Body Language

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There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
-Robert Hass, “Meditation at Lagunitas”

We are eating cheap pizza & drinking iced tea from styrofoam cups under fluorescent lights. I have told her only that I want to talk about body. She begins dabbing her pizza with a napkin, sucking away the grease & depositing it on a spare paper plate. She stops suddenly, alarmed.
“Does this bother you?” she asks.

“What? The dabbing? Of course not.”

“Ok, good. Ok. I would have done it even if it bothered you. But I wanted to ask.”

I am thinking about the way she chews-the muscles she uses, how her jawbone moves in an elliptical orbit, like oarsmen rowing, rowing. She dabs & tears her pizza into smaller & smaller pieces. She eats it in the moments that I am not looking, which are always.

* * *

“When I was a child, I had this feeling that I was going to be an artist-a painter. I don’t know why, or how, I knew this, but I knew I would be a painter. So I looked at things, because that’s what painters do-they look. I looked at things all the time. And so of course I looked at bodies; bodies are beautiful. Bodies are vessels of communicating unsaid things, and I was a painter, so I listened to them.”

She says this to me & I want her to be lying, because it has that sense of completeness that I don’t believe in, that frisson of dead energy that whispers: over-wrought; already-said. I want her to laugh & say, “No, I am lying.” I want her to frown & say, “No, I did not think this. I do not know why I said this.” But she is not lying. As she speaks, her chest contracts & relaxes, shivers. Her breasts are hidden in her blouse, but I know they are there: shifting as she respires.

She tells me a story about birth. When a baby is born, she says, its spine leaves a groove on the inside of a woman’s body. With a sonogram, you can read the grooves like rings on a tree, counting the years: one, two, three. “Don’t you have to cut her open to see? Like cutting down a tree to count its rings?” I ask. She stops pulling apart her pizza & her lips purse slightly; tiny wrinkled lines, like worms. “I am not my body,” she says, & I hold my breath, counting one, two, three, until she moves & I remember to breathe.

* * *

My body is a mystery, a fog, a supreme obfuscation. It is a series of unrelated events, manifest as flesh & bone & follicle. I do not walk correctly, but bounce. This, the doctors say, because my Achilles tendons are too short. I try to explain to them that this is a blessing: less chance for Paris to hit me with his arrow, I say, but they do not understand. They answer me with scalpels & anesthesia. The surgery is unsuccessful, & my tendons do not stretch properly. I spend two months in casts, & afterwards-now-I bounce, still.

My breath, too, is mystical. Asthma, from the Greek for panting. The doctors tell me that it is some defect of my lungs-that something is enflamed, that something is constricted, that something is not the way it should be. I take them at their word. My breath is fog on glass & then-suddenly-leaving, tapping out Morse code on my lungs, telegraphing messages that travel through the smallest pieces of flesh & bone & follicle. Messages I do not-cannot-understand.

* * *

This is, after all things, what I am trying to tell you: that I cannot understand my body, but that I desperately wish to. That I look at myself in the mirror sometimes & say: “This is not who I am. This is someone else.” I am asking you, then, the old questions: Do you see me? Do you see me? Do you see me? Please.

* * *

Stop & watch them. Bodies moving through space. Space, itself a body. The perpetual touching of space & body, body & space. Try & stop. Watch them pass.

The feet are not connected to the ground. They arch away, constantly reaching up. When walking, the body takes small leaps, dispatches itself from the earth; flies, briefly. We are creatures of wind & air. The gluteal muscles, the ass. Their movement-on a bicycle, the back & forth of legs, in the grocery store. A clenching. Up & in. We say bottom, but it is not. It is a center: up & in; a conjunction: but.

Stop & watch them: the way he drags his feet, scraping the ground, refusing to fly. The way she touches her face, once, twice, again. The way he stops, arches his back, continues. Her neck, sideways, motherly, cradling the phone. The constant breathing-incessant. The massive force of lungs, moving up & in, back down. Diaphragms contracting, relaxing; & all at once a great gasp of air, like solar flares bursting forth from the photosphere-itself a body in motion.

* * *

But there exist, too, those bodies which are still. Interred, they wait silently for our forgiveness, for our motion, for our breath. Just once more, they yearn for the quick up & in of motion. They must.

We have words for them: deceased, corpse, cadaver. Cadaver, short for “Caro Data Vermibus est,” Latin for “flesh given to worms.” Bodies, in a body, devoured by bodies. Yet, even in their stillness, there is motion. A body does work even after it ceases-it decomposes: purposefully, methodically. There are those who watch these bodies. Grand establishments-fields that are all body, body, body. Body farms, they are called. Anthropologists who watch the dead.

* * *

There are, broadly, three stages of decomposition. The first, autolysis-literally “self-destroying”-involves the secretion of digestive enzymes. The body eats itself. It does not, however, mistake itself for food-rather, these digestive enzymes are secreted as a response to the inactivity of cells. Even after death, our bodies know themselves-our bodies are brief messages, & then: this message will self-destruct. During this stage, flies lay eggs in the openings of the body: the eyes, the nose, the ears. New bodies in old bodies.

After autolysis, the bloating. Gases release from the gut as it breaks down, & they become trapped in the small intestine, like those last few in the burning building, blocked by collapsed rafters, no way to escape the flames. Bodies expanding. When the fire burns through the rafters-when the body breaks down, & openings begin to form-the trapped gases escape. One last sigh, then the final stage: putrefaction. This is irrevocable. The tissues liquefy, break their bonds & descend once more into the Earth. The brain is the first to go.

* * *

I pick pieces of feta cheese off of my pizza-clumps of white, & the orange-yellow of mozzarella & tomato, mixed. This once came from a body. From body, to body-holy communion.

She used to dance ballet. By this, I am fascinated: the way we trick the body into making lines, making music. The way we extend, then curl back. How a dancer is less a person & more a painting, in motion.

“I spent my childhood looking at myself in mirrors,” she says. “I thought only about my body, my machine, my instrument. How there are tensions; where you place weight, & counterweight.”

“You were an engineer of the body,” I suggest.

“Yes. I saw the body in parts and pieces-this muscle holding this, this bone curved here.”

She tells me about the dangers. About how dancing “en pointe,” on the tip of the toes, can turn suddenly into disaster. She tells me about how she once landed incorrectly, felt something snap, but kept going because she was told to do so. She tells me about how this broke her hip & ended her career when she was just a teenager. I wonder about the bone-ossified matter, the shape of two men kissing, their hands clasped. I wonder what would tear them apart so-what force could rend this meeting of lovers. The pain. The cracking-the snap, like twig, like tongue to teeth.

She tells me, too, about how she was anorexic in high school. How she spent nights in the hospital for injections of nutrition. This is privilege, of course. To feel the body famished, and be saved-to stare into the abyss & survive. Most are not so lucky. But I, too, want to feel the body famished. It is a ritual of self-hood, of seeking. This is privilege, of course, & perhaps reprehensible. Perhaps I should feel remorse, should feel guilt. But I feel only breath & grease & atmospheric pressure on flesh & bone & follicle.

“My skin,” she says, “was alive; it had a heartbeat. It was almost a separate person from me. Lying there in the hospital bed, thinking about your body and how thin it is, how you know you should eat, but can’t, you start to lose track of your metaphysical self. All that’s left is you and this I.V.”

* * *

Later, I will try to feel this. I will lay in my bed, & speak to my skin. Skin, I will say: speak to me. I will think about jawbones & planetary motion, about spines, about the movement of legs & lungs. Trying futilely to decide what language my body speaks, why I cannot understand it the way she does, I will fall asleep; & in this state-a body unconscious, a body itself, & only-I will dream of an anthropologist, taking notes-hidden from me-as Joan of Arc burns, her flesh slowly leaving her, & joining the air. The anthropologist will see the body differently than I ever will: in terms of parts & pieces, & how some burn slowly, others quickly. She will say something: “Hmm, interesting,” or “Ah, yes, I see,” & touch her pen to the tip of her tongue, before noting down whatever it is that makes us a body. Crowded around her, the bodies watching will inhale the burning flesh, a new kind of communion; their eyes will begin to water from the heat, & no matter how hard they try to watch this body burning, burning, they will eventually turn away.

* * *

No, this is over-wrought; already-said. I will want to, but I will not dream this. I will instead dream of faceless bodies dancing. I will see them, but have no body of my own. I will not dance. I will ask: Do you see me? Do you see me? Do you see me? Please.