The Body Remembers

This is how he wrote:

In a series of ongoing experiments, accidental at first, he discovered that his physical position altered the style and even the content of his work. Prone, for instance, tended toward eulogy.

It began on a day his gout had flared up. He found that if he leaned back, one foot on his desk, the stricken toe pointing at the ceiling, he could get just comfortable enough to write. What came out of him was, well, different. He pegged it as a bit more irritable than he’d like. It was too reminiscent of all that Céline he’d read in college. But at least it was different.

When his gout had subsided he began in earnest. At first the thought was just to try different positions. He knew some yoga positions — what was that girl’s name who dragged him to those classes in Cambridge? He couldn’t recall.

Anyway, Downward Dog seemed as good a place as any to start. With notepad and pen near one hand he was like some three-legged mutt, slightly off balance. The blood rushed to his head and his neck started to ache. But he managed two and a half pages. Upon examination it was overextended, not well balanced, and drifted toward a litany of pet peeves.

He tried a few more yoga poses. Proud Warrior was too damn Churchill. Revolved Triangle was more promising. It put him in mind of Gary Lutz, though his taste for the eclectic seemed too narrow a path to wander down. Child’s pose was the worst. It gave him flashbacks. All those nights his kids insisted on the vomit inducing pablum of the Berenstain Bears. He took the yoga idea, folded it up like a wet pretzel and put it behind him.

Needing a break from the strenuous he chose supine next. Indoors drew a blank. And outdoors did little more, perhaps because the day was overcast and the sky every bit as blank as his ceiling.

That limited flirtation with the void put him in mind for something more ardent so he got a milk crate to put his notepad on and knelt before it in somber supplication. What emanated was utterly mawkish, worse than Kahlil Gibran. He tore the page out and consigned it to the trash, as he had that copy of The Prophet his well-intentioned sister had gifted him.

He needed something completely different. There was a water pipe in the basement that looked strong enough to hold his weight. He MacGyvered an arrangement whereby he was suspended by his feet and could easily enough reach down to write on his pad as it rested beneath him on the floor. What resulted alternated between clownish pranksterisms and oddly lucid euphoria. But it seemed a lot of trouble to hang upside down from a water pipe only to produce a few pages of second rate Kesey.

It was time to try things less mundane. The handstand collapsed into a poem half the length of Brautigan’s shortest work. A position requiring a few yards of stout rope gave him a truly demented bit of Poe, but gothic horror was never his thing. Curled inside the wardrobe gave him nothing but Narnia, and he had given up on old C.S. after reading The Screwtape Letters. None seemed the right voice. None gave him the version of himself he sought.

Still he persisted. But when he tried the foetal position it proved the penultimate. Laying on the floor curled into his notebook what came to him was wordless. Language failed him entirely, as if it had yet to be invented. All was the undiscovered and yet that is when it became clear.

The next morning he made tea as he had on any day before. He carried it to his study, placed it next to the waiting notebook. And when he sat in his old chair and began to work his body remembered and all the words he might ever need fell into place and that place became his voice.