sadreads #12: a second global body
Hello!
If any of you are in the Raleigh Durham area, or here in Asheville, you should know that I’m doing three rare readings this winter. The first two are in support of my friend Justin Marks’s new book. The third, at Malaprop’s Bookstore/Cafe, is a hybrid reading, so you can join online and watch as well.
Jan. 20, 2023: Paradiso Reading Series, Rubies Five Points, Durham (with Justin Marks and Dylan Angell).
Jan. 21, 2023: So & So Books, Raleigh (with Justin Marks).
Feb. 5, 2023: Poetrio @ Malaprops Bookstore, Asheville (with Glenis Redmond and Molly Rice).
I won’t be reading beyond this for the foreseeable, so here’s your chance for proof that my molecules can be witnessed in person and/or captured by crude human technology.
Also, my book was shouted out in the New York Times in December so that was cool. Read the article here: The Best Poetry of 2022. The only other time I’ve ever been mentioned in the Grey Lady was in 2014, when I participated in a reading around the concept of debt. This part was not in the paper, but at the event, I read a long poem from my book Dead Horse called “I Owe Money” while consuming a physical dollar bill. It was absolutely disgusting; I had to eat it in pieces and wash it down with beer. I believe the nutritional value of a dollar is not very high.
Ok, onto the reads. I want to talk about The Second Body by Daisy Hildyard.
This past fall, I was reading Elvia Wilk’s Death By Landscape, and in it the author mentions this book-length essay by Daisy Hildyard, a novelist and essayist in North Yorkshire, England. This work is about the dissolving of boundaries between the physical body we have, which we tend to think of as discrete, and all of the rest of existence on earth. Wilk writes, about the thesis of Hildyard’s book: “The first body is the one you familiarly refer to when you go to work or have sex or feel a headache coming on. I might call the second body the ecosystemic body–the one that is constantly implicated in and influenced by ecologies beyond the individual self.”
I went ahead and got Hildyard’s book immediately after that. It’s a fast, compelling read, not too dry or scientific, about her personal awakening to this idea of a second body on a global scale. She writes about her conversations with (among others) a butcher, a biologist, and an investigator of environmental crimes (like animal trafficking or illegal poaching) with openness and curiosity in an effort to understand the micro and macro of this new awareness.
The idea of a second body felt intuitively true to me. I’ve found myself filled with a growing concern (or, more precisely, dread) about the implications of my own body’s comfort on other beings in the world. It has to do with the ongoing, worsening climate disaster, but also with an awareness of interconnectedness between people, animals, organisms, ecosystems.
I don’t know when this awareness started for me. I do remember, as a child, filling up plastic bags of Mountain Dew cans in my family’s home, and then biking them over to an inconveniently located recycling center. That is to say: an ecological concern of sorts has been with me a long time. I think many of us, as kids, were very sold by the 1990s educational campaign about things we could do at home to nebulously "help the environment." Tell your mom not to buy aerosol hairspray! Put a brick into the top toilet tank to reduce your family’s water consumption! Cut the turtle stranglers that hold together your dad’s six-packs into little pieces before you throw them in the trash! We were sold the idea that individual action has an impact on the world, and to some degree, we’ve spent the decades since being disillusioned by this perspective. This is not to say that individual action is bad – just that it feels like not nearly enough when governments and corporations can't be assed to take any action that might lose them money. But that’s a tangent.
But there was a key part in understanding this awareness that I’d been lacking. To Hildyard – and this is important – the second body is not just a nebulous aura, it’s real and physical, with real implications on other bodies, including our own. "The second body appears to pose a threat to the first body – the real one, the one you live in. Any body which is global cannot accommodate an individual, who moves in her own individual way, who makes individual choices and has individual thoughts – this global body, which is entirely without boundaries, doesn’t understand that individuals exist at all.” This is the part I found really interesting, and the part that makes me feel the most nervous: that the second body isn’t merely conceptual, it’s a physical key part of the way we conduct our life on earth. Think about your physical wingspan stretching continents. This is what it means.
Of course to think of ourselves as a part of a collective frustrates the idea of individuality. “If you know that you are an animal, you have to see yourself as a body, and realize that your life could be understood in relation to the predictability of your daily movements.” We have found it difficult and reductive to consider ourselves as mere beasts, but what if to do this by acknowledging the enormous second body is actually expansive to the consciousness, to the individual? What if it allows us to think on a truly global scale for the first time? The sensation can be horrifying, as it was to Hildyard: “I was left with a feeling that the only way to truly experience the truth about your body is with pathological horror. The truth is that it does not have sealed boundaries and that objects pose a direct threat to your body – your car, for example, is invading your body. Your body is not inviolable. Your body is infecting the world – you leak.” But what if stopping to think of ourselves as individual consciousnesses governing a physical entity with clear borders, and instead placing our physical bodies in the space of interconnectedness between ecosystems, allows for greater intellectual understanding and expanded empathy?
And maybe, just maybe, it will also make for better writing. I've read about this kind of permeability and corruption in discussion about translation, and the environmental awareness aspect comes through in genres like ecopoetics. But I think the second body is no longer avoidable in literature and in art in general; to me the truth goes so far beyond a writerly niche as to be unignorable. Everything we do for (or to) ourselves as individuals we do for (or to) all the individuals in the world.