Into the Body of Another

clipped from www.questia.com

by Vicki Graham

"We belong to the moon," says Mary Oliver, and "the most/thoughtful among us dreams/of hurrying down...into the body of another" (49-50). We dream, we long, and some of us believe that we can step outside of ourselves and enter the body of another. But Western culture discourages these yearnings and demands individualism and the formation of strong ego boundaries and stable identities. Unlike the traveller of Leslie Marmon Silko's "Story from Bear Country," we do not hear the bear's call; we do not see our "footprints/in the sand" become bear prints, nor do we see fur cover our bodies, "dark shaggy and thick" (204-05). Yet we are conscious, too, of our potential not just to cross the boundaries between ourselves and others, but to be divided within ourselves. We encounter a variety of theories--feminist, psychoanalytic, cultural--that tell us identity is multiple and the boundaries of the self are unstable.
"Pull yourself together," my mother used to say, and I would groupe wildly, hoping to catch even one of the selves that spun around me. But I have never been able to pull myself together, and works of art that tempt me to drop the fiction of singularity and invite me to enter the body of another fascinate me. Mary Oliver's American Primitive is one such work. The poems in this collection offer many bodies for us to inhabit; we can become, by turns, bear, fish, whale, swamp, and Pan. We can run with the fox, fly with the owl, dig with the mole, and finally, losing all outward form, dissolve into the totality of nature.

Oliver's celebration of dissolution into the natural world troubles some critics: her poems flirt dangerously with romantic assumptions about the close association of women with nature that many theorists...