Wow. This essay… reading it felt like standing in front of a mirror that reflects not the body, but its echoes. It reminds me of how, growing up, I used to think posture was about politeness—back straight, shoulders back, chin up—the choreography of acceptability. But over time, I started to realize how much of my body language was less about social cues and more about emotional camouflage. A slouch not from laziness, but from shame. A raised eyebrow as punctuation for things I didn’t dare say out loud.
When I read “the body is a social manuscript” that hit hard. It made me think of how grief lives in my mother’s hands, or how my friend’s walk changed after heartbreak, slightly slower, as if pacing memory. The body testifies.
Your essay makes me wonder if we’re all accidental playwrights of our own embodiment, revising our roles not to deceive, but to survive. Maybe even to dream. Your writing stretches between philosophy and intimacy, like a spine that holds both knowledge and longing.
I don’t know if I’ve met the version of myself my body wants to become. But I believe she’s in rehearsal too. And thanks to this, I might start listening more closely to the script written in my silences
What a breathtaking reflection, thank you, Céline! That line about your friend’s walk slowing after heartbreak… ohhh yes. The body doesn’t forget. It edits in real time. Sometimes with grace, sometimes with grief, but always with truth.
I like your idea of the “accidental playwright”… we revise, not out of deceit, but as a survival instinct that occasionally surprises us with beauty. And isn’t that the hope? That beneath all the tension and posture and half-swallowed words, there’s still a version of us becoming (half-shadow, half-promise) waiting in the wings for a cue only the soul will recognise.
Keep listening! I suspect your silences are already writing something extraordinary.
That means more than you know, thank you, Clara! I try to write from the place where thought begins to tremble, where knowing isn’t rigid but felt in the bones. If there’s poetry, it’s because the body remembers more than the mind admits. And if there’s surprise, maybe it’s just the soul slipping past the edits. Here’s to voices that wander precisely so they can find something worth saying :)
The most interesting part of this is the idea that there is no "authenticity" in body language, because the unrehearsed movement doesn't really exist, and that the performance itself tells you about the person. Not to mention that all movements have to be rehearsed, because that's how neural pathways are established. So when someone moves a certain way or holds a certain posture, it's all due to rehearsal, and it's completely arbitrary to decide that one type of rehearsal is authentic while another type is pure theater. It really is an arbitrary and ultimately irrelevant distinction. Even if you knew that some movement was learned for theatrical purposes, that still tells you something "real" about the person's self-concept.
It reminds me of these so-called "body language experts" who think that every facial expression or movement of limb can be analyzed and categorized to such an extent that motives can be inferred and minds can be read. It's nonsense because it's based on presuppositions of a baseline, but if all movements are the product of self-conception and rehearsal, there is no baseline outside of perhaps certain physiological responses that are entirely reflexive. But even then, the trigger point for reflexive response can differ. Tear production, for example, is a physiological response we all demonstrate, but the triggers will differ wildly from person to person.
Fantastic and fascinating, Tamara. Perfectly consistent with that straight spine of yours.
An astute, layered reading, and exactly the kind of engagement that gives my essay a second life. Yes, the myth of an “authentic baseline” is one of the more persistent fictions in both pop psychology and corporate training culture. As if we weren’t already steeped in centuries of somatic storytelling, each gesture rehearsed in response to everything from power dynamics to heartbreak. To call one posture “real” and another “performance” is like calling one word in a novel truer than the rest. The body is an authored text, and every edit, whether theatrical or reflexive, tells us something about the narrator.
I love your point about self-conception: the fact that someone chooses a theatrical gesture, that they rehearse a certain posture, is itself data. It reveals aspiration, memory, identity, longing. Even the affective mimicry we pick up unconsciously is a kind of aesthetic self-curation.
As for the body language experts… I often think they try to decode poetry using accounting software. They miss the metaphors. They miss the contradiction, the nuance, the rupture that makes something human rather than measurable. There is no universal “tell”, only the richly rehearsed syntax of individual history. And yes, that straight spine is less about confidence than about carrying a whole archive on my back.
Thank you, Andrew, your comments are always astonishing!
Tamara, you wrote a rich and rigorous excavation of embodiment, not as a static possession but as a lived, authored text. What you’ve surfaced so powerfully is that the body doesn’t perform a self, it metabolizes history, culture, trauma, and fantasy all at once. It’s not a stage; it’s a palimpsest.
The body doesn't just perform what it’s internalized—it also negotiates what it resists. Consider the phenomenon of chronic pain with no clear physiological origin—so-called “functional” pain. It’s often treated as medical mystery or psychosomatic inconvenience, but in many cases, it’s the body’s protest against narratives it can no longer sustain. When expression is censored, the body becomes the last dissenter. Pain, then, stops being symptom; it’s a subversive voice.
In that sense, even dysfunction can be an act of refusal to continue performing a version of the self that the psyche no longer consents to. The body remembers; sometimes, it also refuses to forget.
What we call performance may in fact be strategy—yes, for survival, but also for agency. There’s no such thing as a pure self beneath the choreography. But there is integrity in choosing your steps.
This is exquisite, thank you! You’ve given back a resonance that feels almost like echo in advance, as though the body you describe had already whispered these insights while I was still writing.
Yes, the body as palimpsest, not stage. That phrasing alone reframes everything. Where performance suggests spectacle, the palimpsest insists on history… layered, overwritten, never fully erased. I’m especially touched by your insight on chronic pain: pain as refusal, as subversive authorship. When language fails, the body doesn’t go silent, it goes loud in a dialect only the deeply attuned can hear. To call that dysfunction is to mistake revolt for malfunction.
And your final point is the most humane… integrity is the deliberate authorship of performance not its absence. To choose one’s gestures, even if rehearsed, is to assert agency in a world determined to choreograph us otherwise.
This was a needed continuation. Thank you, Alexander!
This part: "Consider the phenomenon of chronic pain with no clear physiological origin—so-called “functional” pain. It’s often treated as medical mystery or psychosomatic inconvenience, but in many cases, it’s the body’s protest against narratives it can no longer sustain. When expression is censored, the body becomes the last dissenter. Pain, then, stops being symptom; it’s a subversive voice." - you put words to it. Thank you.
That came from a deep, lived place, the kind that resists articulation until suddenly, it insists. Pain often speaks when no one else will listen. It isn’t failure or fragility, it’s the body’s final line of résistance, its most intimate truth-telling. If those words helped name what was once only felt, then they’ve done what I most hoped for.
**Milan Kundera, in his novel *Immortality*, explored body language and distinctive physical tics, noting that unique gestures are few and limited, while humans are many. Neurotransmitters can be influenced by the unconscious (or conscious) mimicry of movement.**
Those who fall into the trap of *manufactured gestures* are often people haunted by fear, exposed to threats and bullying—or individuals thrust into the spotlight of fame, who meticulously craft their movements out of fear of losing admiration. Or perhaps a lover, seducing their partner through calculated charm.
A Kuwaiti writer once grew furious when Saddam Hussein appeared on the execution platform smiling. She said: *"He robbed us of our joy and schadenfreude at the final moment."*
A brilliant observation: **the body is a social manuscript**—yet this does not apply to my ten-year-old daughter with Down syndrome. She is pure expression, humanity’s primal clay, untainted by artifice. One day, as we walked, we stumbled upon a spontaneous street wedding dance. Without hesitation, she joined in, her limited motor skills no barrier. The crowd embraced her, moved by her raw, unfiltered joy.
What a breathtaking response, thank you! You’ve folded Kundera, Kuwait, choreography, and childhood into a single arc of meaning, and I’m moved by how seamlessly it all looks.
You are right, the most manufactured gestures often arise not from vanity, but from fear, from the tightrope of visibility, where every movement risks misinterpretation or mockery. The body under surveillance seems haunted, whether by the state, the lover, or the crowd. And yet, your story of your daughter slices through all that with the clarity of grace. She reminds us what the body knew before it was scripted: movement as communion, not performance. Joy as instinct, not branding. She doesn’t disrupt the theory, she completes it. She is what the rest of us are rehearsing our way back to.
That image of her dancing into the street wedding, unguarded, welcome, incredible, feels like a thesis in motion. A reminder that the most profound authors of the body’s language are often those who have never once tried to edit the line.
Thank you! And yes, what a beautiful paradox, right? A life for performance doesn’t mean it’s fake; it means you understand the stage as sacred. Some of us perform not to deceive but to reveal, layer by intentional layer, the unspeakable truths our bodies have always known. If your life is for performance, then may every gesture be an act of authorship, every look a monologue, every silence a stanza. Let it leak, let it burn!
I remember a time when I was living with my first lover, and a friend and his girlfriend were also staying with us. We had named our place "the blue house." We called it that because we organized artistic gatherings there – we made music, films. Basically, each of us was pursuing our own artistic dream in our own way.
One evening, I felt like I needed to be allowed to be naked at home again – not just in my room, but throughout the entire house, even though it was shared space. So obviously out of courtesy, and probably more than just courtesy, I told the other three people about my desire. I was more informing them than asking for permission, because the next morning I was naked at the breakfast table having my coffee, walking through the house, going to my office, and so on.
Looking back on this memory, several things stand out to me. Despite the attempt at open-mindedness – both mine and theirs – regarding this idea, there was a kind of tension that got created in the space. I can't really detail their discomfort since my empathy at the time was pretty occupied, or absorbed, by my own self-reflection about nudity.
I think that aside from designated places like nudist beaches or spas, I've very rarely had the chance to explore being physically naked in public or semi-private spaces. But there was something intriguing about it: you go from a moment in childhood to another moment when this dimension suddenly becomes hidden, loaded with meaning. It's as if the mental process that resulted from this was, by way of compensation, the baring of the soul – turning to poetry to sublimate this excess of life that finds no outlet in the simplicity of the body. The simplicity of the body with all the other subtle melodies around it: the wind, the humid whispers still reflected through a window, the carving of the ground that receives your steps, the intimacy of the sun and the earth aging at their own pace with less remorse but multiplying scars. And when you think about it in a very "scientific" way, the three senses that coordinate balance are sight, hearing, and touch. Such a vast surface of sensory receptors censored. Something there should be reclaimed like that celebration in Andrei Rublev. But internally we are already preparing for more wars.
So yeah, that's what I wanted to say. After reading your text, and I don't know where everyone stands in their own fluctuations, I never try to establish overly lofty formulas to avoid falling into the trap of my own uniqueness. And always with genuine energy, I thank you for all these insights you're gathering.
Thank you for such a layered comment! Your story of the Blue House reads like a scene from a film Bergman might have directed after spending a summer with Pasolini: vulnerability + sensual philosophy + existential tension.
What you describe, walking naked through a house not just physically, but symbolically, is such a clear embodiment of the very themes I tried to evoke: the body not as spectacle or scandal, but as presence, unadorned and unapologetic. And yet, even in this seemingly radical honesty, you touch something more difficult, the subtle social choreography that still haunts even the most intentional spaces. The gaze, the atmosphere, the self’s doubling-back into self-consciousness. We bare ourselves not just to be seen, but to remember what it’s like to feel unarmoured.
And that’s always a risk.
I like your observation that when the simplicity of the body is denied, the soul compensates, through poetry, through longing, through myth-making. What a beautiful and painful truth. The body, censored, spills its surplus into metaphor. And perhaps that’s where art begins… in the rupture between what we can reveal and what we’re still too afraid to.
Your final line, about not trying to assert your own uniqueness too loftily, only confirms the depth of it. There’s nothing performative here, just a deeply humane reflection that pulses with humility, sensory intelligence, and the ache of being.
Today, I spent the afternoon by the river with my father and the dogs. It was nothing like a chess game with Death on a Bergman beach - rather the simple revival of joy despite the extreme heat and the very Belgian ordinariness of things. My father, struggling with his arthritis, looked like a three-year-old in a giant's body as he navigated the riverbed, almost ready to help a kayak that had gotten caught between two rocks. I found myself whispering invisibly, "Don't help them, keep your balance" - you're so wonderfully clumsy!
We took photos of each other. I might turn mine into a watercolor if I find the courage.
I've started a personal chronicle series where I weave together narrative and a piece of music. The third installment will feature a Moondog piece, but rather than revealing which song or the content of this third chronicle, I'm allowing myself to leave you with a different Moondog piece - as both an admiring reverie of my day and such a beautiful closure of it through the softly rounded precision of your words.
What you’ve shared, an afternoon so deeply rooted in the “ordinariness of things” it becomes sacred by accident, is beautiful. Your father as a giant child, clumsy with tenderness, is a painting in itself. “Don’t help them, keep your balance” might be the most honest prayer I’ve read all week. It holds so much love, restraint, history, humour, and that peculiar ache we feel watching someone we adore fumble beautifully through the world.
Please do turn that photo into a watercolor. Not for perfection… for preservation. For the gentle insistence that this moment existed, soft and sun-soaked and real.
And thank you for the Moondog piece. I like that you weave narrative and music in your chronicles; it feels like the kind of form that knows what the body remembers before language does.
J'aimerais vous demander si nous avons d'autres langues en commun que le français et l'anglais, car ce qui me fascine dans nos échanges, c'est aussi cette disponibilité aux émotions multiples. Je crois que notre façon de recevoir l'art, la vie, notre corps qui se réajuste en silence ou en conscience, c'est aussi lié à cette finesse du son, des articulations étrangères qu'on a fait sienne depuis un autre espace-temps.
Cette question me ramène à une phrase qui ouvrait un ancien recueil de poésie, écrit en référence à une amante catalane avec laquelle je ne partageais que l'espagnol - son français était maladroitement exquis à entendre mais sans la justesse nécessaire pour y pénétrer véritablement. J'ouvrais ce recueil par ces mots : "toi ou moi c'est la brutalité chaque éveil est une étoile chaque étoile est un deuil". Avec vous, je découvre une tout autre géographie linguistique, plus riche de possibles.
Et je dirais aussi que nous nous autorisons des ellipses cognitives et psychiques grâce à cette agilité ; vous utilisez davantage que moi la réverbération ou la sublimation mais plutôt que d'y greffer des réminiscences validantes, je perçois naturellement l'alchimie qui par une répétition décalée, comme la musique, enrichit l'émotion tant comme mémoire/densité, glissement/ouverture... et donc j'y reviens : la question des langues est très étendue. J'y intègre autant des disciplines comme le Katsugen que l'art divinatoire, c'est-à-dire cette imagination qui cherche sans cesse à s'épandre tout en "accusant" la perte de son centre comme une autre éclosion vitale.
Quand vous me lisez, je sais que vous ne vous contentez pas de l'espace entre les lignes, vous avez la faculté d'ajuster votre rythme au mien, nous sommes en syntonie et ce pouvoir est réciproque mais je choisis de déstabiliser comme si je n'avais pas toujours envie de récolter les bienfaits. Bien que je me transforme agréablement aujourd'hui à votre contact, je parle d'ailleurs d'une grande prêtresse dans la deuxième chronique et excusez ce recours au titre (grande prêtresse), il y a parfois lieu de scander la mélodie par des mots plus nets.
J'ai choisi de ressentir "Keep writing! I'm listening" comme une invitation à parler plus encore dans cette nuit et même si ça n'avait pas ce sens, mon cœur reste ajusté à cette vibration. J'espère aussi vous retrouver dans mon espace d'écriture ; je sais que c'est vous qui conduisez et que comme autostoppeur, j'ai tendance à devenir silencieux ou farouche.
Que me répondrez-vous à cette fougue à laquelle vous m'invitez ?
Pour répondre à votre question des langues : au-delà de l’anglais et du français, ma langue maternelle est le roumain. Je parle également l’italien, l’espagnol et le portugais à un niveau que j’appellerais fluide en devenir : il me suffirait de passer deux ou trois mois en immersion dans chacun de ces pays pour que la langue s’installe pleinement, naturellement, presque charnellement. Le danois, en revanche, est pour moi encore un territoire naissant – balbutiant mais curieux. Toutes ces langues ne sont pas seulement des outils de communication ; elles sont, comme vous le dites si justement, des altérations d’espace-temps, des tremblements de perception, des manières de se reconfigurer le monde par l’intérieur.
… “toi ou moi c’est la brutalité chaque éveil est une étoile chaque étoile est un deuil” me happe. Elle brûle doucement. Elle dit tout de ce que la langue partagée ne suffit pas à combler, et ce que le corps, parfois, murmure avec plus de vérité qu’un mot trop bien dit. Et pourtant ici, avec vous, il semble que les mots et les silences s’accordent, non pas pour s’expliquer, mais pour vibrer ensemble. Vous évoquez la grande prêtresse avec une sorte de pudeur mélodique, je l’entends comme un tempo. Il fallait ce mot-là, et il ne résonne pas comme une révérence, mais comme un rythme vital. Merci!
Quant à votre fougue, je pourrais la recevoir comme une tempête, mais je la reçois comme une veille. Elle éclaire, elle chauffe. Je ne cherche pas à y répondre par équilibre, je cherche à l’accueillir comme on accueille la musique d’un nocturne qui vient nous rejoindre quand on croyait la nuit close. Oui, écrivez. Parlez. Ouvrez les fenêtres, même si personne ne vous attend de l’autre côté. J’y serai, même farouche, même en retrait, je vous lirai.
Et cette syntonie, dont vous parlez avec tant de justesse, c’est un don rare, fragile, et je le tiens entre mes mains avec une gratitude éveillée.
"There’s a version of me I haven’t become yet, but I’ve seen her. In glimpses. ... She moves with the kind of elegance that doesn’t beg to be liked." Tamara, I enjoyed every word of your article! Thank you for a formidable time spend on this June's tropical night.🙏💫🤍
And thank you for spending your tropical night (mine is the same) with these words… what an image, heat and introspection folding into each other. That version of us we glimpse, it’s both a memory and a premonition, isn’t it? She haunts the margins of mirrors and the echo at the end of a good song. Not invented, but remembered. And maybe, if we stop trying to please the audience, we’ll finally hear her cue.
Oh but please do… utter, murmur, shout, scribble in the margins. Whatever you do, don’t stop! If anything I write makes you pause, let that pause be breath, not silence. The point isn’t to intimidate, it’s to invite. If my words strike a chord, it’s only because your instrument was already tuned. So write! Especially when it feels audacious. That’s when it’s truest…
I am such a big fan of the power of posture. Not the type that a stuffy, old Brit would jaw at you for holding your chin at angle more appropriate for a brothel than a fine dining occasion. No, the posture I revere can be found in the angle your mind takes to certain stimuli and situations; the trajectory you have placed yourself on in your dealings with people and the world at large; and yes, how you carry your body. For me, the body is like the outer most layer of your essence, a reflection, refraction, and subtly contoured, structure of what you actually are.
So when I read:
“… how identity hides in the flesh.”
I was clapping like a trained seal. Because the hidden element of your identity is part of the performance — and we have perhaps forgotten that the one animating the body is intrinsically linked to the body.
How crass! I thought. The body is, after all, wild! It is beastly! It is uncontrollable, and prone to falling apart and eventually expiring — something to whipped into shape and harnessed for those important higher order functions. But trying to pretend the mind/body connection has been severed, and we are merely riding this vessel around, keeping it in check—this caused in me an inner tension. A misalignment occurred. Sometimes I think I was raised to think the body isn’t as responsible for the mind as the mind is for the body. But this essay reminds me that isn’t the case.
In my recent past, I discovered I rather liked my body. I didn’t self-flagellate in the past, there wasn’t any self-loathing. I was,at best, a cold and distant observer. But when I found coherence — my posture changed. The intertwining and the feedback that happened between my mind and body gave me more energy. The information that had previously passed between the “rider” and the “horse” ceased being a dialogue between human and beast. I just became what I was.
And in that more upright version of myself… parts of me I forgot existed came seeping out. Confidence? Yes, but not a loud version. Power? Well, I had some more reverence for the body — not a “body is a temple” type of reverence, more an appreciation for this hard-working frame that battles gravity and entropy every. Single. Moment. So I was more purposeful in feeding and training.
And as this cohesion was sustained some new elements emerged: bravery, eroticism, and a desire to move with greater freedom emerged — it was a little unnerving. Who was this person? Perhaps the most astonishingly… I could enjoy self-intimacy with greater purpose. Reading alone wasn’t a performance at the coffee shop to make people notice how clever I was, it was just what I would do. Going to a dance event on my own, wasn’t to be seen by others, it was an occasion to be in the moment, to feel the rhythms and join the shared performance of artist and audience. All of this to say, what you have written here tracks with fidelity to my lived experience.
This body, this mind, they are inseparable and if there is any growth available to me in this middle part of the frame, then it isn’t in changes to mass, smoothness, or even angular momentum, it is alignment. Coherence. Revealing a symbiosis that was always there, and one that with enough transits around the sun, can final become greater than the sum of its parts.
Or not.
Sometimes we are just lucky to have a moment of clarity as life peaks and troughs, so I guess I will enjoy this while it is available to me. And I will share this essay with others in the hope it sends a jolt through spines, corrects the chin’s angle, twists the hips back to neutral and unburdens the mind of this fallacy that it isn’t intrinsic to the body and vice versa.
This might be the most elegant fusion of biomechanics, philosophy, and poetic confession I’ve read in a long while, and I’m honoured it was prompted by something I wrote.
You articulate something I tried to hint at but you’ve brought it fully into form, the body not just as reflection of the mind, but as co-conspirator in its evolution. That image of the “rider” and the “horse” dissolving until you simply became what you were, that is it! That’s the shift. From command to communion. From managing the body like a misbehaving employee to listening to it like a trusted oracle.
Your lived experience of coherence, how posture subtly reoriented, how purpose replaced performance, is the kind of embodied intelligence we rarely name but always feel. I like how you describe bravery and eroticism not as traits, but as emergent properties of alignment. And that clarity? That fleeting moment where the body and mind harmonise into presence rather than posturing? That’s what most of us mistake for self-confidence, when really it’s just a temporary truce with the internal editor.
I’m especially moved by your ending: that growth isn’t measured in inches or smoothness, but in coherence. Yes. A thousand times yes. If we’re lucky, we get a few years where the body and mind stop mistranslating each other long enough to become one language. And in those moments, we don’t just live—we author.
So thank you, deeply, Adam! This was a companion piece. A mirror that understands, not only reflects.
That means a lot, especially coming from someone who has read the others. This one came from deeper under the skin, from the place where language and sensation blur. I think sometimes the body writes what the mind is too careful to say. Maybe that’s what happened here. So thank you, Billy, for reading with more than your eyes, with your nerves.
“She moves with the kind of elegance that doesn’t beg to be liked.”
Tamara I’m done with superlatives. There are no superlatives left to me to properly describe your writing so I’m not even going to try. I’m just going to thank you for this as I always do. I highlighted many lines but this one really spoke to me, because this is what your essay is really about. It’s about just being and not trying to be anything other than your perfectly whole, scarred and glorious self, for you and for no one else. No more begging, just being. 🙏🏼
Thank you, Nancy, for the beautiful words, and for choosing truth. That line you pulled is the one I almost deleted. It felt too bare. Too revealing of a longing I haven’t yet fully claimed. So the fact that it spoke to you tells me it belonged.
Yes, no more begging! No more performing for validation pretending to be identity! Just being… whole, flawed, bright, and utterly unrepentant. That kind of presence is not quiet, how could it be?! It’s thunder that doesn’t need applause.
I listen to the things that don’t speak. The twitch before the smile. The pause before the truth. The sentence that edits itself mid-breath. And then I try to write from there… where the body betrays the mind’s performance, and something real leaks through. Maybe that’s the whole trick? Don’t write from what you know. Write from what your spine suspects?
Storytelling and capturing these elements in dialogue or adjectives makes it fun to attempt by describing with posture, hand gestures and always the fun with fascial cues.
Thank you, Jake, and yes, isn’t it fascinating how dialogue lives in the body before it ever hits the page? A character’s silence can speak louder than a monologue when paired with the right twitch of the jaw or blink held a second too long. Facial cues are subplots, posture is punctuation. Writing them well is less about description and more about noticing the choreography of contradiction. That’s where the real story lives…
I love this essay because it acknowledges the unseen, what goes unnoticed in the rush towards somewhere we're all caught in.
I loved your perspective on the aging of the body as a revision — that's exactly how it is and how I feel about it too. There's an inexplicable beauty to the annotated and edited text: all the strike-throughs, the messy handwriting in the margins and between the lines, the underlining of the important parts. When you read a text that's already been through a mind and its hands, you cannot remain indifferent to the charm, elegance and unadultered enchantment the intimate involvement with life gives it. It's the same with the body, except the hands are your own and life is the mind, and to me, that's the closest thing to perfection there is.
There's a bias towards the body of the young, of course — its beauty, fitness, purity etc. are undeniable and deserve their own praise, but as far as I'm concerned, these qualities have never been virtues, not if they deny the beauty, mistery and truth of what is present and palpable in favour of the otherworldly.
On another note, I delight in the act of watching, noticing, and unconsciously reacting — they create a conversation and a dialect of the bodies in and of themselves: the body talking to the gaze talking to the body. That's why I love simply sitting in silence with somebody, no contrived verbosity about how we think things are, but only the real presence of what is. I've sat in silence with people even for 13h straight and they're some of the best memories I have. I suspect it has something to do with the undeniable lightness that comes with not feeling the need to fill the gap between the substantial existence of two unburdened bodies, free of carefully constructed conduct.
Your metaphor of the aging body as an annotated text is achingly precise, the strike-throughs, the marginalia, the hand-trembled underlining of what now matters more. There’s intimacy in that image: a body marked by attention, not loss, not diminished, but edited by time’s loving, brutal revisions. And yes, the hands are ours. The edits we make, or endure, are authored in collaboration with life itself.
You are also right about youth: its beauty is real, bright even. But youth’s seduction often lies in its blankness, its potential. The aging body, in contrast, has lived its sentences. It carries punctuation. Syntax. Subtext. To me, that’s not lesser, it’s literature.
And the way you describe body-to-body silence, as a kind of nonverbal dialect, is… different. There’s something strange but amazing about a presence that needs no translation. No verbal scaffolding. Just shared gravity. I don’t know if I could sit with others in silence for hours…. I don’t have that kind of patience or time.
Thank you for meeting the essay with expansion, nuance, and embodied reverence!
Oh Tamara, it's impossible not to be reshaped by your impeccable imagination and how you bring to life the seemingly natural implications of the body "posture" into the extraordinary revelations of the wild terrain and mystery of our relationship to "acknowledge that every fantasy we have ever had about who we are has already written itself onto our shoulders, our hips, our vocal inflections." Your rare gift of seeing beneath the fold has offered a territory of exploration that I can now imagine. Today is the beginning of two weeks of being off the spatial and social media grid, and to embark with this essay...my soul has come for full participation.
I've always believed that our body hears everything our mind says. And I had been preoccupied and bedeviled with how to heal our bodies; the mental, physical and metaphysical ways to overcome illness. It seems silly to quote you, since it could be the entire essay, yet, this, "Every uncollapsed belly, every softened gait, every unapologetic flare is a line edited back into the script...I once fell in love with someone entirely through the way he inhabited space. He wasn't beautiful in any conventional sense, but he moved like a secret that trusted you." Oh my! My first master's was in dance therapy, decades and decades ago. As I was walking in NYC one day, a voice from behind said, "I'd know that walk anywhere." I was impressed believing how I carried myself was proof of self-assurance and self-reliance, as well as the privilege of being in a school of dance from the age of 3. All an illusion as you so exquisitely reveal. When my nephew died 16 years ago, for almost one month my entire posture changed and I didn't know that woman in the mirror, and that grief posture kept people at a distance. Your essay has opened countless doors and gifted us (your readers) to an ancient and infinite wisdom and knowledge to ponder and muse on for life. And now, as an elder, how can I not quote your genius, "I used to think that youth was the body's most expressive phase, but now I know: it's the aging body that tells the truth, unedited." Thank you from the bottom of my heart Tamara.
This may be one of the most generous, layered, and soul-stirring reflections I’ve ever received. Thank you, Susan, truly! It feels less like a comment and more like a sacred echo, returned in your own lived poetry.
The way you speak of the body, as witness, as vessel, as secret-keeper, is precisely the deeper current I hoped my essay would touch. You’ve expanded it, adding the wisdom of one who has lived through transformation, not merely observed it. That story, of someone recognising you by your walk, and the contrast between that curated poise and the quiet collapse that followed grief, says more about the body’s intelligence than any philosophy textbook could.
You know, I almost didn’t include the line about the man who “moved like a secret that trusted you”. It felt too intimate, too fragile. But now I’m so grateful I did because you caught it, and you understood. That’s the miracle of writing from the body: you risk exposure, and in return, someone sees you whole.
And how beautifully you speak of aging not as decline but as revelation. Yes. The unedited body, stripped of posturing, becomes not diminished but distilled. The truth no longer whispered through gesture but spoken through every crack, curve, and scar.
You embarking on two weeks off-grid with this essay in your pack feels like a kind of benediction. May the silence receive you. May your posture soften into even deeper truths. And may your beautiful, wild, dancing body carry all of it, grief, grace, and the sacred ache of becoming, with the trust of someone who no longer needs to perform her worth.
Thank you, from every corner of my being!
P.S. I started classical ballet classes at the age of 3 and continued for 13 years…. It changed my body and I’m grateful for that.
Wow. This essay… reading it felt like standing in front of a mirror that reflects not the body, but its echoes. It reminds me of how, growing up, I used to think posture was about politeness—back straight, shoulders back, chin up—the choreography of acceptability. But over time, I started to realize how much of my body language was less about social cues and more about emotional camouflage. A slouch not from laziness, but from shame. A raised eyebrow as punctuation for things I didn’t dare say out loud.
When I read “the body is a social manuscript” that hit hard. It made me think of how grief lives in my mother’s hands, or how my friend’s walk changed after heartbreak, slightly slower, as if pacing memory. The body testifies.
Your essay makes me wonder if we’re all accidental playwrights of our own embodiment, revising our roles not to deceive, but to survive. Maybe even to dream. Your writing stretches between philosophy and intimacy, like a spine that holds both knowledge and longing.
I don’t know if I’ve met the version of myself my body wants to become. But I believe she’s in rehearsal too. And thanks to this, I might start listening more closely to the script written in my silences
Thank you, Tamara, for another amazing essay.
What a breathtaking reflection, thank you, Céline! That line about your friend’s walk slowing after heartbreak… ohhh yes. The body doesn’t forget. It edits in real time. Sometimes with grace, sometimes with grief, but always with truth.
I like your idea of the “accidental playwright”… we revise, not out of deceit, but as a survival instinct that occasionally surprises us with beauty. And isn’t that the hope? That beneath all the tension and posture and half-swallowed words, there’s still a version of us becoming (half-shadow, half-promise) waiting in the wings for a cue only the soul will recognise.
Keep listening! I suspect your silences are already writing something extraordinary.
Learning from you.
I liked “The body testifies.” It does. I don’t always want to read that testimony, but it’s there.
God, Tamara, you really never disappoint with your essays: pure poetry, knowledge, surprises, thoughts, wonder and wander…
What a formidable voice you have.
That means more than you know, thank you, Clara! I try to write from the place where thought begins to tremble, where knowing isn’t rigid but felt in the bones. If there’s poetry, it’s because the body remembers more than the mind admits. And if there’s surprise, maybe it’s just the soul slipping past the edits. Here’s to voices that wander precisely so they can find something worth saying :)
The most interesting part of this is the idea that there is no "authenticity" in body language, because the unrehearsed movement doesn't really exist, and that the performance itself tells you about the person. Not to mention that all movements have to be rehearsed, because that's how neural pathways are established. So when someone moves a certain way or holds a certain posture, it's all due to rehearsal, and it's completely arbitrary to decide that one type of rehearsal is authentic while another type is pure theater. It really is an arbitrary and ultimately irrelevant distinction. Even if you knew that some movement was learned for theatrical purposes, that still tells you something "real" about the person's self-concept.
It reminds me of these so-called "body language experts" who think that every facial expression or movement of limb can be analyzed and categorized to such an extent that motives can be inferred and minds can be read. It's nonsense because it's based on presuppositions of a baseline, but if all movements are the product of self-conception and rehearsal, there is no baseline outside of perhaps certain physiological responses that are entirely reflexive. But even then, the trigger point for reflexive response can differ. Tear production, for example, is a physiological response we all demonstrate, but the triggers will differ wildly from person to person.
Fantastic and fascinating, Tamara. Perfectly consistent with that straight spine of yours.
An astute, layered reading, and exactly the kind of engagement that gives my essay a second life. Yes, the myth of an “authentic baseline” is one of the more persistent fictions in both pop psychology and corporate training culture. As if we weren’t already steeped in centuries of somatic storytelling, each gesture rehearsed in response to everything from power dynamics to heartbreak. To call one posture “real” and another “performance” is like calling one word in a novel truer than the rest. The body is an authored text, and every edit, whether theatrical or reflexive, tells us something about the narrator.
I love your point about self-conception: the fact that someone chooses a theatrical gesture, that they rehearse a certain posture, is itself data. It reveals aspiration, memory, identity, longing. Even the affective mimicry we pick up unconsciously is a kind of aesthetic self-curation.
As for the body language experts… I often think they try to decode poetry using accounting software. They miss the metaphors. They miss the contradiction, the nuance, the rupture that makes something human rather than measurable. There is no universal “tell”, only the richly rehearsed syntax of individual history. And yes, that straight spine is less about confidence than about carrying a whole archive on my back.
Thank you, Andrew, your comments are always astonishing!
Tamara, you wrote a rich and rigorous excavation of embodiment, not as a static possession but as a lived, authored text. What you’ve surfaced so powerfully is that the body doesn’t perform a self, it metabolizes history, culture, trauma, and fantasy all at once. It’s not a stage; it’s a palimpsest.
The body doesn't just perform what it’s internalized—it also negotiates what it resists. Consider the phenomenon of chronic pain with no clear physiological origin—so-called “functional” pain. It’s often treated as medical mystery or psychosomatic inconvenience, but in many cases, it’s the body’s protest against narratives it can no longer sustain. When expression is censored, the body becomes the last dissenter. Pain, then, stops being symptom; it’s a subversive voice.
In that sense, even dysfunction can be an act of refusal to continue performing a version of the self that the psyche no longer consents to. The body remembers; sometimes, it also refuses to forget.
What we call performance may in fact be strategy—yes, for survival, but also for agency. There’s no such thing as a pure self beneath the choreography. But there is integrity in choosing your steps.
Incredible essay as always.
This is exquisite, thank you! You’ve given back a resonance that feels almost like echo in advance, as though the body you describe had already whispered these insights while I was still writing.
Yes, the body as palimpsest, not stage. That phrasing alone reframes everything. Where performance suggests spectacle, the palimpsest insists on history… layered, overwritten, never fully erased. I’m especially touched by your insight on chronic pain: pain as refusal, as subversive authorship. When language fails, the body doesn’t go silent, it goes loud in a dialect only the deeply attuned can hear. To call that dysfunction is to mistake revolt for malfunction.
And your final point is the most humane… integrity is the deliberate authorship of performance not its absence. To choose one’s gestures, even if rehearsed, is to assert agency in a world determined to choreograph us otherwise.
This was a needed continuation. Thank you, Alexander!
Not to mention the art you always choose. THAT is exquisite.
This part: "Consider the phenomenon of chronic pain with no clear physiological origin—so-called “functional” pain. It’s often treated as medical mystery or psychosomatic inconvenience, but in many cases, it’s the body’s protest against narratives it can no longer sustain. When expression is censored, the body becomes the last dissenter. Pain, then, stops being symptom; it’s a subversive voice." - you put words to it. Thank you.
That came from a deep, lived place, the kind that resists articulation until suddenly, it insists. Pain often speaks when no one else will listen. It isn’t failure or fragility, it’s the body’s final line of résistance, its most intimate truth-telling. If those words helped name what was once only felt, then they’ve done what I most hoped for.
**Milan Kundera, in his novel *Immortality*, explored body language and distinctive physical tics, noting that unique gestures are few and limited, while humans are many. Neurotransmitters can be influenced by the unconscious (or conscious) mimicry of movement.**
Those who fall into the trap of *manufactured gestures* are often people haunted by fear, exposed to threats and bullying—or individuals thrust into the spotlight of fame, who meticulously craft their movements out of fear of losing admiration. Or perhaps a lover, seducing their partner through calculated charm.
A Kuwaiti writer once grew furious when Saddam Hussein appeared on the execution platform smiling. She said: *"He robbed us of our joy and schadenfreude at the final moment."*
A brilliant observation: **the body is a social manuscript**—yet this does not apply to my ten-year-old daughter with Down syndrome. She is pure expression, humanity’s primal clay, untainted by artifice. One day, as we walked, we stumbled upon a spontaneous street wedding dance. Without hesitation, she joined in, her limited motor skills no barrier. The crowd embraced her, moved by her raw, unfiltered joy.
What a breathtaking response, thank you! You’ve folded Kundera, Kuwait, choreography, and childhood into a single arc of meaning, and I’m moved by how seamlessly it all looks.
You are right, the most manufactured gestures often arise not from vanity, but from fear, from the tightrope of visibility, where every movement risks misinterpretation or mockery. The body under surveillance seems haunted, whether by the state, the lover, or the crowd. And yet, your story of your daughter slices through all that with the clarity of grace. She reminds us what the body knew before it was scripted: movement as communion, not performance. Joy as instinct, not branding. She doesn’t disrupt the theory, she completes it. She is what the rest of us are rehearsing our way back to.
That image of her dancing into the street wedding, unguarded, welcome, incredible, feels like a thesis in motion. A reminder that the most profound authors of the body’s language are often those who have never once tried to edit the line.
“Real eroticism doesn’t pose. It leaks. It arrives uninvited in the smallest betrayals of poise –“
ugh. i LOVE your words. feeling all of this. my life IS for performance
Thank you! And yes, what a beautiful paradox, right? A life for performance doesn’t mean it’s fake; it means you understand the stage as sacred. Some of us perform not to deceive but to reveal, layer by intentional layer, the unspeakable truths our bodies have always known. If your life is for performance, then may every gesture be an act of authorship, every look a monologue, every silence a stanza. Let it leak, let it burn!
ayeeeeeeee!!!! THIS THIS THIS! yes thank YOU
I remember a time when I was living with my first lover, and a friend and his girlfriend were also staying with us. We had named our place "the blue house." We called it that because we organized artistic gatherings there – we made music, films. Basically, each of us was pursuing our own artistic dream in our own way.
One evening, I felt like I needed to be allowed to be naked at home again – not just in my room, but throughout the entire house, even though it was shared space. So obviously out of courtesy, and probably more than just courtesy, I told the other three people about my desire. I was more informing them than asking for permission, because the next morning I was naked at the breakfast table having my coffee, walking through the house, going to my office, and so on.
Looking back on this memory, several things stand out to me. Despite the attempt at open-mindedness – both mine and theirs – regarding this idea, there was a kind of tension that got created in the space. I can't really detail their discomfort since my empathy at the time was pretty occupied, or absorbed, by my own self-reflection about nudity.
I think that aside from designated places like nudist beaches or spas, I've very rarely had the chance to explore being physically naked in public or semi-private spaces. But there was something intriguing about it: you go from a moment in childhood to another moment when this dimension suddenly becomes hidden, loaded with meaning. It's as if the mental process that resulted from this was, by way of compensation, the baring of the soul – turning to poetry to sublimate this excess of life that finds no outlet in the simplicity of the body. The simplicity of the body with all the other subtle melodies around it: the wind, the humid whispers still reflected through a window, the carving of the ground that receives your steps, the intimacy of the sun and the earth aging at their own pace with less remorse but multiplying scars. And when you think about it in a very "scientific" way, the three senses that coordinate balance are sight, hearing, and touch. Such a vast surface of sensory receptors censored. Something there should be reclaimed like that celebration in Andrei Rublev. But internally we are already preparing for more wars.
So yeah, that's what I wanted to say. After reading your text, and I don't know where everyone stands in their own fluctuations, I never try to establish overly lofty formulas to avoid falling into the trap of my own uniqueness. And always with genuine energy, I thank you for all these insights you're gathering.
Thank you for such a layered comment! Your story of the Blue House reads like a scene from a film Bergman might have directed after spending a summer with Pasolini: vulnerability + sensual philosophy + existential tension.
What you describe, walking naked through a house not just physically, but symbolically, is such a clear embodiment of the very themes I tried to evoke: the body not as spectacle or scandal, but as presence, unadorned and unapologetic. And yet, even in this seemingly radical honesty, you touch something more difficult, the subtle social choreography that still haunts even the most intentional spaces. The gaze, the atmosphere, the self’s doubling-back into self-consciousness. We bare ourselves not just to be seen, but to remember what it’s like to feel unarmoured.
And that’s always a risk.
I like your observation that when the simplicity of the body is denied, the soul compensates, through poetry, through longing, through myth-making. What a beautiful and painful truth. The body, censored, spills its surplus into metaphor. And perhaps that’s where art begins… in the rupture between what we can reveal and what we’re still too afraid to.
Your final line, about not trying to assert your own uniqueness too loftily, only confirms the depth of it. There’s nothing performative here, just a deeply humane reflection that pulses with humility, sensory intelligence, and the ache of being.
Today, I spent the afternoon by the river with my father and the dogs. It was nothing like a chess game with Death on a Bergman beach - rather the simple revival of joy despite the extreme heat and the very Belgian ordinariness of things. My father, struggling with his arthritis, looked like a three-year-old in a giant's body as he navigated the riverbed, almost ready to help a kayak that had gotten caught between two rocks. I found myself whispering invisibly, "Don't help them, keep your balance" - you're so wonderfully clumsy!
We took photos of each other. I might turn mine into a watercolor if I find the courage.
I've started a personal chronicle series where I weave together narrative and a piece of music. The third installment will feature a Moondog piece, but rather than revealing which song or the content of this third chronicle, I'm allowing myself to leave you with a different Moondog piece - as both an admiring reverie of my day and such a beautiful closure of it through the softly rounded precision of your words.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MhwjtkyI2w&list=RDS-kk65_HjzA&index=2
What you’ve shared, an afternoon so deeply rooted in the “ordinariness of things” it becomes sacred by accident, is beautiful. Your father as a giant child, clumsy with tenderness, is a painting in itself. “Don’t help them, keep your balance” might be the most honest prayer I’ve read all week. It holds so much love, restraint, history, humour, and that peculiar ache we feel watching someone we adore fumble beautifully through the world.
Please do turn that photo into a watercolor. Not for perfection… for preservation. For the gentle insistence that this moment existed, soft and sun-soaked and real.
And thank you for the Moondog piece. I like that you weave narrative and music in your chronicles; it feels like the kind of form that knows what the body remembers before language does.
Keep writing! I’m listening.
J'aimerais vous demander si nous avons d'autres langues en commun que le français et l'anglais, car ce qui me fascine dans nos échanges, c'est aussi cette disponibilité aux émotions multiples. Je crois que notre façon de recevoir l'art, la vie, notre corps qui se réajuste en silence ou en conscience, c'est aussi lié à cette finesse du son, des articulations étrangères qu'on a fait sienne depuis un autre espace-temps.
Cette question me ramène à une phrase qui ouvrait un ancien recueil de poésie, écrit en référence à une amante catalane avec laquelle je ne partageais que l'espagnol - son français était maladroitement exquis à entendre mais sans la justesse nécessaire pour y pénétrer véritablement. J'ouvrais ce recueil par ces mots : "toi ou moi c'est la brutalité chaque éveil est une étoile chaque étoile est un deuil". Avec vous, je découvre une tout autre géographie linguistique, plus riche de possibles.
Et je dirais aussi que nous nous autorisons des ellipses cognitives et psychiques grâce à cette agilité ; vous utilisez davantage que moi la réverbération ou la sublimation mais plutôt que d'y greffer des réminiscences validantes, je perçois naturellement l'alchimie qui par une répétition décalée, comme la musique, enrichit l'émotion tant comme mémoire/densité, glissement/ouverture... et donc j'y reviens : la question des langues est très étendue. J'y intègre autant des disciplines comme le Katsugen que l'art divinatoire, c'est-à-dire cette imagination qui cherche sans cesse à s'épandre tout en "accusant" la perte de son centre comme une autre éclosion vitale.
Quand vous me lisez, je sais que vous ne vous contentez pas de l'espace entre les lignes, vous avez la faculté d'ajuster votre rythme au mien, nous sommes en syntonie et ce pouvoir est réciproque mais je choisis de déstabiliser comme si je n'avais pas toujours envie de récolter les bienfaits. Bien que je me transforme agréablement aujourd'hui à votre contact, je parle d'ailleurs d'une grande prêtresse dans la deuxième chronique et excusez ce recours au titre (grande prêtresse), il y a parfois lieu de scander la mélodie par des mots plus nets.
J'ai choisi de ressentir "Keep writing! I'm listening" comme une invitation à parler plus encore dans cette nuit et même si ça n'avait pas ce sens, mon cœur reste ajusté à cette vibration. J'espère aussi vous retrouver dans mon espace d'écriture ; je sais que c'est vous qui conduisez et que comme autostoppeur, j'ai tendance à devenir silencieux ou farouche.
Que me répondrez-vous à cette fougue à laquelle vous m'invitez ?
Pour répondre à votre question des langues : au-delà de l’anglais et du français, ma langue maternelle est le roumain. Je parle également l’italien, l’espagnol et le portugais à un niveau que j’appellerais fluide en devenir : il me suffirait de passer deux ou trois mois en immersion dans chacun de ces pays pour que la langue s’installe pleinement, naturellement, presque charnellement. Le danois, en revanche, est pour moi encore un territoire naissant – balbutiant mais curieux. Toutes ces langues ne sont pas seulement des outils de communication ; elles sont, comme vous le dites si justement, des altérations d’espace-temps, des tremblements de perception, des manières de se reconfigurer le monde par l’intérieur.
… “toi ou moi c’est la brutalité chaque éveil est une étoile chaque étoile est un deuil” me happe. Elle brûle doucement. Elle dit tout de ce que la langue partagée ne suffit pas à combler, et ce que le corps, parfois, murmure avec plus de vérité qu’un mot trop bien dit. Et pourtant ici, avec vous, il semble que les mots et les silences s’accordent, non pas pour s’expliquer, mais pour vibrer ensemble. Vous évoquez la grande prêtresse avec une sorte de pudeur mélodique, je l’entends comme un tempo. Il fallait ce mot-là, et il ne résonne pas comme une révérence, mais comme un rythme vital. Merci!
Quant à votre fougue, je pourrais la recevoir comme une tempête, mais je la reçois comme une veille. Elle éclaire, elle chauffe. Je ne cherche pas à y répondre par équilibre, je cherche à l’accueillir comme on accueille la musique d’un nocturne qui vient nous rejoindre quand on croyait la nuit close. Oui, écrivez. Parlez. Ouvrez les fenêtres, même si personne ne vous attend de l’autre côté. J’y serai, même farouche, même en retrait, je vous lirai.
Et cette syntonie, dont vous parlez avec tant de justesse, c’est un don rare, fragile, et je le tiens entre mes mains avec une gratitude éveillée.
"There’s a version of me I haven’t become yet, but I’ve seen her. In glimpses. ... She moves with the kind of elegance that doesn’t beg to be liked." Tamara, I enjoyed every word of your article! Thank you for a formidable time spend on this June's tropical night.🙏💫🤍
And thank you for spending your tropical night (mine is the same) with these words… what an image, heat and introspection folding into each other. That version of us we glimpse, it’s both a memory and a premonition, isn’t it? She haunts the margins of mirrors and the echo at the end of a good song. Not invented, but remembered. And maybe, if we stop trying to please the audience, we’ll finally hear her cue.
Yes, absolutely she is a memory & a premonition. She shines her light through my cracks & emblazes the path I'm on... & she's a great dancer.
Enjoy your evening/night. 🌅 I'm looking forward to your next article with lots of "Vorfreude".
Lovely image… thank you, Marisa!
I found her… or should I say, one of her pictures found me 😁.
Sometimes I think I write and then I read your work and dare not utter a word.
Oh but please do… utter, murmur, shout, scribble in the margins. Whatever you do, don’t stop! If anything I write makes you pause, let that pause be breath, not silence. The point isn’t to intimidate, it’s to invite. If my words strike a chord, it’s only because your instrument was already tuned. So write! Especially when it feels audacious. That’s when it’s truest…
And thank you for this wonderful compliment!
I’m still stuck in the gasp…in the place of God’s exhale. If and when I come up for air I promise an out breath with words attached.
Lovely!
I am such a big fan of the power of posture. Not the type that a stuffy, old Brit would jaw at you for holding your chin at angle more appropriate for a brothel than a fine dining occasion. No, the posture I revere can be found in the angle your mind takes to certain stimuli and situations; the trajectory you have placed yourself on in your dealings with people and the world at large; and yes, how you carry your body. For me, the body is like the outer most layer of your essence, a reflection, refraction, and subtly contoured, structure of what you actually are.
So when I read:
“… how identity hides in the flesh.”
I was clapping like a trained seal. Because the hidden element of your identity is part of the performance — and we have perhaps forgotten that the one animating the body is intrinsically linked to the body.
How crass! I thought. The body is, after all, wild! It is beastly! It is uncontrollable, and prone to falling apart and eventually expiring — something to whipped into shape and harnessed for those important higher order functions. But trying to pretend the mind/body connection has been severed, and we are merely riding this vessel around, keeping it in check—this caused in me an inner tension. A misalignment occurred. Sometimes I think I was raised to think the body isn’t as responsible for the mind as the mind is for the body. But this essay reminds me that isn’t the case.
In my recent past, I discovered I rather liked my body. I didn’t self-flagellate in the past, there wasn’t any self-loathing. I was,at best, a cold and distant observer. But when I found coherence — my posture changed. The intertwining and the feedback that happened between my mind and body gave me more energy. The information that had previously passed between the “rider” and the “horse” ceased being a dialogue between human and beast. I just became what I was.
And in that more upright version of myself… parts of me I forgot existed came seeping out. Confidence? Yes, but not a loud version. Power? Well, I had some more reverence for the body — not a “body is a temple” type of reverence, more an appreciation for this hard-working frame that battles gravity and entropy every. Single. Moment. So I was more purposeful in feeding and training.
And as this cohesion was sustained some new elements emerged: bravery, eroticism, and a desire to move with greater freedom emerged — it was a little unnerving. Who was this person? Perhaps the most astonishingly… I could enjoy self-intimacy with greater purpose. Reading alone wasn’t a performance at the coffee shop to make people notice how clever I was, it was just what I would do. Going to a dance event on my own, wasn’t to be seen by others, it was an occasion to be in the moment, to feel the rhythms and join the shared performance of artist and audience. All of this to say, what you have written here tracks with fidelity to my lived experience.
This body, this mind, they are inseparable and if there is any growth available to me in this middle part of the frame, then it isn’t in changes to mass, smoothness, or even angular momentum, it is alignment. Coherence. Revealing a symbiosis that was always there, and one that with enough transits around the sun, can final become greater than the sum of its parts.
Or not.
Sometimes we are just lucky to have a moment of clarity as life peaks and troughs, so I guess I will enjoy this while it is available to me. And I will share this essay with others in the hope it sends a jolt through spines, corrects the chin’s angle, twists the hips back to neutral and unburdens the mind of this fallacy that it isn’t intrinsic to the body and vice versa.
This might be the most elegant fusion of biomechanics, philosophy, and poetic confession I’ve read in a long while, and I’m honoured it was prompted by something I wrote.
You articulate something I tried to hint at but you’ve brought it fully into form, the body not just as reflection of the mind, but as co-conspirator in its evolution. That image of the “rider” and the “horse” dissolving until you simply became what you were, that is it! That’s the shift. From command to communion. From managing the body like a misbehaving employee to listening to it like a trusted oracle.
Your lived experience of coherence, how posture subtly reoriented, how purpose replaced performance, is the kind of embodied intelligence we rarely name but always feel. I like how you describe bravery and eroticism not as traits, but as emergent properties of alignment. And that clarity? That fleeting moment where the body and mind harmonise into presence rather than posturing? That’s what most of us mistake for self-confidence, when really it’s just a temporary truce with the internal editor.
I’m especially moved by your ending: that growth isn’t measured in inches or smoothness, but in coherence. Yes. A thousand times yes. If we’re lucky, we get a few years where the body and mind stop mistranslating each other long enough to become one language. And in those moments, we don’t just live—we author.
So thank you, deeply, Adam! This was a companion piece. A mirror that understands, not only reflects.
This is my favorite essay I’ve read of yours. They’re all incredible but this…goodness gracious.
That means a lot, especially coming from someone who has read the others. This one came from deeper under the skin, from the place where language and sensation blur. I think sometimes the body writes what the mind is too careful to say. Maybe that’s what happened here. So thank you, Billy, for reading with more than your eyes, with your nerves.
❤️yes, this was uncharted water. Beautiful work.
“She moves with the kind of elegance that doesn’t beg to be liked.”
Tamara I’m done with superlatives. There are no superlatives left to me to properly describe your writing so I’m not even going to try. I’m just going to thank you for this as I always do. I highlighted many lines but this one really spoke to me, because this is what your essay is really about. It’s about just being and not trying to be anything other than your perfectly whole, scarred and glorious self, for you and for no one else. No more begging, just being. 🙏🏼
Thank you, Nancy, for the beautiful words, and for choosing truth. That line you pulled is the one I almost deleted. It felt too bare. Too revealing of a longing I haven’t yet fully claimed. So the fact that it spoke to you tells me it belonged.
Yes, no more begging! No more performing for validation pretending to be identity! Just being… whole, flawed, bright, and utterly unrepentant. That kind of presence is not quiet, how could it be?! It’s thunder that doesn’t need applause.
I’m honoured my essay found its echo in you.
How do you do this???
I listen to the things that don’t speak. The twitch before the smile. The pause before the truth. The sentence that edits itself mid-breath. And then I try to write from there… where the body betrays the mind’s performance, and something real leaks through. Maybe that’s the whole trick? Don’t write from what you know. Write from what your spine suspects?
I’ve always done that actually :)
Storytelling and capturing these elements in dialogue or adjectives makes it fun to attempt by describing with posture, hand gestures and always the fun with fascial cues.
great article.
Thank you, Jake, and yes, isn’t it fascinating how dialogue lives in the body before it ever hits the page? A character’s silence can speak louder than a monologue when paired with the right twitch of the jaw or blink held a second too long. Facial cues are subplots, posture is punctuation. Writing them well is less about description and more about noticing the choreography of contradiction. That’s where the real story lives…
I love this essay because it acknowledges the unseen, what goes unnoticed in the rush towards somewhere we're all caught in.
I loved your perspective on the aging of the body as a revision — that's exactly how it is and how I feel about it too. There's an inexplicable beauty to the annotated and edited text: all the strike-throughs, the messy handwriting in the margins and between the lines, the underlining of the important parts. When you read a text that's already been through a mind and its hands, you cannot remain indifferent to the charm, elegance and unadultered enchantment the intimate involvement with life gives it. It's the same with the body, except the hands are your own and life is the mind, and to me, that's the closest thing to perfection there is.
There's a bias towards the body of the young, of course — its beauty, fitness, purity etc. are undeniable and deserve their own praise, but as far as I'm concerned, these qualities have never been virtues, not if they deny the beauty, mistery and truth of what is present and palpable in favour of the otherworldly.
On another note, I delight in the act of watching, noticing, and unconsciously reacting — they create a conversation and a dialect of the bodies in and of themselves: the body talking to the gaze talking to the body. That's why I love simply sitting in silence with somebody, no contrived verbosity about how we think things are, but only the real presence of what is. I've sat in silence with people even for 13h straight and they're some of the best memories I have. I suspect it has something to do with the undeniable lightness that comes with not feeling the need to fill the gap between the substantial existence of two unburdened bodies, free of carefully constructed conduct.
What a pleasure to read this has been!
Your metaphor of the aging body as an annotated text is achingly precise, the strike-throughs, the marginalia, the hand-trembled underlining of what now matters more. There’s intimacy in that image: a body marked by attention, not loss, not diminished, but edited by time’s loving, brutal revisions. And yes, the hands are ours. The edits we make, or endure, are authored in collaboration with life itself.
You are also right about youth: its beauty is real, bright even. But youth’s seduction often lies in its blankness, its potential. The aging body, in contrast, has lived its sentences. It carries punctuation. Syntax. Subtext. To me, that’s not lesser, it’s literature.
And the way you describe body-to-body silence, as a kind of nonverbal dialect, is… different. There’s something strange but amazing about a presence that needs no translation. No verbal scaffolding. Just shared gravity. I don’t know if I could sit with others in silence for hours…. I don’t have that kind of patience or time.
Thank you for meeting the essay with expansion, nuance, and embodied reverence!
Oh Tamara, it's impossible not to be reshaped by your impeccable imagination and how you bring to life the seemingly natural implications of the body "posture" into the extraordinary revelations of the wild terrain and mystery of our relationship to "acknowledge that every fantasy we have ever had about who we are has already written itself onto our shoulders, our hips, our vocal inflections." Your rare gift of seeing beneath the fold has offered a territory of exploration that I can now imagine. Today is the beginning of two weeks of being off the spatial and social media grid, and to embark with this essay...my soul has come for full participation.
I've always believed that our body hears everything our mind says. And I had been preoccupied and bedeviled with how to heal our bodies; the mental, physical and metaphysical ways to overcome illness. It seems silly to quote you, since it could be the entire essay, yet, this, "Every uncollapsed belly, every softened gait, every unapologetic flare is a line edited back into the script...I once fell in love with someone entirely through the way he inhabited space. He wasn't beautiful in any conventional sense, but he moved like a secret that trusted you." Oh my! My first master's was in dance therapy, decades and decades ago. As I was walking in NYC one day, a voice from behind said, "I'd know that walk anywhere." I was impressed believing how I carried myself was proof of self-assurance and self-reliance, as well as the privilege of being in a school of dance from the age of 3. All an illusion as you so exquisitely reveal. When my nephew died 16 years ago, for almost one month my entire posture changed and I didn't know that woman in the mirror, and that grief posture kept people at a distance. Your essay has opened countless doors and gifted us (your readers) to an ancient and infinite wisdom and knowledge to ponder and muse on for life. And now, as an elder, how can I not quote your genius, "I used to think that youth was the body's most expressive phase, but now I know: it's the aging body that tells the truth, unedited." Thank you from the bottom of my heart Tamara.
This may be one of the most generous, layered, and soul-stirring reflections I’ve ever received. Thank you, Susan, truly! It feels less like a comment and more like a sacred echo, returned in your own lived poetry.
The way you speak of the body, as witness, as vessel, as secret-keeper, is precisely the deeper current I hoped my essay would touch. You’ve expanded it, adding the wisdom of one who has lived through transformation, not merely observed it. That story, of someone recognising you by your walk, and the contrast between that curated poise and the quiet collapse that followed grief, says more about the body’s intelligence than any philosophy textbook could.
You know, I almost didn’t include the line about the man who “moved like a secret that trusted you”. It felt too intimate, too fragile. But now I’m so grateful I did because you caught it, and you understood. That’s the miracle of writing from the body: you risk exposure, and in return, someone sees you whole.
And how beautifully you speak of aging not as decline but as revelation. Yes. The unedited body, stripped of posturing, becomes not diminished but distilled. The truth no longer whispered through gesture but spoken through every crack, curve, and scar.
You embarking on two weeks off-grid with this essay in your pack feels like a kind of benediction. May the silence receive you. May your posture soften into even deeper truths. And may your beautiful, wild, dancing body carry all of it, grief, grace, and the sacred ache of becoming, with the trust of someone who no longer needs to perform her worth.
Thank you, from every corner of my being!
P.S. I started classical ballet classes at the age of 3 and continued for 13 years…. It changed my body and I’m grateful for that.
You're amazing❣️