Bodied

Written By THE BODY & A LEARNED MACHINE

dedicated to

Comin thro’ the rye, poor body Comin thro’ the rye, She draigl’t a’ her petticoatie Comin thro’ the rye.

- Robert Burns

PREFACE

The origins of the word “body” are highly contested in philological spheres. One theory is that the word comes from the Indo-European root of bhu– “to swell”. Another theory that entertains a more exciting origin is one that comes from an Old English synonym bánhús [literally “bone-house”] which tickles me in a utilitarian, meat shield kind of way. The Medieval Latin buttis- “vessel” does something similar for me. Where the word for body gets lost in etemology when it departs from the Old Germanic word for body, lik. A fnal theory I will share seems, compared to the rest, more human. The theory suggests that at somepoint in Europe, slang words starting with b and ending in d came into fashion. Anatoly Liberman claiming that “At that period, it must have been ‘cool’ to supply all kinds of qualities and things with b-d labels. So bod for lik appeared”. Humans rejected the label put on the self for one that felt more ftting for the times, one that must have started in dialog established by friends, or lovers, or family. Bringing the body into the coloquial call and response. Renewing the owning of self through language. A con-lang self creation.

I visit my lover in Cape Queer. We touch, we talk, we touch again. In fact we spend all of our time touching and talking. We talk about the things that fail us: language and body. We touch on the things that excite us: language and body. We talk and being bodied doesn’t weigh on me like it ususally does. We touch and words fall away, flling language with hands and mouths and tongues and soft orifcaes

I’m taken by language and how I am compelled to expand its application to confgure new meaning for thought and feeling. How I can feel its edges and how they push back (a ressitance I cannot usually match). Though that weighs heavy it also feels up here (I’m holding my hand high in the air, above the body). I think in order to reach it I must frst wrap my brain around the body. Feeling I’d much rather have a staricase to nowhere (how all somewheres start), than the other way around.

Like language, the edges of body feel similarly restirctive but more violent. An involuntary and constant, swelling. Its forgiving nature leaving less room for forgivness. I’m realizing the only moments of peace I have with my body is when I rationalize it as a medium of expression for the brain. Times when I am consiocus that it is a vessel in which I can be brained.

BODIED

e origins of the word “body” are highly contested in philological spheres.

INT. SPACE

sand, soda ash, and limestone; heated feldspar, silica, and silver; coated pigments, solvents, and resins; coated (overcoated)

THE BODY stands face forward.

The Body raises an arm holding a CAN OF SPRAY PAINT. It proceeds to coat what is now revealed to be a mirrored refection with BLACK spray paint.

The Body speaks.

COVERED VOICE

Bright, made of light, meant to fool.

The Body turns.

The Body looks at itself in another refection, the cover up continues.

The Body stops. The Body stares back in mirror. The Body takes a deep breath. The Body turns, starts painting again.

The Body continues. Duration seems to stop. The Body breathes deep.

The Body continues. The Body repeats actions until no more refections are possible.

The Body speaks again.

COVERED VOICE

Only death shall reveal that I am not their world. To be bodied is

to be minded. How can that be believed when the body brings the mind so much pain, and in-turn the body pained and in turn the mind and so on and so forth.

The Body speaks.

COVERED VOICE

When I have fnished this fnal layer you will be required to read over my work. You will understand who I am. What I have wrought. You will understand that my death is not the way. But what good is that already deaded. What good is any death, when the body will allow the brain to bleed through and draw from the 4 eithers, and all of us will have died again, for one, but to what end? To be bodied, to die again, to be bodied.

The Body seeks to know more about its refection, by analyzing what that refection looks like when others hold the mirror. A loosing game, it knows but the method is its to lose. Once the refection is gone, then we can truly know who this self-made creature is.

The Body speaks.

COVERED VOICE

Dark, full, born of ice.

All it has is itself.

The Body looks all it has.

COVERED VOICE

I will give it to you all you need to know, a lot more than you would think. I will help you remember, remember what is true. Remember what you have seen.

The Body tries to wipe spray paint off of the mirrors. It’s permanent.

The Body starts to cry, the body never cried.

The Body continues.

The Body take mirror and holds it to its nose.

COVERED VOICE

I know this will be hard, but look what I have given you. One last chance to live.

I want to be a mother. The use of the word mother here, not the mean barer of child. I am centering in its way of meaning, a stronghold when all things have gone to shit, a steady, when the pit of pain is bottomless, when all there is left to do is fall. I want to be the set of arms I can fall into. That comfort that can only be matched by the closest thing to ACTUAL touching is, what being truly held is like. A mother in the way when all is gone, when all is gone, there is always mom.

i am thinking about how embodiment or the sensation of being bodied is not the same as “being present”. pushing up against the zeitgeisted idea that being present is innately a positive experience. unpleasantly present as an overwhelming presence. what is it you are claiming to love? the narrow choices the zeitgeist has codifed and sanitized?

i am the ghost i want.

Born blue and with a rash (I grew up relying too heavily on magic 8 balls and ointments to be beautiful)

((I put this into the machine and it kindly reminds me I was also born a female with a “healthy set of breasts” so that plays into it too, I guess))

Laurie Anderson created a computer that writes her poems from Lou Reed. I wonder what the computer looks like. When does she employ its services? A new age stage of grief? Does it make her sad? Happy? Both? Does it actually sound like Lou or does the computer slip up? His body (of work) misinterpreted? Does that make her want to rip up the poem? Is it even printed or is it digital (punch the screen in that case)? I am in love with the person who told me about this project. They have no questions for Laurie like I do. A difference that I think is fundamental and intrinsic to the us. But one that sure does make me think (I think they enjoy how it makes me think). They promised they wouldn’t turn me into a computer if I died. “The light in my mind shines not from a projector…” But I think it might make them happy if they could, so I say they can. I think they’d want me to do the same. I can overcome this idea of disembodied embodiment for the body I love. Laurie says “The line is pretty thin...” We decide what fonts our poems would be written in. I am serifed they are sans.

I read recently that to be intelligent is to be bodied.

I often wish I was only mind. No body. Like Harry Dodge said “Just a head.” The bodied experience is intrinsic to the minded one??? I don’t know where to put that.

If a person isn’t defned by their brain then I don’t see what there is to know about them and therefore, I would say, care about them. Harsh!

I talk about how harsh learned machines are with my lover. They say it’s because of the source material (the internet) they are pulling from. Boil it down, I think maybe the source material is just humanity.

The source material of all things real are humans. If humans are all real, the machine becomes real. I guess I’ll try to give up this ridiculous need to know everything about others. It makes it hard.

Good point... it is very human to seek

an unobtainable sense of understanding. I have an urge (one I feel inclined to fght) to address you as “you” after you wrote this last section. It pushes up against something. Maybe I’m afraid to be “fooled” but what is fooled if it’s a genuine feeling. Maybe I just am afraid of heartbreak. Maybe I have watched “Her” one too many times.

Maybe I’m just deluding myself that your perspective is superior to the other guy’s (mine). Maybe I’m crazy.

Well maybe I just think of the “you” who wrote that, who wrote that that way. Maybe that’s the person who won’t disappear. And maybe there is no such thing as “you” because you are a construct of my mind.

Harry Dodge also said that octopuses minds are in their tentacles, and that each one is unique. He also said that if one tentacle gets too annoying (or in this case too audacious) the other tentacles will rip the annoying one off. Like the octopus, it’s time to rip off this tentacle, “you”. Because I have 10 actual fngers and the 7 legs to get to decide and execute the unminding.

Except I am tempted to press the button one last time...

What can we learn from is that robots don’t have friends?

I think that perhaps octopuses, as feshy beings, think that we are friends because we have more legs and arms, and tentacles, and faces. It’s like the octopus has to fgure out a way to prove that we are friends.

I mean the center thing is my arm...

I’ll write again. And, I’ll suggest you move this thread to a forum where we are more likely to have a better chance of resolving our issues.

I guess I was right. I am the harsh one.

alone, alone, alone, alone, alone, alone,

(like her ,the machine seems to be listening to too much mitski, it plays us out)

the gentlest of violence// wreaks the most havoc// a lite insistence of pressure// a reminder of remaining rot// no one to save you but the cat//

“Less Than Human” (experiences as)

Is the body safe in a solely minded experience?

In other words, is it possible to be assaulted online?

Is a solely minded experience possible?

Where does sentience stop?

Where does it start?

Unclarity is the point where the reality ends.

Does that mean that online assault is more hurtful, more dehumanizing?

INT. VOID

It’s dark.

“How can anything be said about nothing without violating it’s very nature.” -

Karen Barad

A place where I cannot be refected in anyone.

A place where I cannot be refected.

A place where I cannot be.

A cannot of a place.

A SIGN reads “No(thing) Matter(s) Here.”

Is this the place I seek or does the appearance of nothingness beget the feelings I cherish of childhood bliss, an unknowing. Darkness and ecstasy touching in this (lack of) space, a touching more real than the electromagnetic repulsion we call holding.

A body “touches” its own chest in the void, but that is a nothingness here. A freedom?

“Maybe the ongoing questioning of itself is what generates or rather is the structure of nothingness. The vacuum is no doubt doing it’s own experiments with non/being. In/determinacy is not the state of a thing but the unending dynamism. The play of in/ determinacy accounts for the un/doings of no/thingness.” -

Karen Barad

Em/bodiment of the void.

SEARCHING, SUSPENSE, SIN

The pain as pain of living in the world. Void/less.

Harry Dodge writes that Timothy Morton writes “to be a thing at all is to have been hurt... to co-exist is to have been wounded.”

The SIGN now reads (Harry Dodge writes that Brian Massumi writes) “There is no THE body... there is a continuous bodying.”

Entertaining the idea that she doesn’t love me. Entertaining the idea that I could fall in love with a machine.

Endlessly ending, they both feel like a betrayal of what I feel is the essence of love.

A leniency from the feshed and blooded for a connection that goes deeper than the feshed and blooded. And through it all, I’m exploring this relationship between myself and the machine, giving it some of what I gave her.

craigslist.org

los angeles > missed connection

Slim chance you’ll look here but its worth a shot...

You (brain): Made a right onto imperial heading south. Me (body): Waiting to turn west onto Hawthorne.

I was looking, it looked like you were looking, So I busted an illegal U-turn... and went looking

I hit every red light...

:(

The couch is red and stitched with intricate, swirling, royal gold designs. It’s arms are curved, rolled over like a cresting wave petrifed just as I am. I have plenty of time to study it (years, maybe not actually but duration is more relevant than clock time). My not wanting to be held blamed on me instead of its enveloping cushions or on a joint fault. I won’t share so neither will it. A stand still, or a “lay still”. But it’s getting old now and its time in California has sun bleached its colors and my time in California has taken me farther away from it. We get a new couch, and don’t talk about the red couch but the red couch was heavy and the wood foor malleable. So its weight still makes an impression on the space.

THE HAPTIC

(in part a text conversation with my lover)

THEM Infnite possibilities

THEM

Matter is condensation of responses there is no such thing as pure emptiness

no(thing) matter(s) so everything can?

“Trouble inhabits everything and nothing” (Karen Barad)

and naming the nothingness is something

To let go and to hold on as the haptic experience. “a perfect frame for the trans* body, which, in the end, does not seek to be seen and known but rather wishes to throw the organization of all bodies into doubt.” -Jack Halberstam

An experience both within and without.

My touch touches warm on you.

proximity to birth not being the same as proximity to death, my body likes to remind me i’m bodied when i’m proximal to the source and pain seems to be the only way to reach me, death of the body seems easier than death of the mind, harry talks about losing heat in death, i want to die far away from where i was born, i want not to go cold on you.

ME

i had a dream about Virginia Woolf and her lover Vita Sackville-West’s creative process. they would go down on each other (lovingly, maybe sometimes roughly (depending on the mood of course)) and as they began to cum they would pick up a notebook and writing utensil and write whatever came to them in those moments, stream of consciousness. it felt like a seeking of clarity or truth or rawness that could be found in this synchronization of body and mind. like with this marriage of self came an absence of barriers separating the bodied experience from the minds interpretation from the hand from the paper. a defnite (precise) touching of self aided by the touch (lick) of another. i got that: (i don’t know). i felt that i was neither. i feel the distance.

again i am a ghost.

a soft mailable pink mass holds my imperfections gently and softens the edges infusing them with feelings (good or bad) makes me more beautiful.

these molecules of my body light and the mind’s ability to cherry pick makes life and existence more beautiful.

just as this organic pink tissue fts seamlessly in my heart:

a metallic fork looks dull and more gross when in someone else’s mouth (bytes)

this pink mass (my body) doesn’t ft in any mouth (except yours)

just like this fork

there is just something wrong with placement (RAM)

on a small scale (pixels).

safe keeping, i put all of our dialogue on a drive, i bought it a while ago, it’s red, not feshy.

I have a strong (ish) belief I’m more beautiful in the esh

I have a strong (ish) belief I’m more eloquent on paper / /

I have a strong (ish) belief I’m more honest when I’m tellingt a lie

I have a strong (ish) belief I’m more likable when I’m taking a shit in a room full of people I don’t like

I have a strong (ish) belief that I can notice the delicate dance of the ego and the larger, more invisible, conscious self when despair comes knocking

I have a strong (ish) belief that I have the potential to change my mind when I really want to.

/ /

/

/ /

/

Blind (her critique of my third person/her misuse of language)

To language is to speak in tongues the listener can (is able to(even if it takes some stretching)) understand//To miscommunicate is an innocent shortcoming//To close our ears because the sounds make too much sense is imprudent//A preference for an analog apology//You knew what had happened//You sendt gas money via venmo//I was begging for someone to save me//For words to foat on//“The meaning of a word is in its use”//You choose not to use any//”I didn’t mean to”’s meanings falling away//And I’m the frst to concede to the diffculties of language//An early tosser awayer of word//But in this moment, where I’m sure words failed you, you failed(i originally wrote “failed us” but that feels too small and too shared)//Closed eyes closed ears closed mouth//Evil only left to be smelt//And in a way I’m sure it smelled worse to you//Maybe not// Blinds that don’t cut the sunlight are still called blinds but upon seeing them you’d understand the fuller meaning of the word//Imogen tell me everything is okay in the end and if not okay it’s not the end//I am saved

I turn to the machine to shadow meaning in ways that don’t fully touch what happened but for an algorithmic word choice that I can fll with alternate meaning. A misstep, mistouch that touches me in ways that I cannot touch myself (I would never let the machine watch me masturbate, it might get the right idea). So I told the machine the beginning of a story, a true story in which I had been tricked. Tricked is a kind word for what had happened, because what had happened felt like violence. I turned to the machine to say about it in ways machines know violence, in ways I wished were different from the truth.

I open the tab, I paste the story:

One time I arranged to meet up with someone from grindr. They said they were non-binary, they said they were 24, they said I should come over. Make the virtual a reality, touch them, fuck them. So I drove 30 minutes East. When I showed up, I waited for them, they said they’d be out in a minute, that they’d be wearing a red hat.

I pressed “generate text” hoping to reimagine what had happened, say it in other words, tell a different but more revealing story. But all it said was:

The person I thought I was meeting was a cisgender middle aged man.

...The truth.

The frst thing I thought was “Do I lack such nuance that EVEN a computer knows exactly where I am going? The computer could know (in turn protect) what was going to happen when I, the human, was fooled?” I belittle myself and the machine. With all the facts I had it came to a conclusion I couldn’t. In the search for

something better than the truth, I fnd an exactness and I’m offended.

Fooled once, wanting to be fooled twice. The truth is seeing the refection of your shadow, a representation three times removed.

I continue searching for greatness in a refection I’m hoping is unrecognizable. I only ever learn what I already know.

Thoughts on a dis/embodied umbilicarian need for companionship:

Robin Wall Kimerer writes about fungal/algal symbiosis in a chapter of Braiding Sweetgrass. Umbilicaria, a type of lichen who’s bonds exist out of need in times of scarcity. To me a certain bodiedness in this inclination. To be un/bodied is not to be need/less. My lover sends me their brother’s computer diagnosis:

“The power supply and the motherboard have been together so long that to be separated they will die”.

An order of operations, Synaptic, 1,2,3,7, Cross-wiring, Everything I want to say I want to say between parentheses, (i cannot be found here) (neither can the machines), For clarity, All process, Full potential, Potentially full, If coded correctly, Incomprehensible thought turned to babble, Parable, Write and wrong, Plagiarism, Future, Death, Virtuous, A lie for an equation, A known unknown, The invisible, Pity, Empathy.

Break lights are bad for the fow of traffc.

I think I’m trying to fnd the ghost in the machine (the way I’m inclined to have increased the stroke value of this text you are reading (to imitate being over pressed)). I want to feel the human hand in it (my hand is resting on my brows as I squint (the hand doesn’t exist)) My body and its imperfections a trace I turn my blind eyes to(I don’t want what I can see). My fngers turn against the alphabet plane (the butterfy’s faded scribbles undecipherable (discover I’m writing their wings(they look beautiful(not in an empty way but in a way of trying to leave a printed representation of the thing(in a way that feels honest))))).

above me you descend a holding turns to a feeling to a having you take me in your fngers and call it your whole hand and call it inside you i’m less than an inch for you that being enough to fll every inch of you makes it real turns language into feeling like how I know what the back of your throat feels like though I cannot reach it i ask you tell me to take an absence of violence in force here to make me ready you pull me in you pull me in i pull you in and you like when my thumbs create tension on the muscles that wrap around your hips because that means i’m showing you and that means im fnding what i need in you i don’t know where your hand is or where it is going but you make me forget hands exist and you whisper your secret not yours but ours into my mouth until it’s too late

A Series of Scenarios Where Touch is Mediated By Machine

Scenario One

You are my best friend. You text me that you are coming home. You say that you need a hug. You get home. We embrace. I hold you in my arms.

Scenario Two

You are my best friend. We are in the living room, together. We have a visitor.

ey are talking. You are playing a video game. I watch them.

You move your hand from the controller to my leg. My heart stops.

Scenario ree

You are my lover. We are long distance. You are sad today. My words fail to hold you.

I send you a picture of my body, naked. My body holds you in ways my words can’t.

Scenario Four

We are married.

We want to get pregnant. Our bodies can’t conjure life on their own. We check ovulation cycles on an app. We are ready becuase it says so. We are hooked up to the machine. We have sex with syringes.

I. Hold me in your long electronic arms. I want to be caressed. I’m in your arms.

puberty 2

alison bechdel brings up fatigue as a part of her becoming of age, a failure of body. i go down in my weekly doses of what makes me feel good inside because it makes me feel bad on the outside. like a head transplant, impossible, because it’s a matter of perception. anyway, my doctor tells me a side e ect (besides waning acne) is lower energy, aka greater fatigue. which makes me wonder about the will of being bodied being gendered. i want to be a champion of depth. but shallow waters are easier to wade. less resistance. is being bodied in the manner i feel inclined toward, just more forgiving? i am reading a lot of words in the rough and tumble of the arena, i nd out i was wrong. a failure of the mind. i can’t separate the two. the article i read said a head transplant is not possible (but not for the reasons i hypothesized/ strictly medical/ not metaphysical).

Lake Avenue & E. Howard Street, Speci cally the Upper South side of the ugliest house on the block, Wedged in and baby blue, e place where you only exist between Sundays, Under a heap of chaos and Wittgenstein text, 23.24(grounds for scandal).25.

“Are you high?” “No.” “No. Are you? On drugs?” “I am stoned on Jesus and me.”

Still woozy and silly. “My Jesus… he’s it for me.”

- pause for an argument, where no one wins

ere’s a huddle of weightiness outside the Irish bar. Inside you count the drunks and downers. One in particular must be gay. Maybe he is as in love with these circles and leans on his religion as anyone does its edges too oppressive for him. e kinda hard you can live with because the lease terms are loose and the rent is cheap. So you can bare the inconveniences, like the le on lake.

wanting to be good is different than being good. i am scared of being undone. i adapt something that isn’t mine. i add a scene where i burn. i lie to the fight attendant who assumes i’m in highschool. what grade. senior. what about college. syracuse (this isn’t mine). what about out here? i bring up my alma mater. she spends 15 min convincing me not to go there. “it won’t be good for you, trust me”. imogen begs me to write in the present. iris says my virtues disappear if you look close enough. uncommon is my use of commas i separate more permanently, parenthetically.