The Body as a Battleground?

I recently attended my first Tilt West dialogue and now have the honor to share my experience. To preface, I attended over a month ago, and the experience still unfolds within me. Yet I feel this moment seeping into my bones like marrow nourishing new growth, stretching and expanding them. Before I share a poem from what resonated most that evening, I provide context to help illuminate the sensorial experience in the hope that your curiosity about the body, your body, and the humanness of existing continues to leave you in wonder and deep curiosity.

I walked into a spotlighted gallery at the Denver Botanic Garden filled with sculptures, prints, and paintings portraying bodies as universality and oneness. To my right, on the south wall, prints of elongated bodies hung from hooks, enclosed within towering box frames. Later, a participant shared the irony of boxing in the bodies. As I continued walking through the gallery before dialoguing, I remembered the evening prompt was the body as a battleground. As I approached the circle of chairs where I would soon sit and become confused in conversation yet stimulated by curiosity and deep listening, several large busts stood nearby. The heads resembled being squeezed and thinned by a pasta maker, creating a similarity among them.

A writing on a nearby wall stating, What is beautiful is to be as one while keeping our differences. Yet, I’m not sure what looked different in the space when I was there alone. The various media used differed. The artistic approaches differed, but the differences were vague. The idea that the body is a battleground was not quite felt, or maybe it was that feeling of unsteadiness, the whitewashed sameness. What was different in the space, where was the beauty of difference?

Then, after sitting down in the circle with a small group, Sam, our prompter for the evening, began to retell her observations of a 1970s documentary about dead bodies chilled in a morgue. They mentioned personal interpretations and questions about what bodies are. They asked questions similar to “What is our engagement in these bodies; in our own bodies engaging another body figuratively through realism and abstraction, and at the end of the day, are our bodies just goo, organs, flesh, and hair?”

As I listened to them, I thought about the literal body: skin tones, hair texture, nailbeds,  and the ideas that shaped current U.S. reality: racism, sexism, toxic masculinity, and the behavior of emotional paralysis. I was in my head, slightly detached from my fellow attendees and definitely from my own body.

As the conversation continued, a fellow artist shared how she honors rocks and stones as beings. The beingness of something so still and yet so strong and influential–specifically, disregard of their beauty and their abilities. “Are we rocks?” I wondered.

Sam posed a half-thought question, “To get at the core of us…”

To get at the core of us is a wonder

Unsure:

I move in curiosity.

What does that mean?

Maybe Process, not Stagnation?

What does curiosity mean for connection?

Growth? Composting? Nourishing New?

Sam says, “Bodies - bags of goo and hair…”

An artist with a mustache ponders facial recognition to gain access.

I visualize curtains of zeros and ones flooding a screen. A flash on the screen: ACCESS GRANTED.

Vulnerability and Relationships dance in the dialogue.

Oh! Vulnerability and Relationships, how I love you!

Open to listen. Hearing stories of another while drawing them. 

Zest fills the heart of the artist as she reflects.

Tears well up in my eyes as I feel the moment of two strangers connecting.

Self-looking glass aligning with what is true and tangible - a breath and acceptance of self, what does that really mean when I’m the one creating the art yet inspired by another?

Maybe mutuality? The energetic moment of newness?

Is this what connection feels like?

Artists sharing their deep care for another and their resistance to misrepresent. 

The paradox of connection: uncomfortable but in love with another and the craft.

Willing to try to honor and explore.

Disconnection:

Meditation apps and Looksmaxxing

Cultural coding and code switching

Is this universality?

We’re all just organs - that comment doesn’t feel good

We’re all one, but there are differences - does that feel better? I don’t think so.

What is the universal body, and what is that right now?

Anxious about how you portray the body of another? Yes and No.

Surrounded by prints of bodies, appearing to be people of the Global Majority, tall prints. 10 feet high, enclosed, boxed in.

Is there truly universality?

Am I boxed in?

I feel so at times, and yet tonight, I’m in deep wonder. 

Connection:

Stepping in “Dog shit” while trying to connect. A misstep towards widening curiosity and the Love of bodies.

Forgetting myself as body and more as energy, a sponge, a radio wave, and a sticky web trying To catch what others cast into the circle of unknown - of wonder.

An artist shares creating interactive work - Touching and interacting with the object ignites the Senses - now that feels like connection!

The body as a battleground. Yes. Maybe. 

Still asking, What does connection feel like? 

I leave feeling eager to do this again. 

I leave in wonder.