Body As Verb

The third book in the Autonomics Trilogy

01

Biology. Bio. Logos. The study of life. Biophilia. Bio. Philia. The

loving of life. Biobios. Bio. Bios. The living of life.

In Tzutuj’iil Mayan, N Kasea. To live. Literally, the ember yet

burns. Smouldering, potentially other-igniting, this ember,

which is us, yet burns. To burn is to combust, and to be in

motion.

Old Lakhota, a two-hundred-thousand-year-old language

aboriginal to Turtle Island, the prosodics of which sound like

the earth singing, is described by one of its speakers to me as

a non-mathematical quantum mechanical language of intuition. A

verb-based language, it describes the motion of energies. The

language has no word for ‘I’.

We moderns concretize a sense of self: we attempt to reify it, solidify

it, make it Newtonian. Turn it into a thing. We attempt to

turn a verb into a noun, because we want to capture something,

enclose it, own it, possess it. Make it ‘mine.’

This is like trying to own the wind. Let it go. It is an attempt to

catch water in your hands. Water is life; it spills right through

your fingers. What you be is in motion, animated by an entelechy

that pervades animacy, a source frequency of which the

ordinary sense of self we attempt to localize, reify, concretize

and own is merely derivative.

What would it mean to have a more fluid sense of self, or better

yet to release it all together: to release the compulsion to name

it, to accrete a solid sense of identity?

What would it mean to allow ourselves to return to a more

primal and limpid flux, to permit ourselves to be water, to be

embers rising on the wind, to release the contracted ‘I’, to open

ourselves to the notion that life itself is something moving

through us, to become the flow itself, to realize that I move,

therefore I am.

ARRIVING LATER THIS YEAR…