Bodywork

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Bodywork is a book of drawings of and essays about the body. The drawings of the figure are not illustrations in the traditional sense, but rather independent expressions of and visual arguments for the embodied life.

From the introduction:

Having put in my time in this late-20th century body, I can certainly appreciate our species' disinclination to see ourselves limited to bodies, our resistance to committing to them or settling for them. It does not surprise me that many of us continue in the ancient belief that this life is just a short, dangerous, porthole ridden stretch of two-lane highway to be followed by an eternity of easy rolling on the eternal Interstate... Still, I want to speak for that old-fashioned, possibly vestigial form of life so tiresome to some these days: the body-in-the-world, worldbody, bodyworld. I confess to being still in love with this world, tattered and polluted though it is. And with the part of the world I am, this aging, abused, vulnerable body. The air, the water, the trees, this body may not be what they once were, but I am fond of them. They are my medium, my situation, my stuff. I am not ready for an electronic prosthesis. More than that: I am inclined to think that this situation—this saturation in body—is not just a prejudice of mine, a silly anachronism, perhaps just another fetish or addiction, a stage of human evolution in the process of being superceded, but the very condition of meaning for creatures. Simply, life as we can have it. Herewith, notes on the body, a threatened institution.

Contents

  • INTRO: The Body: Is It Really a Vestigial Organ? (In Which the Author Confesses a Sentimental Attachment)
Part One: Notes On The Body In Our Time
  • The Body as a Utopia-of-one
  • The Unkindest Cut of All
  • What Price Electronic Ubiquity?
  • The Body is No Longer Our Primary Address
  • Life in Edge City
  • Hanging Ten on the Lamarckian Surfboard
  • Going to the Source
  • Body English
Part Two: Climbing Back Into The Body
  • Body: Our Way of Life
  • At Home in the World
  • Creaturehood is Powerful, Purreth My Cat
  • Sanity of the Whole
  • The Embodied Way of Leaving the Body


Reviews

"Beautifully crafted meditations on the human condition as our great and terrible twentieth century sweeps to its close."
—Douglas Hofstadter, author of Godel, Escher, Bach

"Bodywork is a celebration of the body and a delightful corrective to the mechnization of our lives. The accompanying drawings are as simple and beautiful as the naked body itself."
—Howard Zinn, author of You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train