The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Mysteries of the Body and the Mind by John Taylor
Irving Malin

John Taylor. Mysteries of the Body and the Mind. Story Line, 1998. 115 pp. Paper: $12.95; The World as It Is. Cedar Hill, 1998. 87 pp. Paper: $10.00.

Taylor, born in the Midwest—the “heartland” of plain experience—has now lived in France for twenty years. (He is a frequent reviewer of French literature for TLS.) Obviously he lives in contrasting cultures, one of his early years and the other of his maturity. Thus Taylor is a divided man. This division explains the reasons for his odd texts—his short meditations, which resist full explanation, although they are written in a spare style.

“The Penis,” in Mysteries of the Body and the Mind, is a typical text. The narrator remembers—memory “rewrites” the past—a stay in the hospital when he was “seven or nine, perhaps even fourteen.” His penis is infected. His female doctor examines it and her examination comforts and “tickles” him: “I was embarrassed and (as if I were standing alongside my father, observing myself on the examination table) curious about how a boy like me would react, when examined intimately by a woman doctor.” The strangeness—the father and the doctor as mother and/or lover—is intense. But Taylor doesn’t stop here. Suddenly male doctors enter the room “to get a closer look. . . . I felt on my lower abdomen the breath—I opened my eyes—of one of the young men who had wanted to get a closer look.” This rich text—less than two pages—is a meditation on the body and mind, on the presence of his past event. The simple words hide (or reveal) significant perception. It requires elaborate examination.

“Into the Waves” is one of the three sections of The World as It Is. The narrator remembers events—swimming or trying to swim. The past is watery: “When I was quite young, say seven or nine, I would do my imagining—my experimenting—in the bathtub . . . I would watch how my penis remained floating, upright, the glans just visible. With my right hand I would make waves, observing how the glans buoyed about.” The narrator still remembers the event, wondering what it means now and what it meant then: “How many times I have rewritten history, bringing it up in an utterly different present, knowing how the slightest shift in perspective, can change everything.” The text is a kind of sea, time is a wave. Both texts are complex explorations of the imagination at play. [Irving Malin]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Mysteries of the Body and the Mind by John Taylor Irving Malin John Taylor. Mysteries of the Body and the Mind. Story Line, 1998. 115 pp. Paper: $12.95; The World as It Is. Cedar Hill, 1998. 87 pp. Paper: $10.00. Taylor, born in the Midwest—the “heartland” of plain experience—has now lived in France for twenty years. (He is a frequent reviewer of French literature for TLS.) Obviously he lives in contrasting cultures, one of his early years and the other of his maturity. Thus Taylor is a divided man. This division explains the reasons for his odd texts—his short meditations, which resist full explanation, although they are written in a spare style. “The Penis,” in Mysteries of the Body and the Mind, is a typical text. The narrator remembers—memory “rewrites” the past—a stay in the hospital when he was “seven or nine, perhaps even fourteen.” His penis is infected. His female doctor examines it and her examination comforts and “tickles” him: “I was embarrassed and (as if I were standing alongside my father, observing myself on the examination table) curious about how a boy like me would react, when examined intimately by a woman doctor.” The strangeness—the father and the doctor as mother and/or lover—is intense. But Taylor doesn’t stop here. Suddenly male doctors enter the room “to get a closer look. . . . I felt on my lower abdomen the breath—I opened my eyes—of one of the young men who had wanted to get a closer look.” This rich text—less than two pages—is a meditation on the body and mind, on the presence of his past event. The simple words hide (or reveal) significant perception. It requires elaborate examination. “Into the Waves” is one of the three sections of The World as It Is. The narrator remembers events—swimming or trying to swim. The past is watery: “When I was quite young, say seven or nine, I would do my imagining—my experimenting—in the bathtub . . . I would watch how my penis remained floating, upright, the glans just visible. With my right hand I would make waves, observing how the glans buoyed about.” The narrator still remembers the event, wondering what it means now and what it meant then: “How many times I have rewritten history, bringing it up in an utterly different present, knowing how the slightest shift in perspective, can change everything.” The text is a kind of sea, time is a wave. Both texts are complex explorations of the imagination at play. [Irving Malin]

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