my body's story

Recently my dear friend Caroline wrote my (and many others) the following:

"I am currently in Barcelona, attending an art school for a semester, and i'm about to embark on the most ambitious project i've ever undertaken.

It's conceptualized around the idea of disconnection from the body. I'm still forming my exact words and thoughts around it, but it's basically the idea that disconnection from our physical self is the root of many of the struggles we face, both as individuals and in society.

My goal is to use this project as a vehicle for those ideas. What i need from my friends, peers, acquaintances, enemies, and folks on the street is your body story. I'm not looking for a well rounded essay on your entire life's experience of your body (though it could be that, if that's what you wanted), but something simple, basic, and essential. It could be a trauma or a joy, a history or an accident - anything. Anything."

So, this is what I wrote...

I remember being a kid and feeling invincible. I remember my friends and I riding our bikes down this long bumpy hill, no hands, arms up high, exhilarated. I remember clambering through the canopy of entangled conifers, or over the thick limbs of eucalyptus trees. I remember rolling down sand dunes, hiding in the brush.

I remember feeling very free, light. There was very little distinction between my body and the world around me.

We moved when I was 10, and social pressures came to the fore of my experience. I shut down emotionally, and became more physically rigid. One didn't have adventures - one played sports. Very particular kinds of movements, imbued with conformity and posturing. At home I became the proverbial couch potato. I had almost no friends for 3 years. My parents marriage was falling apart and the restrictions on behavior slackened. It wasn't uncommon for me to spend 10 hrs a day in front of the television eating junk food. And then my parents told me they were getting divorced and my world came apart.

I remember feeling confused, heavy. My body was full of emotions I didn't know how to express or process.

By the time I was 14 things were improving. I had friends again. I was even in love, a kind of tortured love, which was all the sweeter for its agony. I started having adventures again. I started shedding the weight of the last 5 years. Voluntarily, I stopped watching TV and started eating better.

When I was 19 I was taken to my first contact improv dance jam, we're various radical faeries, large, muscular, sweet gay men were more than happy to help me explore the ways my body could move. I took a yoga class, an aikido class. I started spinning fire. Yet the existential
dilemma of entering adulthood uninitiated started taking its toll, and I sunk into substance abuse. I still had adventures, but there was always this nagging, stinging, tinge of self-doubt.

I remember feeling free, yet lethargic, depressed, yet open to the possibilities of the adult life I was entering. I was in my body, but my heart was spinning, scared, excited.

Now, at 28, even at 28, I gain weight easier and my body is heavier, slower. I don't think it has to be this way. It's what I've chosen, though perhaps not consciously. Over the past years I somehow chose DJing over dancing, meditating over yoga. I feel good, happy. I've passed through the angst of my twenties and know who I am, and am at peace with who I am. Mostly. I feel like my body and I are like an old married couple. We know each other incredibly well, yet there's a certain depth of intimacy that seems no longer attainable.

I wonder, how do I fall in love with my body again?

culture and change

Last weekend Kassia picked up what appeared to be something like an activist's flashcard. On the front it reads, "Alternative popular culture." On the back it reads, "struggle to aquire, maintain or resist power using culture as the site of or for that struggle."

This reminded me of a group I ran into at the National Conference on Organized Resistance back in 2003, called SmartMeme. In their workshop they outlined the key points in the development of an activist campaign where, traditionally, mainstream media and other institutions take control of the situation by framing the issue and controling the language and issues. We looked at strategies for counter-acting that pattern.

"SmartMeme is about doing social change in a holistic way : shifting from issues to values, supplementing organization building with movement building, focusing on the intersections of story telling, relational organizing, communications, alliance building and creative new forms of civic engagement and action.

SmartMeme amplifies the impact of local and national non-profit and grassroots organizations with capacity-building partnerships, collaborations, and new strategy tools to change the stories that shape the dominant culture. We integrate the art of framing, the science of strategy, and the approach of grassroots organizing through our framework of story-based strategy." (from the smartMeme website)

I'm writing this as something of a follow up to my previous post. Somehow I'm finally starting to put the pieces together of this new culture that's emerging. To some extent it's a resistance culture. But it's primarily that in that in order to have the space to create the culture we want to live in we have to push on the boundaries of the dominant culture, because they're not leaving much room to work in. And this conflict is more about values, lifestyles, economics than it is about physical, or even formally political confrontation.


According to Wikipedia this idea is actually nothing new. "The phrase "culture war" is a translation of the German Kulturkampf, the name given to the struggle between the government of the German Empire under Otto von Bismarck against the power of the Catholic Church from 1871-1878.

Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci in the 1920s argued that the reason the proletarian revolution had not advanced in Europe as fast as many Marxists had expected it would was due to cultural hegemony. The theory of cultural hegemony states that a diverse culture can be dominated by one class because of that class's monopoly over the mass media and popular culture. Gramsci therefore argued for a culture war in which anti-capitalist elements seek to gain a dominant voice in mass media, education, and other mass organizations." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_war

In my opinion, another reason that different political and social movements operating from a base of counter-culture creation have had limited impact is because there has been too much focus on ideology and rhetoric, as well as organizational structure and, as a movement develops, bureaucracy, and too little on the real point of the matter, which is to better the lives of those who are oppressed.

In my work, I hope to turn this around. I hope to work for the betterment of life circumstances for all, and to organize people and resources in a way that clearly makes their lives better. If it's not obvious, something's wrong. If there is energy wasted on bureaucracy and institution, something's wrong. If I can simply point to what's happening and say, "look we're helping people meet their own needs while meeting the needs of others through their own hard work and mutual support" it will be hard to argue with that.