Listening to Beauty in Pain: The Kerry Goode Story

Meagan Poole’s seminal work, Listening to Beauty: Rhetorics of Science in Sea and Sound, highlights attentive, embodied, and visceral listening. She challenges scientists and biologists to employ this tradition to encounter beauty thus deepening their understanding of the sea world. The Listening to Beauty Framework includes punctive listening, emergent listening, and embodied attention. Punctive listening attunes to moments of aesthetic wonder. A moment of aesthetic wonder could occur upon encountering a rainbow or sunrise that evokes feelings of awe and admiration. Emergent listening allows patterns to arise unsystematically. An emergent listening situation can be someone is asked to closed their eyes and identify a sound made by something or someone. Embodied attention engages the body, affect, and intuition parallel to rational cognition. It is an interplay between physical actions and mental attention. An example of an embodied experience could be a “fed up” woman dancing to Beyonce’s – Irreplaceable – shouting “To the left, to the left, to the left; everything you own in the box to left”. When individuals, not just scientists or biologists, apply Poole’ framework to a particular situation, the situation can be viewed from a different perspective. Beauty can be seen in seemingly negative situations. For this week’s Applied Reasoning assignment, using Meagan Poole’s embodied listening framework, I rhetorically analyze how Kerry Goode establishes ethos, pathos, and logos in his autobiography “When Life Drops You, God Still Holds You”.

Context and Purpose

“When Life Drops You God Still Holds You” reflects Goode’s lived reality as a National Football League (NFL) now living with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). The Mayo Clinic describes ALS as a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord, leading to a loss of muscle control. ALS is also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. With no known cure, it weakens muscles, causes difficult in speaking, swallowing, and breathing. Goode’s book functions as both a personal narrative and an exhortation of faith, resilience, and adaptive agency. Employing Poole’s Embodying the Body as a framework for rhetorical analysis allows for an embodied reading that interrogates how Good’s physical experience of his own body informs his rhetorical strategies and appeals.

Ethos: Credibility Rooted in Embodied Experience:

Many young boys dream of becoming an NFL football player. Goode’s credibility derives from his identity as a former NFL athlete who is currently living with a progressive disability. According to Poole, the body mediates authority because lived experience grants epistemic access to claims about physical and emotional endurance. Goode leverages ethos by his journey from athletic prominence to dependence on oxygen and mobility devices. Presenting his body as a site of loss and a site of resilience, Goode situates himself as an authoritative voice on perseverance and spiritual fortitude. “Failure is not falling down but refusing to get up” further reinforces his ethos. Finally, his philanthropic engagement with the Goode Foundation strengthens establishing ethos.

Pathos: Emotional Engagement Through Multisensory Narrative:

Goode’s rhetoric is heavily pathos-driven. Poole argues that embodiment intersections with emotive rhetoric when narratives convey sensations of the body. For example, descriptions of physical limitations like inability to lift boxes, maintain yardwork, or eat unaided; emotional candor – reflections on frustration, dependence, and familial impact; use of metaphor and analogical imagery – “People who fall the hardest, bounce back the highest”, equating literal falls with existential setbacks. These approaches invoke empathy by allowing readers to inhabit Goode’s sensory and affective experience, creating a visceral engagement with ideas of struggle, hope, and transcendence.

Logos: Logical Structure Anchored in Moral and Theological Reasoning

Goode’ discourse employs theological grounding to appeal to diving providence. This approach underscores the argument that resilience is both possible and morally endorsed. Sequential framing establishes logos by narrating the moves from fall, realization, adaptation, and moral takeaway. He uses cause-and-effect reasoning by how his physical fall parallels to spiritual or emotional growth – (Sometimes it takes a good fall to really know where you stand”). Poole’s lens emphasizes that embodied logos is persuasive when the author’s physical conditional substantiates claims about endurance, moral success, and agency.

“When Life Drops You God Still Holds You” exemplifies rhetorical power borne from embodiment. His ethos, pathos, and logos converge in the service of inspiring perseverance through spiritual and physical trials. Using Poole’s framework, readers can understand that Goode’s text persuades not purely by argument or exhortation but by integrating bodily experience into the rhetorical fabric, transforming a painful experience into a compelling, shared ethical and beautiful narrative.