The grammar of bodies

Today's tribune is born from the experience with val flores –an Argentine writer, teacher, and activist linked to feminisms and sexual dissidences–, who recently visited us, through the Mallorcan artistic and pedagogical association La Lioparda, with the workshop Leer es un verbo del cuerpo. From my experiment with her performative practice, I approach two verbs of the body: 'to read' and 'to write'.‘To read’, ‘to write’: two verbs that are the same water, made of syntactic orders woven by invisible threads, slippery, unpredictable. Torrents that calm, momentarily, the languages of the butterflies of thought. Because thoughts are, perhaps, the murmur of the flight of the butterflies that we capture with writing.This space is too brief to explain the corporal anatomy of writing, the syntactic organization of moving bodies —remembering Socrates—, and we already know that both thought –poetic– and the expression of bodies are dissident, if we are willing to risk the self and remove it from the middle or, at least, displace it, transfigure it, as Clarice Lispector would prefer. Personally, I haven't achieved it yet; I only make humble attempts and collect the best failures from them.When we approach the body – the text is also that – from heretical affections, normative semantics crack and reveal latent syntaxes. Body syntax – the relationships between movements, emotions, thoughts, and perceptions that create meanings – investigates new links, but, to do so, it must start from familiar patterns. The body cannot throw itself into the abyss of creation without some point of support. That would be chaos, and creation demands decisions. Not necessarily control, but risk: risk of clumsiness, of losing thresholds. I improvise the grammar of my body by making decisions. There is no improvisation without this risk.In the same way, I try to order this text according to the laws of normative grammar, the point of support. The polemic or I leave it be with its doubts, routes, failures, intuitions. Why do we prevent the text —and the body— from being disorder? And if we let it remain in the background? This is the place where the seed of the creative act remains: on our back, in what we cannot look at directly without losing. Perhaps that is why I am an orphic poem.Bodies, in motion or at rest, have their own rhythm, punctuation, and internal relationships. The poem, for example, is a body that reads whoever approaches it. We should approach it with respect for its timings and for whatever it wishes to show us of its intimacy and vulnerability – logocentric norms should only be sources of consultation, never an unquestionable discourse. We should allow it to transform us: we are not the same when the poem has read us. It does so with a body of eyes that dips us into the milk of our mother, the mystery of the unformed. The body-text perceives with patience the rhythm and fluctuations of the white feather. Hélène Cixous and Clarice Lispector already knew this: their experience of feminine writing is testament to it.Reading and writing distort time, as there is also a strange form of reading-writing: the déjà-vu of everything you haven't yet read and written. When it is finally revealed —like a mystical algorithm—, you recognize yourself in the writing, because writing is always rewriting. And the act of reading is its blessing.Whether the self is capable or not of getting out of the way is not a matter of rational will. There is only one beacon, one purpose: the strangeness of moving through places that one has crossed hundreds of times and, despite the present uncertainty, rewriting in aeternum a certainty: the void. One must eat this void. Oh, what an absolute and marvelous failure the body made of the fear of the void. I must stop for a moment here: the last words have revealed déjà-vu. Will I be able to be present when something happens, here and now?It is from this void that we approach the body of our neighbor. We do so with the desire to understand the principles that govern the use of our own grammar, with the aim of converging in communication. My experience is that this approach is a performative gesture carried out from the fantasy of entering into communion with each person's wound. We seek a syntax that gives meaning to the gift that each wound hides. This syntax is presyllabic, written with mother's milk, as I said before.You, dear reader, do not read this text: you inscribe yourself in it as you move with it. The paradox is that I still do not know how to write —I doubt if I really know how to read—, because every time I move between these two verbs I do so with unease and discomfort. Cultivating patience and curiosity, but also frustration and the joy of discovery, is the only way I have found to continue experimenting. If in one of these silent movements of the pen we are moved together, we will have tricked time for an instant. Perhaps this was val flores's invitation: to read from the body to rewrite it.