The sky has opened and is pouring rain down in a solid mass of water.
We say “sky has opened” as if it is a solid mass but it isn’t.
Or is it?
Isn’t the sky solid, full of particles and molecules and atoms?
And maybe the body is like the sky, not a corporeal individual after all, but merely a locus, a space in which phenomena occur.
I’m reading books about alternative bodies.
“Waking” by Matthew Sanford is about his experience coming back to his body through yoga after a horrific car accident killed his father and sister and paralyzed him. He writes at the beginning of it, “I know what it feels like to leave my body.” His life was his journey back to it.
“Eavesdropping” by Stephen Kuusisto is about his experiences as a blind person learning to listen to the world.
People in other bodies move through entire universes I could never imagine unless I too was in their place.
The body is in transition, never a static place. Both Sanford’s and Kuusisto’s memoirs are titled with participles–verbs of action for bodies in action.
Like the water in the earth, sunk deep in the earth, emerges into plants and trees, flows out, is drunk by us and returns, evaporates, condenses, water, rain, rivers, all of it in constant motion.
The sky too like this, gasses forming and reforming, carbon going into the atmosphere and out of it.
The body is like this too.
We, like all planetary systems are in imbalance. Water is being used up quicker than it can replenish. More carbon is going into the air than coming out of it.
What will happen to our bodies–our own human, individual bodies–touch yours now, right now, touch the skin of it, it is real–what happens to our bodies next?
And next?