Four times it happened, in one year, when I lived in Italy.
They said I looked like Mick Jagger,
which I think they meant as flattery.
Hovering then in my late 30s,
I found it was not so—
complimentary.
Later on, I understood that they meant: moved like.
I eventually allowed it to be (to me)
a complement.
During 2005–06 in Colorno, my body was shaped by morning runs along the Lorno canal, afternoon cups of slightly sweetened espresso, and evening glasses of limpid Grignolino d’Asti. Under new management—that of a nascent gastronome—my body morphed, becoming seemingly my own. Before that year, I had always sensed I was carrying it around with me, a bit of a bulky burden. But as I learned new ways of bringing all of my parts together, I discovered how well my body carried me around. The ‘rules of the stomach’ I was ostensibly studying extended to rule the larger corpus. Eventually, however, they would pierce my physical limits, pierce the ghostcloud-envelope of individualness that I believed I possessed, and pierce the apparent divides among the places, times, and definitions around me. Food does remarkable things, when you let it.
This past week, I re-read Anna Tsing’s “Unruly Edges,” a kind of paean to mushrooms, Donna Haraway, and multispecies ontology. I also had another slow wander through Lisa Heldke’s “It’s Chomping All the Way Down,” which probes parasitism and co-eating as constitutional qualities of humanness. Both are brilliant works of re-figuring what it means to be ourselves, (where our- is both singular and plural at once). They are not entirely straightforward reads, but only because they deal with not entirely straightforward themes, at least for many Western readers. Their language and messages, however, are clear. They suggest putting on hold a long-held worldview—or maybe, better, a long-held selfview. That is, the sense of one’s self as being both oneself and one self. Most of us grow up with that one-self sense. It is how we learn to be: to be a member of a family, a member of a society, a person who puts on clothes, who eats, works, plays, plans, saves, buys, argues, rejoices, cries. And who dies, too.
When you suspend belief in something you truly believe(d) in, it can be terribly scary. It also puts you at a distance from those who have not suspended their own belief in that belief, which can add to the scare. But if you do achieve that suspension, and then let a new, other, and/or very compelling worldview step into the now-open space, it is thrilling. This is what I feel when reading Tsing and Heldke. It is a current-day, mental-emotional-psychic parallel to the decade-old corporeal-affective-emotional sensations that started to emerge in Italy.
Back in 2006, I ran along the humid Lorno canal most mornings when it was not too chilly. I vaulted garbage piles on the coastal walkway in Torre del Greco for a week, and once went drunk jogging in the pig-scented dusk of Vic. We did a little burlesque at the Colorno pub and shook our asses on the beach at Barceloneta. A high (and low) point might have been at Wooz, the dijonnais nightclub where Julie crawled on the floor, I played gogo boy and lost a belt, and a few locals got an appreciative eyeful of several youthy morphologies. These moments started to invert/extrovert/convert my corporeal selfsensing, I think—from carrying a body to being a body, from feeling bounded to feeling porous, from being I to being we. The process continues to weft and wobble. More than a decade of other moments have passed, adding bits here and there, losing others along the way.
Today in Montreal the humidity is ever so high. The sounds from outside sound louder inside my home than they usually do. Farther away, friends and family are mourning recent deaths, of both people and relationships. Their lives necessarily continue, however, and new radiations of who they are spread out. In my life, a job has satisfyingly crystallized, while another that almost evaporated is now recongealing. What I was a year ago, professionally, ain’t what I am right now. Or maybe it still is? Among these physio-bio-social relations, I am anchored, light, owned, and autonomous. Today I am still, reflecting. For now, the caffeine from my morning coffee is helping fingers form words on a screen, and the PB-miso-pumpernickel has co-activated various gastrological reorderings. I gurgle. (We gurgle.) I sense the interpenetrations of me, of us, of them. All together, we’re moving around, slipping through spacetime, grooving maybe just a little bit like Mick.
Anna Tsing says, in a non-conclusive way, that noticing the seams is a way (“a place”) to begin to reorder that which doesn’t feel so just in the world. The seams are where the mushrooms grow, where decomposition, liberation, transformation, and potential reside. Attending to these spaces, participating in them and inviting others to do so (judiciously, perhaps) is a start to feeling-seeing-being differently than before. Lisa Heldke, for her part, advises that “to be is to be chomped on. To be is to be vulnerable to being chomped to death.” We are not singular. We should not triumph in our singularity.
Today, my moves are likely more jagged than Jagger. I am a bit creaky in the mornings before yoga sets in, and have been missing my lungo Lorno runs. But I have my coffees, my wines and bitters, my crudités and crackers and nuts, my small-and-oily tinned fish, my seasonal fruit. And I have that sense of being penetrated, vulnerable, and in cycles of de- and re-composition. It remains and I keep dancing. The dance and dancer form together a whole, and I accept that complement.