Transcript
The Body Artist
Which was when we met the guy who said he was a “body artist”––
do you remember? “Artista del corpo.” That he considered his body
which he built methodically from moment to moment, the canvas––
he used a word which more closely translates as the arena––of his work.
Which I thought was horseshit. The bundle of endorsements he received
from a supplement manufacturer in Milan allowed him to eat very well
and work out twice a day, I decided, and add to an indisputable physique
the convenient artist imprimatur in his involved self-advertisement
to the opposite sex. He was beautiful, but the proportions of his art
had been arranged in advance; and this freed him, I felt, from producing
a statement of aesthetics, which was what artists are obligated to do.
I was suspicious and told you so when we finally got away for lunch
on the balcony overlooking the square in Lamezia––“I prefer statues
which don’t draw breath,” I had said––and you identified his artistry
of the body, of the breath, of the will to self-actualize the instrument
with which we perform the kinetic aria of our lives, as worthy
of reconsideration as an almost religious vocation. I admitted I thought
he was gorgeous too, and you sneered, asking what the Buddhist monks
were doing when they sounded the bell to initiate morning prayer
and sat down in full lotus to balance their limbs in such a way as to focus––
the breath, the heartbeat––on unrippling the pond of consciousness.
“Consciousness?” I asked. “No restriction, then, on who can be an artist?
Shouldn’t time and evolution have been judicious in their liberation
of individual bodies to self-select as artists simply for being what they are?”
“But how many people have you heard claim body artistry?” you asked,
forcing cessation. Because after all we were sitting on a balcony in Italy
overlooking the smoked limestone of an ancient square dotted with white
parasols shading carts of produce brought to the square before sunrise.
“Look at the clouds just being,” you said. “Look at the blue of the sea
in its pact with the horizon and the sky where tufts of cloud suspend––
taking in the view––disinterested in debate about the legitimacy of any one
form of artistry. Look at them being what they are without this endless
accordion of thought or justification.” “You are a cloud,” I told you
adoringly. “I am and you are too,” you said, which was when the plate
of steamed mussels in the white wine brio arrived on a brief sonata
of Italian spoken by the waiter whom I didn’t understand precisely––
your Italian that summer surpassed mine––and we had both said Grazi
and I leaned back into my Campari and spread, on a wafer of baguette,
the olive oil-doused bruschetta I was crazy about and would later fail
to replicate––“It was the tomatoes,” you would say––and I thought
of the body artist, beginning to forgive him. Thinking that, perhaps,
bidden as our bodies are into this forceful ballet of chance and suffering,
perhaps this cultivation of one’s own vessel, sole coil, mobile prison,
et cetera was in fact an act of resistance to the unrequested life
through which we hasten––as Nabokov would have it––at some
forty-five hundred heartbeats per hour towards the grave. Why not,
I thought to myself, let the sculpting of each moment accrete into
the spiraled aspiration of the body? Why not––I was thinking
of the controlled motion of the interpretive dancer I had admired
back home––let the body remind us that the world consists of atoms
and emptiness and we are the little parts of it with agency? You had seen,
then, my face detach from itself and you said, smiling your smile,
lifting an imperfect mussel out of its steam-canted shell with a small
bifurcated fork catching the summer sun, “You’re doing it again.”