16 April 2020
“I began to talk. I talked about summer, and about time. The pleasures of eating, the terrors of the night. About this cup we call a life. About happiness. And how good it feels, the heat of the sun between the shoulder blades.”
— Mary Oliver, “Toad”
A few months ago (before the seeming end of the world) I was taking a shower in my hostel in Madrid, absentmindedly leaning against the button on the wall to prevent the hot water from shutting off mid-shampoo. I was looking down at my stomach, which was still in the fragile queasy stages of post-drinking recovery. It was late at night, and I felt very tired, and I had this thought: my body doesn’t need to be anything right now but alive. Everything else doesn’t really matter. Just alive is enough.
I don’t usually write about my body or body image in general, not because it’s something I don’t think about or talk about, but just because it’s a hand of cards that I prefer to play close to my chest. When I write, especially about my experiences while traveling, I find that like a magpie I tend to focus on colorful details, the small things I’ll want to remember in seventy years. The familiar tang of Heinz ketchup on my tongue that day I ate a whole plate of fries in a cafe in the rain in Mostar; the sweet bready smell of the breweries on a lightly frosted morning in Edinburgh; the soft coo of doves in the rafters and the way the sunlight reflected off the green pools to dapple the carved walls in Granada’s Alhambra. Sensory details. Details that I couldn’t have gathered without my body.
It turns out that I’ve actually been writing about my body all along, without ever really writing about it. I’ve created a road map, an outline of the physical self by describing its “edges”, by writing about everything my body experiences but not my body itself. I think this is indicative, unfortunately, of how I usually view my body in general: not worth mentioning unless it’s a problem. I never really think about my body unless it bothers me — never think about my nose unless it’s runny, never think about my stomach unless it hurts, never think about my neck unless it aches, rarely think about how my face looks unless it’s to worry that it’s not symmetrical enough. I mine my sensory experiences for writing material, without ever thanking my body for making those experiences possible.
This has been on my mind lately because the two months I spent in Spain were a time of extremes in terms of body image, and I swung wildly between intense dissociative anxiety, overwhelming exuberance, and occasional bouts of raw self-hatred. I felt so disappointed by my body at times that there were moments I could barely stand to look at myself, or to touch my stomach or my thighs with my own hands. I felt like crying, often. I felt guilty about everything: what I ate, how much I drank, how little I was exercising, and (when I did exercise) that I wasn’t exercising more. I cringed at the feeling of my body moving, disgusted by the wayward jiggle of a thigh or roll of a stomach.
I’ve never been particularly good at being out of control. On a personal level, I like to have a solid grasp on where I’m going next; lacking that, as I do now, I tend to become both depressed and restive. Leaving Scotland for Madrid in the autumn was the first domino in a set of major life changes that felt very much beyond my grasp. I felt that my hand had been forced in my decision-making process thanks to my difficulties with finding work and the accompanying resident visa, and I resented it. On top of that, in the spring of last year I had decided to stop taking the birth control pill. Throughout the following months, I noticed my body change as my hormones found their natural 23-year-old balance after being held in artificial 18-year-old stasis for the last five years; mostly, it became wider and softer in places it hadn’t been before. My body — the thing that, especially as a woman, is supposed to be the last bastion of control — was also suddenly forging its own unauthorized path. And so my body, which had only ever been quietly doing the work of keeping me alive, found itself the subject of a desperate sort of loathing that was the result of an overwhelming sense of complete physical and existential powerlessness.
And yet, simultaneously, I filled page after page with notes on the minute sensory details of my days in Spain. I wrote these things down with great urgency on buses and before falling asleep, as I usually do, determined not only to experience as much as I possibly could but also to not forget, as if I was gathering straw that I would later attempt to spin into gold. Within the space of a minute or less I would berate my belly for not being as flat as it used to be, and scribble a note to myself about the cup of coffee I drank sitting in the cold beneath the evening shade of Cuenca’s cathedral: hot against my stiff fingers, a little nutty, and so creamy-sweet that even I, the queen of sweetening everything, didn’t spare a single thought for the sugar bowl.
Writing is something that I have always considered mostly cerebral — unlike pottery, for example, or woodworking, which both quite obviously depend on the body of the maker. It was all too easy for me to miss the connection. I had been struggling to figure out what to do with the mass of scribbled, disconnected notes that were mostly impressions and captured moments; none of my attempts at cohesion seemed to be working. That moment in the shower, looking down at my tired body, was the link that I had been missing. Just by being alive, my body gives me the gift of observation and experience, and it enables my craft as a writer just as much as the potter’s hands at the wheel shape the vessel. That is to say, my body of writing is my body, in writing: I wring my sensory experiences dry and from the twisted wet cloth come words.
I am in good company when it comes to writing about myself by writing about anything but myself. Joan Didion reminds us that “…our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable “I” (Didion 1968). The journal entries I write while traveling sometimes reflect an almost compulsive need to record detail. Because of that, I can look in my notebook and be reminded that the man who stopped to talk as I sat writing on a sun-warmed stone wall high up on a hill in Granada was a poet-historian named Antonio, and that he carried a cloth backpack woven in rich blues, yellows, and greens. But what I am really trying to recall is myself in that moment. If I mention the lemon that Antonio gifted me from his family’s tree, I’m remembering how I scored the rind with my thumbnail and breathed in the scent of it, as sweet as if it had already been squeezed into a sugary lemonade. If I describe the cold, dry mountain air of Andalusia in the wintertime, I’m remembering the way it made my sinuses ache for lack of moisture, and how one by one over the course of five days each of my cuticles cracked and filled my nail-beds with blood. As Didion writes, “My stake is always, of course, the unmentioned girl…Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point” (Didion 1968).
That urge to collect and record masses of sensory detail — accompanying explicit self-reflection not required — is displayed at its peak in Cider With Rosie, Laurie Lee’s memoir of his boyhood in rural England during the early interwar period. Lee writes with such powerful descriptive prose that from the very first line the reader is catapulted directly into the author’s sense-memories:
The June grass, amongst which I stood, was taller than I was, and I wept….It towered above me and all around me, each blade tattooed with tiger-skins of sunlight. It was knife-edged, dark, and a wicked green, thick as a forest and alive with grasshoppers that chirped and chattered and leapt through the air like monkeys.
…A tropic heat oozed up from the ground, rank with sharp odours of roots and nettles. Snow-clouds of elder-blossom banked in the sky, showering upon me the fumes and flakes of their sweet and giddy suffocation…
…For the first time in my life I was alone in…a world of birds that squealed, of plants that stank, of insects that sprang about without warning…I put back my head and howled, and the sun hit me smartly on the face, like a bully (Lee 1959, pp. 1).
Out of Lee’s memory flows a riot of color, sound, taste, smell, and texture. From his pages spill older sisters, their “mouths smeared with redcurrants and dripping with juice”; cool cottage interiors which, when populated with gathered wildflowers, become “still green pool[s] flooding with the honeyed tides of summer”; water from well-pumps that “came out sparkling like liquid sky” and “weighted your clothes with cold”; peas which “rolled under the tongue, fresh cold, like solid water” and “teeth chewed green peel of apples, acid sharp” (Lee 1959, pp. 2-8).
Throughout it all gambols the young boy, Laurie, running and falling and scraping knees and eating berries and swimming in creeks and drinking heady elderflower wine and absorbing it all to transform into written words as an adult. The body of the author goes unmentioned in the same way that the forest cannot be seen for the trees: it is everywhere and everything. Lee preserves a sensual world in his writing, an inter-war rural England that no longer exists, but in doing so he has also preserved himself, the sensing body of the young boy who experienced that world.
Lee’s writing in Cider With Rosie flows from the well of the physical senses, and takes a deep, joyful pleasure in the simple fact of the living body’s capacity for sensation. Though not all writing is this way, it (and to some extent, mine) is the kind that would be greatly reduced in subject matter — if not erased entirely — if it did not have the memories of the body in the world to draw from. Here, the experiences of the body and the story are one and the same.
“Your very flesh,” Walt Whitman once wrote, “shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body” (Whitman 1855).
The link between sensuality, movement, and creativity that Whitman hints at is something that I’m only just beginning to put into my own words, despite the fact that it has been at the forefront of my mind for a long time and has in many ways shaped (and been shaped by) my life over the past four years. Paul Theroux believes (and I agree) that physical outdoor activity is a necessary counterbalance to life as a writer: “The sense of liberation I felt on the water, alone in a boat,” he writes, “was comparable to the freedom I had felt expressing myself in writing…Being outside…I found inspiring, and some of my best ideas have come to me in the most unliterary circumstances — offshore, in the invigorating trance that the aerobic exercise of rowing continuously can induce” (Theroux 2000, pp. 58).
Rebecca Solnit’s book Wanderlust: A History of Walking expands on this idea at length. Walking, according to Solnit, is movement “closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart” (Solnit 2000, pp. 5) and because it can be done almost unconsciously, it allows our minds to drift freely. Walking produces the same trance that Theroux ascribes to continuous rowing, a rhythmic repetitive motion of the body that seems to both activate the mind and set it loose to roam at will through its halls of thought. Both walking and rowing are, as Solnit writes, examples of “bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, and arrivals” (Solnit 2000, pp. 5) — perhaps the clearest and simplest way I’ve seen to describe the link between movement, the body, and the act of creating.
Many hours of my life have been spent on the back of a horse. My memories of summers as a child and teenager are filtered in the dusty golden light of a hay barn, and smell of manure and the rotten vegetation of never-quite-dry valley bottoms. From the age of fourteen to the age of twenty, I had a mare with two blue eyes and a wonderful fast walk. Most afternoons after I had finished mucking stalls, I would go on long rides through the trails that radiated across the valley from the central hub of the barn. I would let the reins loop down long and loose, and my horse’s ears would flick back and forth, and when she really got going her head would swing side to side to the four-beat rhythm of her steps. I trusted my horse, and after over a decade of riding more or less trusted myself in the saddle, and so riding took on the same unconscious rhythm of my own footsteps, the body of my horse an extension of my own. It felt, indeed, like breathing, and on these long rides I would find myself easily slipping into Theroux’s “invigorating trance.”
Everything about working with horses exemplifies the connection between the physical and the cerebral. It necessitates manual labor and physical effort, but at the same time requires a deep attention not only to your surroundings but also to the internal emotional state of both yourself and your horse; all of these things together determine if your ride will go well or if you will end up in the dirt. And because so much of this attention and communication between horse and rider is non-verbal, it leaves the part of the mind that deals in words free to match itself to that four-beat rhythm and wander at will. I have done some of my best thinking in the saddle, idling my way through summer days to the rhythmic creak of leather and easy huff of my horse’s breath. The intense yet effortless feeling of both concentration and freedom I found while riding — stemming from a combination of keen but semi-subconscious sensory engagement, an acute spatial awareness of my own body, and a verbally unencumbered mind — has shaped what engaging meaningfully with the world looks like to me, and has etched both observation and movement into my bones as the conduit through which my creativity flows.
The simplest reason why I love traveling is this: being in a place to which I don’t belong tunes me in to my senses. Without the numbing agent of routine, I feel more awake. I run my fingers along crumbling stone walls, taste weird new ice cream flavors, kiss strangers, sing songs in languages I barely know. When surrounded by the unknown, I am like a person in a strange house whose lights have gone out, straining every one of my sensory faculties to its full capacity in order to find my way. In a new place, your own body is sometimes the only familiar thing, and so it makes sense that being “elsewhere” (in the global sense) would make you feel more “here” (in your body).
For me, the idea of movement as it links to creativity does not mean only the physical movement of the body; it means that and it also means movement across geographic landscapes and borders. Without overcomplicating it too much, I think that the two are like two sides of the same coin, or like one of those puzzle boxes where all the moving pieces fit together perfectly in a way that is difficult to both remember and describe. After all, what rower or walker or rider has not experienced a moment (or perhaps many moments) where they’ve thought, well — what if I just kept going? It’s perhaps the oldest human desire. Many writers more well-read and well-researched have spent their careers (or at least a book or two) contemplating this same thing — Bruce Chatwin, for example, in The Songlines, which near its end transitions into a collection of notes on nomadism interspersed with narrative in something very akin to a literary throwing of hands into the air.
Regardless, I have written these words in six different cities, three different countries, two different airports, one airplane hurtling through the sky at around 35,000 feet, and more cafe tables than I can count. Sometimes, it has seemed that the only thing that shook the words loose at all was my continued movement from place to place. Make of that what you will.
Now I’m back in California, and I’m not somewhere new or foreign. I am in the place I know the best, where I have spent the most time in my life, where everywhere I go I see familiar faces and am myself seen as a familiar face. The other night, after my shower, I stood in front of the mirror looking at myself while I brushed my teeth. I grinned at the sight of the weird charcoal toothpaste I just bought that painted my teeth black. I looked at my sun-marked chest and my shoulders and my collarbones and watched them move as I breathed and raised my arms and put my arms down again and I felt an immense tenderness towards my body. I looked at the faint scars on my skin and the freckles dotting my arms and the barely visible white patch on my right collarbone where there used to be a mole. I thought, it’s good to be home.
Didion, J. (1968).“On Keeping a Notebook.” Slouching Towards Bethlehem. NY: Dell.
Lee, L. (1959). Cider With Rosie. London: Hogarth Press.
Solnit, R. (2000). Wanderlust: A History of Walking. London: Penguin Books.
Theroux, Paul. (2000). Fresh-Air Fiend: Travel Writings. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Whitman, W. (1855). Leaves of Grass. Self-published.
SGBRSH 