Why writers need to be bodiful

To live in hope, expectation and wonder, we need to be bodiful. It’s so easy for those of us involved in creative tasks, especially writing, to become cerebral and sedentary. Yet great art and great writing demand connections to the body and to the world. Travelling to places we write about is not always possible, particularly if we are writing about other time periods or imagined worlds or living through a global pandemic. But writers do need to find ways to connect; not to cut ourselves off, not to imagine ourselves as disembodied minds. The urgency of the times we live in, both politically and ecologically, scream against this. Writers need to

• Breathe in and be aware of their bodies, themselves.
• Feel our breath reaching every part of our writing bodies.
• Become attuned to our body’s blockages, discomforts, tensions.
• Walk and move in the world, that feeds our senses, which in turn  nurtures our imaginations.

The bodifulness of enworlded soul

We are not minds (subjects) looking at bodies as objects we lumber around in, but whole creatures, intelligent bodies that are not as separate from the world as contemporary individualism has suggested.

The question of where the individual mind-body complex ends and the rest of the world begins is one that has exercised philosophers for generations. Husserl asserted that the lived body is the centre of experience, whilst Merleau Ponty talked about it being not thought, but the world that is the realm of experience in which everything we touch in turn touches us. We don’t understand the world from the perspective of disembodied minds. Rather, the body is the primary vehicle of knowing. And mind is rooted not only in body but in the body’s interactions with the world. Ultimately, distinctions between mind, body and world may be arbitrary.

Within this matrix, the self is an elusive thing. The moment we attempt to step outside of ourselves to observe we are objectifying a version of self that is more likely to be someone else. Virginia Woolf puts it simply:

One can’t write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes.

In another diary entry she talks about ‘the slipperiness of the soul’ and about its delicacy and complexity.

Writers, creators, all of us, are enworlded, soulful bodies, imagining quests, writing the stories of our cultures and of the people we want to be, imaging how the world can become a different story.

The bodifulness of emotion

If we fancy some strong emotion, and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its characteristic bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind, no “mind-stuff” out of which the emotion can be constituted, and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception is all that remains.

The notion that cognition and emotion are embodied is not only rooted in the philosophy of thinkers like Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and John Dewey, but we also see it most simply in our use of metaphors. We talk about being ‘up’ as a metaphor for happiness or ‘down’ for sadness, for example. The physical, embodied directions become metaphors. Similarly, several metaphors originate in physical interactions from childhood, so that, for example, affection becomes synonymous with warmth.

Thought requires a body, not in the obvious sense, but in the sense that the structure of thought itself arises from the body. Nearly all of our metaphors are based on shared bodily experiences. In short, thinking is embodied. And if metaphor is fundamental to who we are as humans and if this in turn is embodied, it behoves writers to embody their work. Despite the seemingly disembodied state of flow, in fact we always remain bodies in context. We see this when we realise how easy it is to disrupt flow with interruptions or distractions. Rilke understands this perfectly in Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke: when he talks about how mind and blood are continuous with each other.

The bodifulness of connection

Our writing should take note of embodiment not only because we are bodies but because it is how we connect—to others, to animals, to plants, to the universe, to the seasons, to the winter when we are often pulled inward, or to the mid-point of the year when we feel the sap of creativity everywhere. We are intimately connected to everything and unless we wake up to this, as individual writers and as a species, we will run out of a planet on which to live and think and love and write. The substance of the stars and of our bodies is the same. We are linked to every other atom of the universe and we survive or perish with every other life.

We stand at a point in history when we either speak up for our embodiment and intimate connection to all that is alive, to all that is material, or we face extinction with it. If we are to be writers who make a difference to the world’s story, we need to feel ourselves part of all nature.

David George Haskell finds such connection wherever and whenever we take tentative steps to listen to all that is life; wherever we pay attention:

… a sensory, intellectual and bodily opening the place. […] From this engagement … comes … the ability to perceive beauty through sustained, embodied relationship with a particular part of the community of life. […] If some form of objective moral truth about life’s ecology exists and transcends our nervous chatter, it is located within the relationships that constitute the network of life. We are awakened participants within the processes of the network …

Writers cannot afford to be creatures of the mind only, labouring under an illusion of separateness. What we are about is not cerebral, remote, and of no consequence. In The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram puts this lyrically and powerfully:

Caught up in a mass of abstractions, our attention hypnotized by a host of human-made technologies that only reflect us back to ourselves, it is all too easy for us to forget our carnal inherence in a more-than-human matrix of sensations and sensibilities. Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth — our eyes have evolved in subtle  interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.

The bodifulness of the Numinous

Being embodied, being participants in a new story of the world, has never been so urgent, yet writers, unlike sculptors or artists whose bodies are integrally bound up with their processes of creation, can sometimes feel as though we live a huge amount of time only in our heads, even though our minds don’t simply perceive the world in a disembodied way.

But the sense of embodiment is not to decry a state of flow that can be experienced as other-worldly, mystical and touching on the Numinous, but it is a call to bring back what we find there and connect it to how we live.

Being connected, being embodied, being in flow; experiencing the Numinous of nature or of the profound transcendence of writing are not dichotomies, but of a piece. To quote Abram again:

That which we call imagination is from the first an attribute of the senses themselves; imagination is not a separate mental faculty (as we so often assume) but is rather the way the senses themselves have of throwing themselves beyond what is immediately given, in order to make tentative contact with the other sides of things that we do not sense directly, with the hidden or invisible aspects of the sensible.

The bodifulness of time

This slippery soul that Virginia Woolf referred to, with its ever shifting and evolving elements is grounded in our bodily experience and also in our experience of time. To quote Woolf again:

Consciousness is tied to corporeality and temporality: I experience myself as existing as a body over time. Humans live embodied in time. Time is how we make sense of concepts like ‘self’ and ‘relationship’. It’s how we remember the narrative of our life: the food we ate, the places we saw, the people we were with… It’s how we plan our lives, by imagining forward to where we will be and what we will be doing.

Our embodied entwining with time is at the heart of identity in so much literature. Kafka was certain that:

Reality is never and nowhere more accessible than in the immediate moment of one’s own life.

And filmmaker, Andrei Tarkovsky, says that we watch film because it gives us a sense of time:

time lost or spent or not yet had.

Life often feels like a constant dance with time. I have periods when I’m convinced that ‘there is no time’ and others when it appears that time is boundless and I can fit in enormous amounts of activity or being. Finding rhythm and balance in this bodiful quest keeps alive memory and allows new stories to unfold. We do this by living, as far as life allows, in kairos time, not simply linear chronos, but the ripe moments of now. As Anna Quidlan puts it:

Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze over the dunes … keep still. Be present.

Be in your body and the soul, the emotions, the numinous, the connections will be in your writing.