Boh-dy and sunlight

I woke up tremendously sore from yesterday's capoeira class. Sore like had difficulty sitting upright in bed. Coughed and it hurt kind of sore.

This is great.

I have been working out all week, in some loose way of reasoning, that (1) if all madness is somatisized, (2) i could work it off, like the law of mass action, or Le Chatelier's Principle: expulse some of the frenzy into the universe, and the system will continually shift it out until it leaves. (3) Therefore I will be less crazy. There is very little evidence for either premise, but the logic seems consistent.

Whatever the details of scientific fact, in one week my bodily self esteem has improved 50 fold. Mind you, bodies don't actually change very much in one week of activity: flesh still overflows from my constricting jeans and i can still make it sway rhythmically to most jennifer lopez songs. The difference is now i rather like it.

"I hurt myself today to see if i still feel." This appears to work even if you are not a melodramatic 16 year old, or red blooded great American song writer. The soreness of physical exertion to remind me that the self does not stop at my keyboard nor tumorously hypertrophied cerebral cortex. Once in my life, I was training in dance for 10 to 15 hours a week. I wasn't particularly very good, but after the betrayal of puberty, i found the body again--it could take up space, i could mark the world with my finger tips and toes. "The arms start at the back because they were once wings." I could be bigger, take up a whole room, launch into the sky, or disappear entirely.

Empowering. An overused word. But there is great power in rediscovering the body, its relation to space, to gravity, to pain, to existence, to other bodies. And there: three quarters of the story to the allure of sex...of medicine...of dance.

Now it is 80 degrees in San Francisco and all the girls are out in pretty dresses, men have thrown their shirts off, a great celebration of sweaty bodies, hairy chests, dangling limbs, and luscious muffin tops.