Calamities | Renee Gladman
“This would be real communication: something you started in your ____ would finish in mine.”
The empty space is carved for the word body to fill. One of the days that Gladman began, she tried to repeat body as often as she could for herself and others in the room. The above sentence, the last in Gladman’s essay, struck me as one poignant act of this delight practice. Every artist, in every medium, is practicing communication. Every publish, print, performance, recording that I have been impacted by starts in their body and indeed ends in mine.
The way my body moves to their beat or how momentous my chest rises to an image even as my form is still: that is what is finishing in my mine. It makes me want to know what that something is that began in their body. I know their art, and in so doing a certain extension of them, because how could one create and not leave sweet residue of themselves on it? But it is residue. A further but, maybe that is where boundaries come into play, the respected drawn lines of communication. My never knowing what started in an artist’s body, certainly never expecting I should know, is perhaps the fullest form of communication. Every artist is a whole person, more than their art, with internal bits they may want to keep deep no matter what is motivating the bury. I can glean without assuming, my body can receive without asking for more intimacy.
It is an understanding created between strangers, one who vulnerably starts the conversations, and the other who vulnerably receives, repeats, and creates something new with it…the start of a new conversation between bodies.
[Book of Delights pg. 108 | No. 35 Stacking Delights]