the garage gospel: what it means to be a body, meat torn open
My mother cried out. It was a religious moment. I learned what it means to be a body, Jim, just meat wrapped in a sort of flimsy nylon stocking, son, as I fell kneeling and slid toward the stretched net, myself seen by me, frame by frame, torn open.
Context
The creed's terminal revelation, "the religion of the physical" earned in blood: what the ruined body finally teaches is "what it means to be a body, Jim, just meat wrapped in a sort of flimsy nylon stocking," seen "frame by frame, torn open." The whole doctrine — head is body, you're a machine an object — comes due here as the literal disclosure of the meat under the skin. It is the martyrdom that founds the faith the father preaches and E.T.A. will inherit: the body known most truly at the moment it is ruined, the athletic instrument revealed as flayable flesh in a "seminal, religious day when you get to both hear and feel your destiny at the same moment."