Molly McCully Brown: Places I've Taken My Body

 Molly McCully Brown cannot forget she has a body. Many of us can. We float through life without recognizing the way we move from one place to another. Brown lives with severe cerebral palsy. She is “visibly disabled” so she must “talk about [her] body everywhere [she] goes.” (109) In this captivating collection of essays, Places I’ve Taken My Body, Brown explores living with this body; hating it, learning to love it, what she says to her body, what it says to her, where she has taken her body and where she has pushed it to its limits.

Brown is acutely self-aware. She does not have the luxury of not being self-aware. Her body pains her nearly each moment of her life; when she stands “up out of a chair”, when she bends “down to get [her] laundry from the machine”, when she sneezes “too hard in line at the convenience store.”(3) Through the years, her body has changed. She once could walk but is now mostly confined to a wheelchair. She has undergone a series of operations to repair and reorganize the nerves from her brain to her spinal column. Her body tells a story.

To tell this story, Brown uses the metaphor of landscape. “I know the map of who I am,”(5) she explains. This metaphor is how she tells the story of who she is, the story of her body’s “slow erosion” to a “new geography.” (5) Each change, each new geography moves her into a new unstable body for which there is no “road map.” (10) “My body was a country of error and pain,” (124) she writes and after undergoing a research experiment as a child, the digital sensors they attached to her body, “left behind burning red squares like perfect territories” when peeled off.(125) When a lover looks at her body as one that needs assistance she rolls away in bed: “my body is no country for desire.”(132)

It is interesting that Brown uses these metaphors when describing her body for she explains that she “cannot read a map effectively.”(25) “There’s a neurological explanation,” she explains, the lack of “ability to process information about distance, angles and direction” or “spatial cognition” was caused by the “oxygen deprivation at birth that caused [her] cerebral palsy.” This oxygen deprivation “resulted in some injury to the neural structures that make this kind of reasoning possible.” (27) Without the “capacity to map the world”, Brown has instead placed herself firmly in the landscape she knows, her body. She uses language to make it her world ---and it is.

Brown explains,

it isn’t at all that I don’t get attached to landscapes…But you could put me down on the land I love most in the world, and I would still be lost inside it, the familiar made alien and unsteady by my inability to fuse its fragments to a whole. (29)

Her own body, her inability to disassociate herself from it, overwhelms her ability to connect outside of it. Her body is both fragments and a whole.

She notices this is true not just for her but for others who live with disabilities, notably in her collection of poems based on life at The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, of the same name. Its residents are trapped within the space of a room or a body. She says, “the whole collection was shot through with my sense of how closely my body hewed to its history and landscape.” (105) She grew up near the colony, known for its eugenics policies. In another lifetime, she could have been one of its residents. “I wrote about the Colony when I had no choice but to sit still and live with my body and my brain.”

In following this thread of narrative, Brown is able to convey to her reader, the intensity of the space in which she lives,

If there's any territory I should know well, it's the country of my own body. So much of my life has been devoted to attending its margins and features: it's tenuous center of gravity ; The tense curl of my hamstrings and heal cords; The banks of calluses along the perimeter of my feet, hardened from years of walking on my toes with my feet listing stubbornly to one side; The thickets of scarring behind my knees and at my ankles, and the fading ridgeline where they slice me open at the spine. I've had so many cartographers and architects: doctor’s appointments and surgeries designed to know and map my body, alter its geography, to make it more habitable. It, at least should be comprehensive: place instead of merely space.  (30)

This space will never be home.