The body is not singular
An exploration of the many Earth/Body technologies of interconnection
An image from At Land, a film by Maya Deren
I’m sitting at my desk in a big, dark, empty library that looks upon the Cap Canaille, the highest sea cliff in France. As we are in the dark of the Moon, I cannot see beyond the railing that borders this room for longer than one second increments - there is a special phenomenon tonight that allows for this sight at a time when the landscape disappears, taking its own nighttime rest from the human eye. It is about 11pm and lightning flashes have been hovering the Mediterranean for the last hour. No sound, just light. A reminder that time and space do not always work synchronously, and that the yawn opened where they are spliced offers a tectonic crack to wiggle our way inside of slippery, curious questions.
There are two reasons why we might see a show of lightning with no thunder:
It occurs too far away for us to hear.
The atmospheric conditions are such that the sound bends back up toward the sky, silencing itself in the process.
Either way, though its sonic force has been relegated to an invisible place (from our singular perspective), it is still digging its stake in the ground, reverberating in an unknown place that puts us into contact with the greatest of all forces: mystery.
As I watch this lightning flash, now in its second hour of performance, I beckon the questions:
Who is hearing the thunder? What are they doing? How are their bodies receiving this sound?
The mere inquiry offers points of connection. A reminder of the vast web of interconnection and the ways in which we are threaded together along the space–time continuum.
If you have been reading these letters over the past couple of months, you may (or may not) remember that I have been in the South of France on residency to further develop a new body of work. While here I am expanding my research of the mourning rituals + mythologies connected to the feminine genealogies of the Mediterranean basin, in service of a work that I have been creating (and am creating continuously, with more certainty each day), with women who have experienced sexual violence. I am in the final days of my time here, almost able to count those days on the fingers of one hand, and I’m called to already begin the ceremonial process of stitching into myself the words that will anchor the lessons that have spoken through this time. It is nearly impossible: Every day has spun me round, reorienting my perception of who I am, what I am meant to be doing, what all of this work is for, and on and on.
What a silly sentence to preface what I am about to note as one of my favorite lessons of these months here:
The “I” is best observed when distributed through layers of kinship with relational ways of being.
I’ve become frustrated by writing (my own at the top of the list) that prioritizes “I” and “me”. Of course there is a necessary place for narrative writing that centers the Self as the site of perception. This must be the case after all, it is irrefutable that we we will always be moving through a world in which we are a main character.
HOWEVER - there is plenty of science (and plenty more coming down the pipeline) that supports theories of extended cognition, or an extended mind – that we think in community, others being at least partially responsible for the ways in which we think and metabolize the reality in which we place ourselves. Some examples of this are the ways that a friend or partner might help you remember what time you have to be at the doctor’s office on Friday, or a calculator performing math calculations for you, or (perhaps most harrowing) the smartphone that virtually relieves the “burden” of your brain having to muster its archive to answer questions on its own, or (to end on a good note) how the petrichor of a just-rained-upon forest may remind you of that time you were walking the woods at your grandparents’ home, and, maybe it’s time that you give them a call.
We are placed inside of webs of complicated relationships. Spend the next twenty minutes observing the gestures your body must move through to accomplish the tasks at hand. How many threads do these gestures tie to another?
No body exists in a vacuum, and it is of increasing interest to me (it really is hard to avoid the Self reference entirely) to highlight the ways in which we must honor other beings through our bodies. As the books and practices and movements and oral lineages of ritual are transmitted, it is clear how recently our cultural consciousness in the West obliterated the idea that we move in a singular body: schools of thought, community dinners, group ritual, the project of Arcades… Even the practices that mark thresholds lack singularity: Rites of passage, grieving rituals, Yuletide, Cross-quarter markings: these are all group containers, contingent on an efficacious process that implies responsibility not just for the Self but also for Other.
What is most exciting about what ties these disparate ideas together: lightning that you cannot hear, extended cognition, group ritual, rites of passage, week-long Holy Days etc, is that they all present atmospheric (literal or figurative) conditions that invite and, in some cases demand, change. The body is always in a state of changing and becoming, in constant competition with the stability of the mind which seeks familiarity and recognition. The dance between these two opposing forces: the logic of the Mind and the desire that moves the Body is where Life is invited to work upon us. I’m beginning to think that this is the great work - listening to the ways that we are being asked to change through the lens of what is reflected back to us.
Through the particular lens of grief, and of the rituals that have etched themselves into the particular landscapes that I am now growing inside of, I have learned much about the medicine of the group-mind extended to the human and non-human. When grief becomes too big for a single body to hold it is siphoned into the bodies of others – the closest word we have in our pop culture is “empathy”, but I think the implications run much deeper than that. It is a practice of lending our body to another. To say “I see this is too difficult for you, let me carry it. Let my bones sing it, let it dance me for this time so that you might find some relief.” This is standard over many indigenous grief rituals the world over. And it does not have a timeline; Grief is danced until it does not want to dance anymore and then it tells us what it would like to shapeshift into next. This heightened sensation being just one expression of the aliveness that we experience when we fully say yes to letting life have its way with us.
I’m also thinking about the power of people gathering, how this allows us to reach new conclusions and, quite excitingly, the possibilities of imagining new worlds into being.
Every night until around three a.m. I am in discourse with other artists and scholars here, who are lending their own lens to me. It reminds me a bit of a library: a kind of checking-out system whereby I get to see the world through the philosophies that have shaped their own bodies and bodies of work, to accelerate the topography of the ideas of my own that are mirrored through their lens, and to plant into my practice the seeds of their work that allow the web of my understanding to widen. This is new practice for me, as I am typically devoted singularly to the completion of a project or the discipline of a practice that resembles steel more than it resembles the elastic, having no space to stretch for the allowance of other people’s entry. But I am enjoying watching myself be changed by the making of other people, to allow my edges to become a bit less defined, more porous, more open to not knowing what I think about a topic or how I might move forward with that exploration. More willing to accept my own tangential nature: The one who falls down a rabbit hole of queries without often finding a succinct way of tying a bow around a thought or question. What a helpful reminder that, though we may perceive from the perspective of our own brain and our own body, we are often extended invitations for change through the angels that show up as other people and beings. How often would you like to accept that invitation for change? I’m beginning to think I’d like to check “Yes” as often as possible.
And so, I am led to walk the labyrinthine remembering that we can never let go of the “I”, just as we can never let go of the “Other”, cannot vow chastity to the Eros that thrums through all of us, which is best accessed through the relational body, new ways of seeing, and curious conversation that points us in directions we never could have located through our own singularity.
In perfect poetic conclusion, the land here has given me my ending of this essay: A giant thunderstorm (it is not 6.15pm on the following day from when this began) that has descended upon the city of Cassis. A poignant underscoring of these ideas. I always have issue with conclusions, but now I will go listen to the thunder and imagine it to be the echo of last night’s thunderstorm.