Review of Eloquent Body for the SA Medical Journal

by Prof Peter Folb 

There is a creative artist within every person and everyone has something unique to explore.   Few realise and actualise it; many have no time or interest, or are overcome with the apprehension of self-revelation.   It may be that doctors and scientists have a special opportunity or talent for creative art, be it music, poetry, writing or the fine arts, given their privileged insights into the human condition and the scientific method.   One thinks here of Chekhov, Marie Curie, Borodin, Frida Kahlo, William Carlos Williams, AJ Cronin, Conan Doyle, Somerset Maugham, Alexander Doblin, Keats, and Kathe Kollwitz.   Not uncommonly, patients, too, seek refuge in the creative arts.

In “Eloquent Body” Dawn Garisch examines her own creativity in a frank and carefully researched semi-autobiographical new book.   She is medical practitioner, novelist, poet, walker, mother and patient herself.   She sees herself as a doctor who writes, wanting to become a writer who doctors. Her conflict is not resolved.   She is an accomplished writer and her life is enriched by doctoring.   She draws widely on her experience with patients – their fortitude, frailties, obstinacy and quirks.   She is influenced by Jung.   It is as a doctor that she explores, confronts and embraces issues of truth, fear, doubt, service and trust in the creative process.   She believes in the innate self-healing capacity of the body and in the part that the arts can play in achieving that.   She has discovered that it is important to relinquish the illusion of control.   She maintains that in completing her book the two streams of her life converge.   One is not convinced that she has at last found repose, and quite possibly that is a good thing – for her, for us her readers and, not least, for her patients.

Creative art is therapeutic, if not necessarily curative, for patient and for health practitioner alike.   Dawn Garisch knows.   It’s there, clearly, in her book and she has written it modestly and with courage.

"Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation." ~ Graham Greene

Dance with Suitcase

Work in progress - A memoir that rests on movement

An aspect of writing that interests me is how to make form and content work together to enhance the piece. When I started this memoir, I intuitively decided against too formal a structure in which to place the narrative. I wished to honour an analogy between a particular approach to writing and to dance. In this second half of life I am more attracted to free movement than in learning formal steps.

The thrust of the book is towards developing an attitude of trusting body signals and symptoms, and trusting error, as means to invite untutored unconscious material to spill over into awareness. It assumes that non-rational physical and artistic processes have immense value, both in anchoring ourselves and in finding a way forward.

Yet the unconscious is hard to follow, difficult to grasp, as we know from our dreams. I sometimes think of the flow of life as an incomprehensible wash over which we must superimpose a grid or raft – something to hold onto to help us make sense of our lives and the world, to prevent us from drowning.

If we hold on too hard, we can mistake the grid for reality itself and we become rigid, unable to sense the enigmatic flux. But without the grid, we flounder and feel lost.

The art, I think, is to develop an ability to both stable oneself using an approximate raft, and a the same time, to be able to see through the mesh – of words, guidelines, rules, interpretations, models, analysis, structure – so as not to lose sight of the immensity of the mystery out of which we exist and live.

In dance - in movement of any kind - we have schools and forms, cultural practices and rituals, taboos and constraints. Underneath this, and within us all, is the flux and wash of life in all its patterns and guises.

I wish for this memoir – run through as it is by the origins and development of my own movement practice – to pay homage to it all.