Summary
Carmella to Rosy at the step one day: The past is history. The future is a mystery. Live for today.
Rosy: Everyone has a past, John.
(Excessive) fragility is a theme that runs throughout this work. This chapter further tries to develop and extend this theme that was raised by people like Frank and Nadia in earlier chapters. This chapter raises questions about the nature of being-in-the-world for Tina, Charlie, Rosy and Steph. Their psychological and social selves are the product of events and practices that have taken place in time, as it were. In their practices and life histories and life events we learn a lot about how their bodies and hearts and minds change and diminish over time. The effects or outcomes of such change also include their own self-perceptions and the actions taken to follow through on such perceptions. One expression of this was the prominence of disability as a theme on many occasions in daily conversation and argument. To get ‘on disability’ was a practical necessity sought by Tina and that had already been achieved by Charlie and, in a slightly different vein, by Steph. But, for specific reasons, in the past Rosy had rejected it as a category that she would apply to herself or a ‘good’ that she would seek. Central, therefore, to this chapter are changes in and to the physical body and its breaking down due to things such as age, the effects of work, illness or addiction. Dramatic changes can happen relatively quickly to the body, where one goes from a position of being a relatively autonomous individual to one where one's physical capacities are diminished within a short period of time. Brute luck can play an important role in this in terms of the capacities or talents or physical or mental powers that one is born with or not born with. There are also chance events that happen, as with Steph when she was burned seriously in a fire. But Steph, Charlie, Rosy and Tina are also sentient emotional beings, in that the physical body has an emotional psychic core, and this dialectic between the two is crucial. Fragility is embedded in the sensuous and comprehending core of being that animates skin and bone. All of this takes place through time. There is what has gone before, what is now and what is to come.
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- Information
- It's Not Where You Live, It's How You LiveClass and Gender Struggles in a Dublin Estate, pp. 75 - 85Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2023