the body, as tactic
I have reached the point in my writing practice where my mind isn’t enough. I can’t milk it for words or ideas anymore. That’s actually something I’ve always known. I’ve known that the nexus of my work does not lie in my mind. My mind is simply a scribe. It filters through what is being translated.
Well, translated from who? Who is speaking then?
My body.
My body is speaking to me. That is who encounters the world. That is entity in which memories record. It is through my senses, and perhaps something far more integral. Something essentially wordless. The essence in which life enters.
When I try to get myself to write, forcing my mind into a tremor to shake out some of kind of truth I can mold on the page, I am missing something crucial. I am missing my body. There are things it has not gotten the chance to tell me because I have not taken the time to listen.
The mind is there to listen to what the body has to say. It’s there to take care of the body.
What makes us living?
Two parts.
The heartbeat and what surrounds it.
Lately, what I’ve been doing, is just moving. Moving through inspired spur of the moment figurations and dances, with or without music. That way, I free the seize I’ve held over my mind. It breaks and puffs into a dust that falls off through my motions. New ideas come to me. They open through portals.
My arm has stories. So, do my legs. My neck, my cheeks, my spine. There are stories embedded. Memories untouched, and predominantly unfelt. Things that life has poured into me that I have not gotten the chance to drink.
Rachel Nguyen illuminated in a conversation with How To Be A Woman On the Internet how, “The hardest thing is that we actually are way too inspired now, and we don’t give ourselves the time to digest or metabolize our inspiration enough to know what do with it.”
How many times do I claim I need inspiration and go seeking outside of myself for it? When the body, is a recorder. It is recording so much that I am not even conscious of. I would like to be conscious of these things.
The days I remember I have a body are my most enlivened. My least anxious. The most devoted I am to each and every one of my cells. Harmony pings within me and emanates with a mellow ommmmm.
When you read is it just with your mind?
Or when you watch a movie?
Or when you fall in love?
Where does the mind come at play with the events in our life that make us feel?
Can the mind feel?
Is it capable of that?
this is exquisite and puts into words so much of what I’ve been feeling as an artist as of late - thank you