I can often envision where I would be before I walk down a street for example especially if the curb is familiar to me. The time of day may change, along with the weather. Onlookers sitting by small coffee shops would continue their conversations about events as distant and close at hand as the ambling of a bored teenager on their cellular device. And - in a sense we are always gett
ing out of our body in a way even as we express ourselves.
There is however a more vital sense in which I would like to touch upon the word embody today. In a way that cannot be uncoupled very easily from what the sense of having a body would mean to a person when they reach out for example to another for help, to perhaps make a little space on a crowded staircase so that a person may pass, and perhaps most crucially that is reflected in all our moments of ununderstanding - when we cannot comprehend why something may have happened and feel compelled to find out.
I may know how my father likes his coffee for example. Black with a teaspoon of sugar, just about half a cup. This memory operates within me if I am called to make one - and in this sense actions, yours, mine and those of others are bound by what we know and can recognize in the sense of the world afforded to us, and here - perception remains a means of experiencing this raw sensorial melee of data.
The crow crowing on the branch, chatter on the streets, interrupted by the occasional blare or horns. Vessels clanking in sinks in flats around the vicinity - and all other manner of idle commentary, much of which I may have to leave aside, pushing it out of the periphery of my mind so that I may attend to a task closer to hand that calls for my addressal.
The sensorial medium of the body, its social engagement and the products of this in a crowded street for instance produces a plethora of sounds which are so many products of instruments. Like a shovel scraping against tarmac to lift sand, not very much unlike the screech of chalk on the blackboard from yesteryears, which perhaps to some today may appear as nothing more than an antique from a bygone time as whiteboards with smoother surfaces accommodating markers have replaced the chalk and board from our yesteryears.
In this sense - the act of transmission is temporal. It works within a frame of possibility and identification, perhaps at the very least - a shareable language. It is not always reciprocal, and often one is compelled to search in other lanes, among other windows, peering through other shelves, amidst other lines to find a scrap of information that would point me to where it is that I would like to go, and this would be true even if I were not to be speaking for myself. And that is the other thing about language or transmission that I wanted to bring up. It works, is intelligible - even if the experience which is expressed is not mine, much in the way that an employee at a supermarket sells fruit that are not his.
The function of memory in the disturbance which constitutes what may as well be a bustling metro station becomes a function of direction seeking self preservation, a quick screening of signs and times so that you may jostle past a crowd of people doing the same thing to get on a train.
It becomes something different however were you to be a paediatrician attending to a child with a cold who has been coughing so incessantly that he occasionally has trouble breathing, maybe even with an upper-respiratory tract infection which often is a symptom which covid surfaces as. The care required by a physician is of a totally different order from that of a passenger, or a driver for that matter - and as with all of such practices the function of memory is a lubricant which brings to the surface a familiarity of associations, habits and the keenness of sensibility often required in the dressing of a cut, which would just scab over and may even draw flies if left as it is.
A chamber, or any dwelling for that matter - much like an office space is an arrangement where such tasks may be attended to, and often - I might add, they are places where people hide just as much as they may attend to some task which they may themselves not be particularly interested in.
Comfort, much like the lubricant of familiarity softens the difficulty of recollection, that buttresses a habit, that allows for the consideration of not merely the matter at hand but the consequences of how it may be handled. Here, in confronting another an aspect of care is often reserved for oneself, and this is not selfish - but perhaps a necessary facet that a persona embodies and carries with them, like a garb that shelters a body from eyes, but more than that a way in which a person asserts themselves to another, even if communicating nothing more than a lack of consideration. A dwelling means and can make so much.
Why does an individual express themselves however? Is it only when they may want something from another? A crow calls even in the dullest of afternoons as do other birds who we may not recognize by their sounds - and yet their persistence reminds us of a sensorial world which is not our own and perhaps bearing other meanings as unrelated and as un-interfering as the benign indifference of the universe.
None of this really matters to us however which is perhaps why it is fanciful to think of, and perhaps in these avenues we are even provided a respite from memory itself and no longer have to try and express ourselves, or perhaps like the moon - the body of our expression becomes nothing more than an instrument which reflects the light of the nearest star, just as it becomes visible by that very act.
Consideration. I was once asked by a teacher ‘when do we think?’ and I replied ‘in the presence of a question’. And I guess even without that our minds must be doing something - like some mute vegetative matter going through life processes as it seeks sensations which tickle it sweetly and avoids those which rub it the wrong way.
Embodiment is always bodily, even when the body in question is not our own. The flavour of coffee may be incarnated in the body of a chocolate, and just the consideration of this, as an artefact - as a piece of work brings to minds possibilities that seem to be dividable, were we to fixate on that object - to two basic decisions. Would I eat it, or would I perhaps give it to someone else.
Perhaps a far more meaningful question were a toffee to be unappetising would be where was it found? And perhaps who made it - and this would particularly be the case if one wanted another. And yet your perception of that artefact would remain and perhaps with it - the chance to share the experience with another, just like dirty ink often makes smudges on paper.
There is another way however in which embodiment remains bodily, and this has to do more with a sense of the taste of the object, the drives or sensations which led to its consumption, and at a more meta level - the making of it.
I do not know how to make a toffee. But, perhaps it is not very different - in principle that is, from how one makes a sandwich. A rather simple object, and in its simplest rendition - two slices, buttered with sliced cucumber in the middle, sprinkled with some salt and pepper suffices, and when you make it you are perhaps thinking about what it would actually taste like, unless that is you were making it for another and simply could not give two hoots.
Dwellings, like hollows in the trees can be like this too. Like the meme which I am not sure anyone even remembers in these days of personal propriety of a partner stealing a blanket from you in the middle of the night, leaving you cold in the morning. Isn’t this an experience which is relatable to all of us and yet is perhaps better used as a metaphor?
A metaphor is easily the commonest term I have for describing transmission. A word whose proximity to fucking and talking can never be entirely disassociated, but when we take up the word metaphor it serves as something of an instrument, a device via which we may present to another perhaps what may have been our experience the prior day, unless of course it were a second hand story. And I must ask, is authenticity very important in acts of transmission?
I mean if a candle remains a candle irrespective of who gives it to me, why do I care whose story I may be hearing as long as the newsreader on television gets it right. Indeed, do we not find in this figure, instituted as it were - the position of a pure transmitter instituted for no other reason than to narrate other’s stories? Stories which to him or her may mean nothing more than the next ice-cream the job they do allows them to buy? However, are all stories like that? What about proofs?
Notorious! for once a proof is known it is endlessly reproducible and may even be mechanised in ways to do so. In terms of its capacity to subsume, geometric and algebraic truth bear with them a capacity which works independent of scale for Pythagorus’ theorem and algebraic formulae hold irrespective of the magnitudes in question, and in this sense are strictly formal.
I sometimes, perhaps tiring from these activities wondered something like what does the word ‘formal’ even mean. Is it merely how the teacher dresses? How a waiter at a plush restaurant for example may adorn a waistcoat? In a sense presenting the appropriate distance they were to be approached as, even as the uniform indicates that they are to be approached?
Forms are contextual. Is this blasphemous? I mean I am sure my math teacher would tell me that a triangle is a triangle irrespective of where you find it - but were we to be speaking about a form that I may submit for example applying for a driver’s licence, it is very important that I present it at the right window, at the road transport office - and not to the candyman outside the movie theatre. Do you understand the importance of form?
Embodiment more than anything entails a care of oneself. Rather, it forces you to do that - to care for your only fixed spatial presence on this planet. And it is important. Forms of practice, bathing, brushing etc. exercising, cooking - form a certain kind of domesticity which enables the appreciation of life in ways that further possibilities that life may have to offer. Possibilities that are always diminishing, slipping away - and your deeds are often weighed by the price you are willing to pay for something. Ludicrous, and a shopping mall makes more sense, and yet there are stocks, and orders that have to be made to get resupplies, and predispositions in terms of choices do not go unnoticed.
Transmission in its communicative dimension remains an act where a store keeper for instance may possibly develop an understanding with a customer so that they may get what each party needs on terms mutually agreeable. Some call this negotiation, and negotiation happens on many terrains, among parties who are often not even or perhaps not yet aware that they are in fact party to a particular arrangement. Am I speaking of newcomers? Yes, and this is part of the problem, for we so rarely notice who leaves, for that which is new always appeals in ways which the familiar does not. That is with the exception of a practice and understanding in place.
Rambling is something that bodies, more than people or individuals do, a form of conviviality that is not quite like subjects following rules or officers obeying orders. In a way, you may call it a means of expressing freedom. There are all sorts of associations that may be formed, beginning with perhaps a small open walled shack with no more than a carrom board at the centre, a board that no one touches as the party concerned takes more of an interest in the going on of the locality, perhaps doing nothing more than basking in the sun occasionally, expressing alarm on other instances, highlighting what they believe to be pertinent and taking heed of what may be said by other. There are always others, and the children add their calls to the cries.
I think last year, my father bought me a pair of headphones with a noise cancelling feature. It helps if for instance you were to be running down a road, past traffic, away from home - if only to the lighthouse and back. Although roughly an unadventurous route, but made interesting by a podcast which interviews entrepreneurs, scientists, musicians, and other such trailblazers. We are not the same. And sometimes, even to just hear these figures, I need to be away from the noises of domesticity, and to have something that dampens the sounds of the streets. My father is considerate in that way.
Houses I find are rarely in order. There are more things that can go wrong with a house than any mouse would ever be able to find out. And, ultimately when the apex predator returns to their den - to find that they have conquered all that they purvey, they find that well - I don’t know, was it worth it all? Gluttony, avarice, greed, - sins right - are what we well fed caricatures of culture can very easily be accused of, and it does add to the veneer of not merely an anti-intellectualism but the repetition of forms of interpretation that quite simply curtail on any understanding of the freedom of expression - a cornerstone of any democracy. As vital as it is often abused, often by those in office, holding public positions which make them accountable as such to the duty of upholding precisely such liberties.
What is it one may ask that makes embodiment of this kind different from rumination, or the chewing of cud and the storing of it in the stomach before it can be digested by the small and large intestine respectively. An odd anatomical familiarity which seems to be, at least from the outside, more familiar among the pot bellied people who may for instance be found outside a sweetshop, or buying jelebies in the morning, a kind of delicious fried sweet which is sure to get your blood-sugar levels higher than most doctors would recommend. I mean I don’t quite know what a cow thinks about when it chews? Does a cow dream? Does it meditate on the happenings of the day? Or does it simply zone into the functioning of its own bodily apparatus to such a point where the experience of a sensation such as swallowing and the comfort facilitated by it reminds it of the safety of the pack. Perhaps because that is how the pack relates to each other - via such communal activities such as grazing on fields, and dreaming - or perhaps not. Maybe they just chew cud.
Embodiment and even transmission are always tasks that call for not merely discretion, or discernment - that they certainly do. What they require in their effectiveness more than anything is the ability to present or rather choose to take up a particular inquiry, a single subject - even if it is unknown, to put one’s hand into it and see whether it may be warm or cold for example. And, as such - even as minor perversions, they require an element of partisanship, if only to distinguish oneself from that which one looks at for instance - even if this serves only to loose oneself in a movie for a while as a new building is constructed next door.
And this I suppose is the most debased sense in which the word virtuality may be used. The term however is also evident - as I see it at least, in any act of interpretation where we see a sign for instance and recall that it stands for a person, perhaps signifying an understanding and maybe conveying a message to another, as simple as the route to one’s house or perhaps the passing of an event.
There is a sense in which interpretation is at play when we witness forms of embodiment as they move to tasks, making shapes with their bodies and faces - expressing anger, pain, disgust and all those other things which make us human I suppose, and here I do see that neither embodiment nor human are in any way expressed in an elevated or expanded form. The former being made to sound static like a person posing for a photograph and the latter a mere vessel for that which may be simple expressions even if they are vile or perhaps unseemly.
And here is where it helps to recognize that the vitalistic aspect of embodiment - or rather of virtuality; of interpretation that is. The recognition of a possibility and to see joy in the process of becoming is a mark that requires a sense of daring and of resolve for often that which is vital is also acquired attrition-ally. Some may call this conflict.
Is it a form of mutualism? I don’t think so as to see that which is vital in another requires that there must be a way in which they may be not the same as yourself - and this may be perhaps an advantageous position or perhaps a trait which appeals to oneself, even if only to solicit a certain response. There is a way in which that which is virtual may be identified as a sheer surface level phenomenon, in the sense that we may see a gesture of welcome and yet not find much upon investigating - leaving an indulgent soul perhaps nostalgic for the trace, and depth is so easily forgotten or rather relegated as some unmentioned reserve that may be drawn on when a sufficient charge calls that a deed or endeavor be undertaken.
Virtuality however is not a function of depth, but an effect discernible on a surface - even if the space in question has depth like the volume of a glass. More humanely it is like an expression of bewilderment upon the face of a child, or perhaps of pride as they point out to what they appreciate and what they may perhaps not, even as they learn to do it in ways that are socially acceptable and understandable, even I may add with the added artifice of sarcasm - a rather mature form of expression but wh
ich uses a sentence to convey its opposite; here virtuality is a function of interpretation - but it is a product of meaning.
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