The body as a map

Today I'm thinking about this quote by Michael Ondaatje from The English Patient:

'We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves...' 'I believe in such cartography ... to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste and experience...'

And the idea that we are tangibly transformed through learning and through our experiences.

I've been scanning a book online, called Curriculum: Toward New Identities by William Pinar.
Although this book is essentially a collection of essays about learning and the curriculum, it contains some wonderful ideas and a number of the passages simply jumped off the page at me today.
The authors Dennis J Sumara and Brent Davis of the chapters entitled Unskinning curriculum and Marked bodies talk about the sense of self-identity being (I quote)

'not contained within the boundaries of one's skin, but instead, occurs more ambiguously and tentatively amid the interstices of various interacting and overlapping phenomena. What is considered individual and what is considered communal cannot be caught within fixed immutable categories, but unfold through the continual fusing of perceptions, understandings and interpretations. Any conscious sense of self is always an interpretation of lived, remembered and projected experiences.'

... they go on to talk about unskinning or removing recognisable markers - stripping back the boundaries we use to identify ourselves and simultaneous remarking of those boundaries.

It's a concept I'm drawn to - and the associated imagery is lovely.
I'm thinking of marked bodies, of intersections and shared spaces, shared marks or markers (like the cinnamon peelers wife perhaps, who lives with the persistence of presence - ah me everything's a circle... back there again. Maybe this time I'll have more success at expressing the idea), shed skins maybe, (how the dye on the dyers bodies in that passage from In the Skin of a Lion just dropped off in one coloured sheet under the warmth of the water, to puddle like a skin newly stepped out of at the dyers feet) ...of the concept of shared identity and souls and of layers of communally shared iconography and stories - that are somehow 'unidirectional'. The imagery is lovely, and there is much to play with you have to agree.

'she wore a small depression on her shoulder' ...