical. The breath of G-d. The stuff at which words can only point, and yet Gil's point exquisitely. Words pouring out of nothing in circle this morning, talk of the usefulness of functional models of the body and of the world and the necessity of not mistaking models for what is real. Understanding that there's nothing wrong with models, and they can serve us well, until it becomes apparent that the model we held so dearly is a prison. And yet the seeing of the model for what it is, a story, is its own liberation. It's the morning dharma talk, and it goes straight in. I'm dumbfounded at how to even begin this work that's calling me, while at the same time seeing that I've already begun.
Deep fascia's getting all the press lately. Everyone's interested in it, doing research on it, having conferences about it and its properties and its function and hoo-ha and whatnot. Why doesn't anyone study superficial fascia, the layer we only recently finished removing? It's messy. Its globby and blobby and disappoints conventional standards of beauty. It's provocative. It's hard to describe. And in the constraints of a med school gross anatomy lab, it's part of the flesh that has to be ripped through and chucked in the bucket as fast as possible to get to the viscera that'll be compared to Netter and marked with pins and numbers and tested on Monday. Deep fascia is silvery and glimmery and strappy and sexy and shiny and tight and keeps everything contained in a nice package. And who doesn't like packages?
Today we're going one step beyond the packages to the muscles. Here our anatomical charts start to emerge in technicolor 3D glory on the tables as we begin to "fluff" the first layers, carefully differentiating quads and pecs and abs from their neighbors. We melt away the filmy deep fascia attaching sartorius along 100% of its surface, to find it pouring into the ASIS and giving rise there to tensor fascia latae. They could EASILY be one muscle, tracking the knee via the IT band on the lateral side and the pes anserine on the medial side, and yet someone centuries ago decided differently. "I've never looked at it that way before," he says, and then continues further to include gracilis in the conformation, showing how the three together form an "N" across the entire thigh.
Later on, gracilis takes on an entirely new persona during the dissection of the female genitalia. Bilaterally, gracilis forms the lower arms of a star at the pubis with the inguinal ligaments and the rectus sheath. Yep, seriously. A star. "Fucking A," says Kate. Well, it literally is a fucking A, he says, because the left and right gracilis form the larger "legs" of the clitoris, attached to the pubic symphysis via the fundiform ligament. The body of the clitoris has its own smaller legs, or crura, that attach to the ischial tuberosities, and the whole thing together looks like a fleshy wishbone. I'm observing and palpating Rose as I'm watching, images and memories and thoughts flashing too fast to track, skirting the edges of my own tension and trauma, consciousness keeping me solidly in the realm of pure fascination for now. I can only let so much in, and he's taken us up to quitting time.
A nearby park hosts my hoop session on the way home, and I find a level, sunny spot to spin not far from the playground. Out of the corner of my eye a mom and her daughter, not more than 4, stop to watch, and I stop as I notice her approach me. "That's beautiful," she says. I thank her and ask if she wants to try. She spins the seaglass green tube around her little round belly about 15 times, then drops it and heads back from where she came. "Have you ever done that before?" her mom asks, beaming with a smile of surprise. The girl shakes her head from side to side. "Get that girl a hoop," I say, to which mom responds, "I think we will!"
