The Human Body Experience

A scene I cut out of All Fours / the state of the body I'm reporting live from

Sometimes I want to refer to parts of All Fours that I didn't ultimately include in the book. A novel takes on a life of it's own and things get cut simply because it's too much knowledge for that narrator at that point in their life – though not for me, not for where I'm at. And, based on your comments, not for you. So I will open with a conversation that I cut from the book, inspired by an actual interview with a friend’s mother.

On Wednesday I went to the motel and was grateful for the structure of an interview. Today was Pilar’s mom, Camille, a very lucid nutritionist in her late sixties. I gave a kind of dramatic performance of my libido anxiety, setting it up so she could easily knock it down, maybe even laugh. She went quiet for a moment.

"I wouldn’t say it that way but…”

Oh no.

“…it’s like all the seasons stop, you know? Like you’re permanently in Hawaii or something. It’s temperate all the time.”

“What about the lunar calendar, can’t you follow that?” She was very tuned-in to that sort of thing.

“Well sure, I can follow the moon cycles intellectually but it's not tied to my body any more. There aren’t those waves of changing sensation and emotions that come with periods. I miss having my life in a cycle.”¹

“That just seems so sad,” I whispered.

“Yes, the grief is real. There’s a mourning that’s part of letting go. But from a spiritual point of view, that’s kind of what I’m here for, you know? To have the body experience.”

I nodded thoughtfully. The body experience, yes.

“It’s not all about transcendence and overcoming, it’s about being in your body, here. That’s why we incarnated. I don't know if I'm gonna reincarnate, but right now I'm having this human experience with human problems and that includes having a body, with pluses and minuses of having a body.”

“But it’s not an unbearable grief,” I said, “Right?”

“I guess grief itself is always bearable. But the things we do to avoid grief might not be.”

She gave me what I felt was a pointed look and I wondered if Pilar had filled her in about my marital dead heat. Was I avoiding grief? If Jed and I were to divorce I would almost certainly enter the deathfield. I would either live in anguish forever, like my dad, or be destroyed by it, like Esther and Ruthie. I thought about saying the word deathfield to Camille just to hear her say deathfield? Never heard of it – but what if she had.

I think of this all the time, the body experience: that's what I'm here for. Not just lust or being strong but the whole ride of having a body, incarnation from start to finish. A lot of this Substack will probably concern the body experience.

Since late May I've been dealing with a brand new body experience that I'll name on another day; for now I'll use the vague term "exhaustion". It’s unlike and unrelated to perimenopause — a sudden event, something I can recover from — but has been similarly life-altering. The best awful thing that ever happened to me (that's one giant lesson of getting older, no? That without some kind of crisis that involves real suffering, it's hard to actually change, to see yourself and really approach life in a new way. I think when I was younger I thought change could happen through a series of things working out, like swinging on the monkey bars - taking a risk and succeeding, over and over again. Never realizing that falling, dropping down off the bars on to the woodchips (lol this metaphor straight out of 1986) allowed you to move freely in any direction. Not with the gymnastic amazingness of practically flying but with another, subtler agility that no one will ever notice so it has to be enough that it feels wonderful, to you.)

[Forcing myself to interpret my metaphors like dreams, since they do rise up from the unconscious, what do the monkey bars mean for me? Well: I wasn't good at them, they did seem truly scary and dangerous, they also seemed to be designed 100 percent for showing off -- unlike, say, the jungle-gym dome which you use as a shelter or the merry go round which made you dizzy. I often felt frail on them, like my arm might get pulled off. And they were exhausting, they took stamina. Something I not only don't have right now, but that I can't re-build simply by training or trying hard or being brave, as I have my whole life.]

This exhaustion is the jittery kind (not snoozy doozy). It's like kicking Xanax, that tight-jawed, relentlessly restless agony. Her "nerves are shot" - I can picture co-workers on a tv show saying about a woman whose sister went missing; I like that phrase. Shot, the way brakes on a car can be shot - broken thus dangerous, skidding, crashing - but also the shooting gun that produced the word "shot" feels like it could be the very thing that caused her condition. The culprit is right there in the diagnosis. And when your nerves are shot, everything is like gunshot. The house making one of those tiny little pop noises that normally you don't hear, it's just the sound of the sun coming out, the house expanding - that makes me jump! Myself stepping on a leaf. Everything involving cars.

*

These days I can often just proceed, cleaning, making dinner, having a conversation, laughing at jokes, but in the summer each of these things was very hard. I couldn't even laugh -- the first joke, ok: heh. But then people get encouraged so they do another joke, not understanding how hard that first heh noise was. For the second joke I would have to wiggle my fingers in the air to imitate laughter and that always dried up the mood. Nothing could be funny after that.

I'll know I'm better when I can easily watch tv or a movie. So far it's too passive. I read. I walk. Anything with a cadence. I want to be massaged every moment, pounded. Not sexually. This exhaustion kind kills the soft focus of fantasy. Very here and now, that's the radical aspect of this body experience. The discomfort keeps you locked to your body, like your face shoved up against a mirror, unable to shut your eyes. Here you are. Here. Here. Here.

Which, as it turns out, is a real achievement; not nowhere.

So that's where I'll be reporting live from. As per the above, and given the warmth and vulnerability of all your comments, I'm going to stay improv-y here. Erratic, too much and too little. Brace yourself for a fair amount of frivolity, as I'm trying to do what feels good, not what is good, and that's often just dumb as a doorknob. But by this late date we all know that the Dumb Door is the only door that leads anywhere, through shame, through femininity, through reality. I wish I was as dumb as the doorknob on the Dumb Door. One day!

Allright, time to get ready for the Semiotexte event celebrating the late, wonderful writer Kevin Killian and this new book of his collected Amazon Reviews. I'm reading the review he wrote about Superman. If you're in LA it's at 7:30 at 2220 Arts + Archives.

mj

1. I should add that this same woman, "Camille," was having sex she loved, which she explained to me in wonderful detail, and is just one of the more alive and interesting people I know. And, fwiw, not the earth-mama you're probably picturing - rather glamorous and put together! I eventually realized that while these things she said about grief and the body experience were important, you really needed to see the whole picture of her, hear everything she had to say, to not feel slightly devastated. It's *because* she's so in touch with herself and the pull of the moon that she even notices the one-season feeling (and misses the wild shifts, while many women are glad to be done with them.) Maybe you're getting the sense of why, in the end, I did not include the many interviews I did while writing the book. Tiny pieces, here and there, but not to this extent. It's really because any single, real woman is too complex! I whole book unto herself.