Mercury and Macaroni

A body doing what bodies do

Photo by Joyce Hankins on Unsplash

Something tells me that I shouldn’t be fascinated by a 300 years old description of a person suffering from smallpox. The fascination isn’t from the subject itself, or about death. It’s more about the very existence of this description.

In Casanova’s memoirs, such a description can be found in the first chapter of the first book. Its presence is part of the reason why I keep coming back to this book. Why Casanova has magnetized me for lots of sleepless nights. How he triggered dozens, if not hundreds of wikipedia searches, consisting in a big internet browser tapestry of various subjects, from chocolate to the origin of condoms.

It’s not about smallpox in particular. Nor is it about sex, which, as you might expect, is a big part of his journey and personal life. Nor is it about the accounts of his culinary preferences, or the specific description of his own decay through age. It’s all of these things at once, and a little more.

People have described Casanova’s memoirs as a “second” encyclopedia. The first being Diderot’s. Implying that Casanova’s autobiography contained enough subjects to feel like moving through an encyclopedic book rather than a conventional face-value memoir.

I think I agree with this vision. This book is quite probably the first cause for the “how do you even know this” recurring incident. The “slumdog millionnaire” effect.

Do you know what’s (possibly) better than reading an encyclopedic memoir? Maybe reading a memoir, and an actual encyclopedia on the side. Or is it? Was it ever about getting facts straights, I wonder?

What I mean is: the Histoire de ma vie contains the body in full. Not the body as metaphor. Not the body as site of shame or transcendence or dramatic consequence. Just the body, doing what bodies do, reported with the same equanimity Casanova brings to everything else. Ideas, debts, cardinals, the weather. He contracts diseases and describes the treatment in detail: mercury, in quantities that would frighten you, applied with a patience that suggests he has done this before. He has.

He discusses the condoms he calls “English overcoats”, he blows them up before use, to check for holes. He eats. He eats constantly, specifically, with attention: truffles, macaroni, oysters, ripe cheese at the exact moment of its perfection. He loses his teeth gradually across the later volumes the way you lose anything gradually as you age in a space and time when it was normal.

The register is almost alien to me, a reader of the 21st century in Europe, where the body isn’t quite mainstream, where death and decay are taboo. The body in the Histoire is never exactly the point. It is just… always present. As it should be. It’s not like we can escape it, can we?

When Casanova describes a seduction, you get the desire and also the room, the temperature, what they ate beforehand, the logistics of the thing, the smell of the bodies. When he describes an illness, you get the fever and also the specific incompetence of the doctor, the cost of the treatment, how many days he could not travel as a result. And the smell. Don’t forget about the smell. The body keeps interrupting. It never stops being material.

That’s what describing the reality of a material world is, or rather what it should be.

There’s comforting honesty in reading a book that doesn’t pretend it can escape the material plane of existence. Because I can’t. If we get the seasonal flu, we can’t skip it to the next most interesting part of our lives. The flu is very much part of the journey, as will any other disease, or meal, or fart, or lovemaking.

Finishing the memoirs for the first time made me notice something I failed to see for years of reading. The body is too often left out in literature. I can’t fathom the sheer number of books in which the minds are moving in a bodiless world. Love stories where people don’t seem to need any cleaning. War stories in which wounds are a formality. Normal lives in which physical pain isn’t described, but a single mind wandering anxiety steals the show.

I don’t think leaving the body out is honest. I don’t think it’s good either. I rather believe that we should make peace with our material selves if we seek any kind of self acceptance, or decent meditation about mortality.

And at some point, mortality will be an issue to face.

I meditate. I have a daily practice, and what it returns me to, every single time, without exception, is the body. Not ideas about the body. Not the concept of breath or the philosophy of sensation. The actual breath. The actual weight of sitting. The itch on my left knee that I am trying not to scratch. Meditation, at its most basic, is the practice of noticing that you are a physical thing in a physical world, and that this is prior to everything else you think you are.

Casanova knew this without meditating on a 30 dollar zafu and a Zen Meditation Handbook. Or maybe the memoirs were his practice, twelve volumes of paying attention to what was actually happening, in the room, in the body, without flinching and without transcending.

I keep thinking about the smallpox. First chapter, first book. A body covered in lesions, described with the same attention he would later give to a meal or a seduction. No lesson extracted from it. Just the fact of it, present on the page, the way it was present in the room.

That’s what keeps pulling me back. It’s not the sex, not the encyclopedia of an era, not even the cheese at its precise moment of perfection. It’s the refusal to look away. The understanding that a life reported honestly has to include the lesions, the mercury, the lost teeth, the smell, because these aren’t interruptions to the life. They are the life. The body isn’t a vehicle the mind reluctantly inhabits. It’s the whole thing.

I don’t know another book that trusts this so completely. I’m not sure another book has tried that hard.

Thank you for reading.