“Every living thing has two bodies these days – you are flying into the atmosphere and back down to the ground right now, but you can’t feel it. You breathe something in, and what you breathe out is something else. Your first body is the one belonging to … the place you live in, made out of your own personal skin. Your second body is … a body which is not so solid as the other one, but much larger. This second body is your own literal and physical biological existence – it is a version of you. It is not a concept, it is your own body. The language we have at the moment is weak: we might speak vaguely of global connections; of the emission and circulation of gases; of impacts. And yet, at some microscopic or intangible scale, bodies are breaking into one another. The concept of a global impact is not working for us, and in the meantime, your body has already eaten the distance. Your first body could be sitting alone in a church in the centre of Marseille, but your second body is floating above a pharmaceutical plant on the outskirts of the city, it is inside a freight container in the docks, and it is also thousands of miles away, on a flood plain in Bangladesh, in another man’s lungs. It is understandably difficult to remember that you have anything to do with this second body – your first body is the body you inhabit in your daily life. However, you are alive in both. You have two bodies.”
— Daisy Hildyard, The Second Body
Let’s help bisexuals feel less erased by making a slur specifically for them
anyone else just decaying
“The books I liked became a Bible from which I drew advice and support; I copied out long passages from them; I memorised new canticles and new litanies, psalms, proverbs, and prophecies, and I sanctified every incident in my life by the recital of these sacred texts. My emotions, my tears, and my hopes were no less sincere on account of that; the words and the cadences, the lines and the verses were not aids to make believe: but they rescued from silent oblivion all those intimate adventures of the spirit that I couldn’t speak to anyone about; they created a kind of communion between myself and those twin souls which existed somewhere out of reach; instead of living out my small private existence, I was participating in a great spiritual epic.”
— Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
Oskar Schlemmer. Stick Dance, Figure in Space with Plane Geometry and Spacial Delineations, Bauhaus Masks, Triadic Ballet Costume Sketch, Space Dance, Triadic Ballet Costume Sketch, Stick Dance, The Disk Dancer Costume, Kurt Schmidt Mechanical Ballet. 1921-1927.
countervisuality 