The body that is truly thought about (desired, loved) is not just dazzling surfaces, but also mysterious depths. The body is very deep: just like the sea. Like the sea the body too has its contours, its inlets and its quiet coves, its long, mysterious fjords, and sudden vastness. The horizon of the body stretches out ever further; the farther we go into it the more the horizon advances and dilates in moving boundaries, sometimes reassuring in their apparent completeness, at others causing anxiety by their constant motion. Just as the breeze grazes the sea, hands graze the body in a contact which, even when striving to be present and concrete, in reality delves in the “liquidness” of the body which always lies beyond, because like water, it too literally slips through your fingers.
The body too like the sea has its utter calm, at times it seems to express only boredom, a nerve-racking, nerve-racked expectancy, but behind this seeming tranquillity currents still flow: fish wander in the body-sea sometimes as countless as clouds, sometimes lonely and swift as sharks. Life in the body moves, flows, dies and is regenerated like a submerged infinity that we can only perceive by straining and being aware that silence too is alive and absolute immobility a fiction, an illusory appearance. As the sea needs eyes to recognize it is sea, so the body is not a body without another’s eyes.
The body does not appear, does not exist as such amidst ignorance and everyday lack of attention.
Only a clear, selective awareness makes the body real and true. And even my body, which at times seems other to me, is just my body seen by another, who can also be myself. But the body is itself if the other person is myself and has become a body united with me, just as rain has become sea. Sky and sea, body and gaze are the same thing. The sky gazes at the sea and encompasses it, just as the true gaze sees and encompasses the body, and where sky and sea meet and blend, body and gaze interpenetrate and blend in a unique reality.
In this passage between sky and sea, between gaze and body, in their being in the end the same thing, there lies the mystery; that is not so because it is what we don’t know, but because it is what we do know, but that dazzles us, confounds us and withdraws, always, from contact...
Yes, the body is very deep, and it is easy to see that there are various depths to the body. Sometimes it is even possible to see “in transparency” the depths of a part of the body. It is possible to see the depth of a hand or a foot lazily letting themselves be discovered: here are the fingers, the curved lines drawn by the wind, by centuries of generations. Here is the defenseless mobility of a part of the body that becomes transparent and is there, nearly stilled by some uncanny magic. But all we need is a ray of sun, a reflection piercing that stillness, all we need is a longer wave for the body-sea to cloud over, to escape that apparent taking possession of the gaze, and merge with the mist of habit.
The body is no more ours than we can say the sea is someone’s... It is a pious illusion that the body is guided by the mind, because actually what is the mind, if not this selfsame body, breath, current flowing underground in every fiber of the body?
The joy we feel when our body bears us is just, if we think about it, the truth at last discovered or rediscovered anew, that is, as we say with great psychological precision, it is the truth we can touch, it is simply happiness.
So we think about the body really like something we inherited (in the primary, authentic meaning of inheriting) from centuries of generations, from many parents who are all standing in line behind us, inside us, and then from animals, fish, algae, earth, air, storms and serene breezes, from water and sun (from the primordial game, perhaps, of an original spark of energy with infinite power: bang!). So all of this is that thing, so close and so remote, we simply call the body.
Mario DıAvino
