The Body as Object

“This is how you began to understand your body as object. You saw yourself in other people’s faces. And although you stopped singing, your body sang on its own and you knew everyone around you could hear it. You couldn’t stop hearing it. You were nineteen years old.” 

From a haunting and marvelous and hard-to-read essay by Susannah Nevison up at the Rumpus.

“Paternalia.” Rumpus original art by Erech Overaker.

The body as object — one of the many and yet most common frames through which we view bodies, our own and others’. A body that is beautiful. Or unexpected. Or failing; that is burnt or broken or stuck somewhere, inside. Or perhaps a body that is whole when we are not and so we find some flaw, some tiny fissure or failing to ridicule.

Nevison writes about the body, about disease and wounds and healing and family, with a lyrical grace that still never shies away from the raw, the honest. Making beautiful words, even structures (I admire the use of the numbered sections in this essay), weaving three separate stories together, sharing brutal and tender details side by side (singing Salt-n-Pepa while washing pins in a wounded leg), never slipping into the melodramatic, the overwrought…it’s this kind of work I want in my head when I sit down to write.

Manifesto.

“Nude, Belgravia.” Bill Brandt. 1951.

I’m setting out to write about the body: its subtlety, grotesquery and power. About aesthetics: texture and style, the play of the light. About how these things bring me, and possibly even us, closer to finding an identity–or perhaps to relinquishing the very notion of “identity” all together.

Mostly, I write essays. On physicality and memory. On origins and insides. On the body’s rhythms, traumas and transcendent moments. Essays exploring my attachment to beauty, both within and upon and beyond my flesh–beauty in objects, spaces and things. I’ve found myself trying to write a piece about myself and ending up, again and again, with a piece about my mother. Or a piece about my legs, their whiteness; or my hair, its sheen, its eccentricities. I’ve found myself getting inspired by the contents of my body, and equally inspired by the contents of my handbag.

This is a place for proposing connections. Indulging desires. Exploring the insides of things.