A Writer's Body Insists

The footnotes are the best part of this essay

I hope my West Coast readers — doused in the hot tongues of 2022 climate — will forgive my saying this, but here in Toronto, Fall is upon us.

Artwork by Mario Merz.

I love Fall. (How else does one begin, but in loving something?) Speaking for myself, I love the dynamism of Fall in Toronto specifically, the way each day small slippages reveal a design behind the madness: the way milkweed appears, stolid and upright, next to the bending heads of asters and goldenrod. The restlessness of the birds, the bold animism of the sky. September blue against wet leaves at golden hour. Here, Fall is not a destination unto itself but an ongoing proceeding unto Winter, and all too often it proceeds as a melting glacier does: in small timid pieces, and then, with an enormous burst of energy and a raucous billowing of seabirds, all at once.

I love the smell of fresh laundry, somehow sharper, vivid in its clarity, in the cold. The strangers walking their brown-haired dogs with Eastern seriousness, the vivaciousness of those dogs in their curly coats. Schoolkids garrulous with the day’s gossip, the tink-tonk of piano practice from open windows. Harvest time, the squash piling up in their sagging cardboard corrals. Tangerine, mauve and violet-indigo. The pink flush on a friend’s face, the secret sweat that builds atop scarf-swaddled skin. Secrets, mysteries, and the muliebral space between them. The night stretching into day like pavement shadows at sunset, bound neither by physics or worldly measure, on and on until darkness covers our eyes, spares us the obscenity.

Also, my body just works in the Fall. If the classic seasonal metamorphosis of the millennial woman features a fattening at Thanksgiving, Christmas and into the colder season, then a shedding in Spring in preparation for the infamous “hot girl summer,” my body traces the opposite course: in heat, I cower indoors, grow slow, splash around diffidently at the pool. As soon as it cools, though, I am in my running shoes, tracing the slow curves of Toronto’s twin rivers, pounding back Selena Gomez and FKA Twigs, head encased in a globe of encircling muffs.

I think differently, too, in cold weather. This is an admission that should feel innocent but instead — perhaps due to our Platonic inheritance, the idea that writers work from their higher order senses, without bodies, without time, without context — feels a bit embarrassing. Some of it, I’m sure, is inherited: I’m told that growing up in China, my father’s head would sometimes steam up during exam season, emitting a small visible column of clouds like a cartoon character. The rest, I narrativize solo: I was born in December, during the first snow that Winter; my Chinese name means “snow child”; I am Canadian, through and through. It seems right to me, amidst all of these mental furnishings, that heat often feels personally oppressive: it slows down my mind, my ability to strategize or access the sum of my inner resources. In heat, I lollygag. In cold, I become dense and tight, more of myself.

Such an admission feels simple enough in almost any context — except writing. The idea that a writer’s work might change depending on the seasons — flouting the consistency of tone we expect from a novel, collection of poems or work of non-fiction… is just a little bit scandalous. A writer, after all, is not supposed to have a body — and if she must have one, it must never enter the work. Whether a writer is hungry, sleepy, horny, overheated or dehydrated, the work must stand apart from these base conditions, an effigy rising above the mud of the sensual. Fleshly as the writer may be, her work must be gossamer; it must proceed “purely” from the mind.

Photograph by Dominique Issermann.

Over my decade and a half of practicing writing, I’ve certainly derived some satisfaction from this theory. In middle school, starting out as a writer, it felt like such a relief to escape the confines of my own body — its gangly charmlessness, its motley graphic tees rather tight in the wrong places — and take up the page as a kind of cape-like defense against the socio-political games of the schoolyard. I did not merit attention for my looks or my sparkling wit, but on the page I became something else entirely: I became authoritative. There was weight to what I said, precisely because the page hid the person saying it.¹ At a glance, my words could have been anyone’s, and I revelled in this newfound ability to escape the cramped particularity of my self.

But as I’ve aged, and writing has taken up its intimate and permanent residence in my life, I’ve come to understand its ethereal qualities less as actual sorcery and more as a lovely party trick, a deliberate illusion cast for social effect. Writing can make someone’s words appear more profound than they truly are, because many of us have been enculturated to believe that only smart people write. (Oops!) The truth is, anyone can write anything — and whether they are smart or a questionable thinker, well-fed or horribly irritable, their writing appears as writing always does: a collection of words in stoic procession. Thought without context, soul without home, idea without enactment. Often we give writing its authority precisely because it appears contextless, because the sweaty figure behind the screen — and her miseries, her petty jealousies, her distortions — is obscured from us.²

And we do this to ourselves too, as in: writers more readily believe their own thoughts when they appear as writing: as eloquent, clothed in fine stylistic taste, redolent with the perfume of the verbally new. Good writing seduces, the way a fine yarn can waylay your own murder — as in the case of Scheherazade — by casting a shawl of questions over the fact of your own body.³

Live Grass Suits by Gene Pool. More on Pool here.

I was thinking about all of this recently — ah, the good old Sundog refrain! — because I recently met a friend, a very bookish friend, fond of reading and thinking and talking. We met, one heady Sunday morning, in High Park, and quickly dissolved into the patter of long-lost academic colleagues, discussing ethnography, the tech world, the latest heavy tome by David Graeber. At the end of our time together, I had within me the little torrent of excitement I have come to associate with the best intellectual connections: a small, chest-sized snowstorm of thoughts and an eagerness to speak. I suggested we might one day write a paper together, or that we at least meet again soon to revivify our debate. At this, he smiled and demurred, with what at the time I read as bashfulness.

Later, my new friend sent me a text suggesting we step back from chatting for a week, to “let ourselves settle.” He suggested, too, that even friendships suffer from “first date energy,” and that whatever we were to build together, it would be built through moments of deliberate encounter and the paring of expectation, learning and unlearning each other over time, coming through this ongoing process to what really worked. He reminded me gently that we had just met, and then he wrote this:

More and more I find a lot of value in stepping away, pausing the sense making, and letting the body and subconscious sort things out. It's an important counterbalance for people like us who have highly developed tools for sense making.

He added that he felt no shortage of excitement himself, but that he wanted to relate to his excitement differently. In this, he had a faith that I utterly lacked in the moment: the faith that, through some corporeal process of insight-making, his body would come to conclusions his mind could not, and that these conclusions would be helpful for us in building a friendship properly, if we gave them the time to emerge. I said to him that I was happy with this idea — and then we fell companionably into our respective solitudes.

Over the next week, I tried very hard not to think — at least, about this. Piqued by his suggestion that the body had its own way of knowing, I set about letting it work. Sometimes, thinking of the fun of our conversation, I found myself buzzing internally; other times, thinking of some small impression or turn of argument, I found myself with a dense heat between my shoulder blades, or a tension in the back of my neck. Strange forces worked their way through me the way I believe they always do — it was simply that now, aware they had a purpose, I was more invested in these sensations than I had ever been.

And as the week went on, my impression of our time together took on new dimensions. There was the aforementioned excitement, sure: a heady feeling, a kind of cloud of electricity behind the forehead. But beneath that there was nervousness — a tautness behind the ribcage, about the size of a bookmark — and beneath that, there was nostalgia, a kind of flowing-out of satin, billowing from my lungs and spilling over down to my feet like an unfinished evening gown. I saw that I had been in a rush to secure this friendship, as though afraid that without it, I would be lacking something essential: some mental nutrient, some key ingredient to my internal life. And I saw the ways in which my fear had led me to tell stories about a future that had seemed so assured at the time.

Yes, this new connection was exciting. Yes, it was rare to find someone who could speak at this level about these topics, those books. But also: I had been lonely — we both had been. I had been far away from the place where I had first set down the roots of my adult life. Even more prosaically, we had both been under-slept. (That night, I buried myself in blankets and drowsed until midday.)

Artwork by Nathaniel Russell.

Peter Levine writes compellingly about the difference between emotions, stories and the felt sense of the body in Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. His central thesis is that many of the conventional approaches to dealing with PTSD involve narrativizing the events that lead to the disorder itself (like telling a therapist exactly what happened to you), but neglect to work with the body on a physical level, allowing the pent-up energy of the flight-flight-freeze response to release itself through instincts we share with other animals:

In moving through apprehensive chills to mounting excitement and waves of moist tingling warmth, the body, with its innate capacity to heal, melts the iceberg created by deeply frozen trauma. Anxiety and despair can become creative wellsprings when we allow ourselves to experience bodily sensations, such as trembling, that stem from traumatic symptoms. Held within the symptoms of trauma are the very energies, potentials, and resources necessary for their constructive transformation.

Trauma, then, in Levine’s reading, is not primarily a disorder of self-narrative: of feeling shame, guilt, or diminished self-regard. It is a disorder of the body, of physical tension that was never released, and thereby makes itself known by corrupting our emotions and sense of self. He points out that other animals, except under conditions of ongoing confinement or torture, do not suffer trauma in the same way that humans do; rather, they tense up before danger, and when the danger has passed, move instinctually through a process of “shaking it off,” restoring themselves to a more relaxed state until danger strikes again.

I love this idea, not least because dualism — the idea that the mind and the body are somehow separate from each other — seems to me to be so last millennium. Is it not time to admit that we are embodied thinkers — that the heat of the summer, the presence of a crush, the taste of a raspberry popsicle each change the way we think about politics, philosophy, and life after death?⁴ I don’t feel despair at this idea, lamenting the loss of some mythic “pure objective thought,” but rather a sense of release: release from the burden of representing truth through writing. The truth cannot be represented, it can only be approached — and not merely by the mind, but by the body too.

(Here I am, scratching out these letters for you, at 9:36pm on a balmy night on the cusp of Fall. My monstera deliciosa wilts before me, and my stomach is full of jerk chicken soup and rooibos tea. A meek headache visits me at my temples. I tuck my left leg up into my chest as I write. My right leg I’ve snaked around the leg of my chair. Outside, the proud and bulbous moon bears down on me, patient as only a dead thing can be. I feel warm…)

What’s more, lately I believe more and more that it is not only stories and ideas that will save us, but our departure from them too — the ability to leave the realm of interpretation and return to the felt sense. Do I feel safe? Does my chest feel open or tight? There is tension here — is it tough or supple, large or small? Where is it in my body? This internal sense must be practiced, and it is often hard work to separate it from the internal babbling that usually accompanies introspection, including the compulsive naming of emotions. Yes, I feel frustrated, but how do I know I feel frustrated? Where does my frustration live? In my throat? My back? As a pit in my stomach? (It was Baruch Spinoza, my favourite philosopher of all time, who argued that the mind is God’s knowledge of the body, and that at the end of the day, for this very reason, the body and the mind are one.⁵)

If writing has any place in this journey towards the body, in this practice of somatic awareness, it must become, I suspect, a very different type of writing.⁶ Writing must stretch to accommodate that which it has historically excluded, and if it cannot always do this, if it cannot always let in the body, we may need to set it down for a while, we may need to return ourselves to the quiet. To the quiet of things before their names, and the time it takes to appraise them as our own.

Image source unknown.

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Discussion Questions

Feel free to reflect by yourself, with loved ones, with other readers in the comments, or in the weekly reading group hosted by mda.hewlett@gmail.com.⁷

1. Try to feel your body right now — not your thoughts, your emotions, but your body. What stands out? As you pay attention to these sensations, do they change? If so, how?

2. Have you ever told yourself a story that later turned out to be more physically-influenced than you thought?

3. How do you relate to your body? Does it feel like you, a part of you, or separate from you? Do you like relating to your body this way?

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If you liked this post, you might like this story about my last crush, this story about a very particular winter run, or Lor’s haunting piece on cutting and the color red. As always, here is the complete archive of past essays.

1. During this time, my homeroom teacher even assigned one of my short stories as a class reading, an event I look back on with great ambivalence. On one hand, this ignited in me a great yearning for an audience, and the questionable certainty that I would eventually deserve one. On the other hand — I say this now as a teacher myself — the social implications of the act might have been better considered! But what do I know? Teaching and learning continue to be mysterious, and I still write, and I still enjoy having others read my writing. Game set and match, Mr. C.

2. And how much more true is this in the internet age, when every stranger with a keyboard has the means to write their manifestoes, their screeds? I say this not to lament the democratization of writing and writing platforms — I hardly think that is worth lamenting — but rather to remind us that this illusion of authority, and its attendant powers, is daily exercised by those whose ideas have hardly been thought, let alone revised.

3. Why do we hate our bodies so much? I mean this in the broadest sense possible, not just in relation to the seemingly never-ending debate about “body image,” “body positivity” and “body neutrality” online, but in relation to the idea that we act as though our bodies are fundamentally stupid.

Adam Mastroianni writes so hilariously and compellingly about this in a fantastic screed against productivity culture, “Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs,” (title quoted in full because it’s utterly fantastic,) in which he likens the relationship between our conscious mind and our body’s subconscious processes to a relationship between the big boss and the new, diligent intern. The boss tells the intern, do what you need to do, and when you need me for something, just come see me in my office. The intern is excellent and mostly does his own work very well. But whenever he runs into an issue, exactly as he was asked to do, he visits the boss. Over time, the boss gets frustrated: this intern only ever seems to be encountering problems! Why is he so incompetent? But of course, the intern isn’t incompetent; it’s just that the boss never pays attention to him when he’s doing well. So too do we ignore the wisdom of our body, its utter genius in keeping us alive and balanced and well, and become frustrated when its signals become conscious: as hunger, pain, tension, etc. Silly boss!

4. There’s a book I’ve been meaning to read about this, Annie Murphy Paul’s The Extended Mind. If you get a chance to check it out, do send me an email!

5. And, this is called monism. Not a very important word these days, unless one is studying rationalist philosophy, but certainly a very pretty one!

Also, Spinoza extended this idea to encompass our very emotions, and pegged his two primary emotions — joy and sadness — to knowledge of the strengthening of, and the weakening of, the body, respectively.

6. For what it’s worth, I do believe the best writing really is quite bodily, both in the sense that it speaks compellingly of the embodied experience of being human (like Leopold Bloom taking a shit in Ulysses, mucho vivid) and in the sense that it affects the body of the reader, sometimes by stirring up sensations that appear genuinely new, not merely memories of sensations past.8

[8 To place a footnote in a footnote, I recall now my poetry teacher Louise, the way she would read a poem, all of her bent over the page as though in private prayer, her entire body bobbing to the rhythm in her mind. When Louise was like this, we all knew better than to speak up, than to make the merest sound.]

In fact, one of the reasons I decided to become a writer was because, upon reading Mrs. Dalloway for the first time, I noticed myself feeling sensations I had never before experienced. Virginia Woolf’s writing was so good that she made me feel things my own life had never made me feel — not merely a re-assemblage of familiar sensations. If the bodiless authority of writing has since soured for me, this is the part of writing that has never ceased to feel, to me, like true sorcery.

7. Just send him an email to join! One hour a week over Zoom with some lovely folks.