Blood Read Free

entrenched identity to another? What truths, including the inconvenient ones that can indict us in a court of law or in the court of family judgement, lie in our blood? To whom are we most distantly related?
    Blood reveals us and protects us. It’s a curse, and it can be a sign. In Exodus, the blood of the lamb protects the Israelites from the avenging Angel of Death sent to kill the first-born sons of all Egyptians, who are responsible for the enslavement of the Jews. By smearing lamb’s blood on doorposts, the Hebrews signify their innocence and their homes are passed over.
    Blood can also be a gift. At the Last Supper, Jesus tells his disciples that their wine is his blood and instructs them to drink it in memory of him — a practice and a belief that are still part of the Catholic Mass (the Eucharist, for Anglicans; the Holy Communion, for other Protestants). In religious lore, saints have shown stigmata — bleeding hands that mimicked Christ’s wounds from being nailed to the cross.
    Blood is not just a symbol in religion. It’s a symbol in literature. In storytelling, it is integral to the very way we speak and express ourselves. Iambic pentameter, used in much poetry and in Shakespeare’s plays, is said to best capture the rhythm of human speech. Its emphasis — an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM — lodges in the memory and seems familiar on the tongue and to the ear. Perhaps that’s because it is also the sound of the human heart. It is the sound of blood coursing through our bodies.
    And this is where we find ourselves, when we behold great art. Right in the core of our bodies, deep in the midst of our arteries.
    When I was a child, I had the fortune to have a mother, Donna Hill, who read poetry to me at bedtime. She was a kickass civil rights activist who shook her white friends and family to the core and turned her own life upside down when she fell in love with a black graduate student in Washington, D.C., and moved with him to Canada. However, at the age of three, when it was time for bed, I neither knew nor cared about those things. What I cared about was that a gentle, loving soul named “Mom” would summon all of her enthusiasm and pitch it into her nightly poetry readings. My favourite of all was her rendering of the poem “Disobedience,” by A. A. Milne, which begins like this:
    James James
    Morrison Morrison
    Weatherby George Dupree
    Took great
    Care of his Mother,
    Though he was only three.
    There, beating alongside our pulse, are the playful, absurd, seductive sounds of the early twentieth-century British writer best known for creating Winnie-the-Pooh. Milne entered our imaginations first and foremost through our ears, by mimicking the sounds of our heart. When you read Milne’s poetry aloud, it feels as if you are swimming in your own bloodstream.
    It is not just poetry that climbs into your body. In jazz and rock ’n’ roll, the driving bass beat holds the music together. The bass beat gets you dancing. You want to slide into bed with it. Forget the lyrics. The bass is where you feel the music. Deep down, in your bone marrow and in the pulsing of your blood.
    OUR NOTIONS OF BLOOD have evolved over thousands of years, and our understanding of its nature and functions has shaped our ideas of ourselves. Blood acts as a mirror, reflecting the march of life, of ages and civilizations. It speaks of our beliefs and prejudices, of our potential and our limitations as flawed beings. And like all things biological, chemical, and physical — the mystery of nature — it is governed by its own set of rules and regulations. Indeed, the ways that we identify and interpret the biology of blood affect our self-concept, individually and collectively.
    Blood has some four thousand components. A drop of blood the size of a pinhead is teeming with quantities of cells that seem unfathomable: