Head
An ex-yoga instructor claimed a diagnosis for me once, matter of factly, in someone else’s kitchen. Of course you love fish pose– you’re so in your own head! Is it that obvious? I had wondered. I hadn’t even realised. I thought it was because I’m a Pisces.
She had this tendency to designate and assume expertise. I had the tendency to listen, take everything as fact, every reading as oracle. Tell me who I am! I begged of the world. I didn’t filter out the responses. I kept them all locked up in my skull, my jaw, behind my ear lobes– every passing comment, every glance from fellow commuters. I still feel them in my teeth– a handful of which have now left– having run off with dental surgeons, not liking the direction the neighbourhood was heading towards. Too much fog and not enough bone. Earthquake prone. Disruptive nighttime traffic.
It means decisions can be sticky. Should I turn here? I expected, as a Pisces, that my intuition would be glowing. It took me a long time to accept that it wasn’t. Instead, portents are fused with paranoias, instincts entangled with intellectualism. Cognition happens (or doesn’t) in a basin pooling over clogged pipeways. Muck and bits of sodden cabbage have built up in the copper and the sink water has become Yarra soup.
It’s no fit place for aquatic life, so I tilt my neck back in fish pose, open my throat trying to get the filtration system started– get things flowing. First, from head to
Shoulders
Pressing on my shoulders after I complained of tension, my friend drew back with startled horror: they’re like rocks!
I’ve tried balms and pouches of heated grain; chiro and acupuncture. I’ve enlisted partners and various hard objects around the house as makeshift massage therapists; bathed myself in essential oils. When desperation and frivolity have coincided, I’ve seen professional masseurs. I’ve even worked against the intrinsic guilt of politeness to request more and more pressure, please. Sometimes I skirt social boundaries and ask strangers if I may feel the splayed roots of their necks, prodding and squeezing like I’m selecting avocados. I examine the firmness from one shoulder to the next, trying to work out an average. Perhaps it’s not old cabbage that’s bundled under my skin after all. Not anymore. These are pipes packed with layers of sediment, fossil, volcanic debris; twisting core samples of geological neurosis; the trapped remains of circular thinking and inconclusiveness pressurised over millennia. Light years worth of thoughts that never found their graves and now haunt my cerebral cortex until they’re honoured with a proper burial. I say all of this to my friend. When she stares back at me, brow raised, I reel back and summarise: Yes, they are indeed like rocks. We order our ice cream.
But I’m vindicated by her recognition and my avocado simile is resonating with the hip gelato bar we’re standing outside. She’s moved on to other topics while I’m still thinking: Avocados ripen in sunlight. Ice cream melts in sunlight. I brandish my cone and feel buckwheat crumble and drips of spiced apple funneling down to gather in a pointed waffle embrace. This conical accumulation is good for keeping sweet treats, bad for cognitive faculties. I need sunlight and loose earth. I need my pipeline roots to flare out beneath me. To aid the manifestation of this thought, I start to bounce my shoulders and wobble my
Knees
They feel like a catchment, like the curve of a pipe trap. I try to stretch them out, straightening the PVC to clear out the blockages. This must be why I’ve always hyperextended my knees. The base of my femurs are harbouring more of those wriggling demons. Restless in their confines, they push against my kneecaps. The fortress doors need to yield so they can spill out into the meadows. Maybe that’s where they’d like to spend their eternal rest. I prod at the scars on my boyfriend’s knees and then at my own. Egress, I whisper, picturing each childhood fall onto asphalt as an opportunity taken by the phantoms to shoot out through grazed skin. The area is buzzing with paranormal activity and my Electromagnetic Field Reader is blinking furiously. They’re wreaking havoc in there. My knees swell up to cushion the riots. I try placating them with the smother of a compression brace. Beneath the upper layers of vegetable sediment is a hot slurry of magma. If it stills, it’ll harden into a cold bind of basalt. So I keep wriggling around, trying to shimmy a passage for all the restless things and coax them downwards, dissuading them from continuing to stifle the calcium.
I start to think about knees as present only in land creatures. They are evolutionary mechanisms which let us push up off the ground and also fall down onto it; a crucial but limited resistance to atmospheric pressure. They host the extremes of emotion– dances of ecstasy, crumples of despair. Knees can be submissive in that way, so inclined to act out in a tantrum. You can hardly blame them – with all that’s pooling up in the joints – for snapping between jigs which defy gravity, and sinking to the floor with the weight of it all.
The risk of believing your body ends there can run treacherously high. Children reach up to touch their heads, their shoulders. Their little fingers brush against their knees. Rarely do they bother to reach all the way down for their toes– the pace is too fast and they’ve got to rush back up to take it again from the top. They’re just a little too far to reach.
Knees are the last point of bodily immediacy. We can kneel in worship and still feel whole, in correspondence with the divine. We love sitting. Knees as stoppers. But, I think, I’d rather not end in prayers or narrow devotion, all folded up in pointed allegiance. Faith is too focussed. Realising this, I tilt my head to the side and take a savage bite from the bottom of my ice cream cone, freeing the sink water. I watch with curiosity as it pours and lands in splatters around my
Toes
I learnt recently about lightning rods. I was told that, on building sites, they attract the bright lashings, directing them away from the constructions to conduct the electricity safely downward. The energy is then stored in the earth. I picture it humming in the dirt– the whole planet caressed by mumbling vibrations. But surely electricity can’t just stay there. Topsoil and sand would reverberate with all that frenetic turbulence. The friction would set off some wild surface storm, flaring up to coat the earth in glass and fired clay. It would be as beautiful as it would be unlivable– the planet encased in amber like a fossilised thing. It only makes sense for the lightning to course deep: weaving between mulch, curving along riverbeds, feeding the frail roots of marrow, tickling fragments of prehistory. Last week, I witnessed how the burr of a MacBook can ride through a body, sending its electric pulse across your skin. See, you can’t expect it to keep all its chattering stored up– a laptop hasn’t any gums, after all.
Sometimes, when lightning strikes the ground, it leaves site markings. They’re the trail mappings of electricity sprouting outwards from a point of contact; fingers reaching to spread across a breadth of surface, trying to get a grip. The puddle of ice cream is melding into the pavement and I need to get a grip– not on my head but in the world. There’s a reason I only wear toe socks. I’m channelling downwards, maximising my exposure to the earth, trying to expand the feedback loop.
Stepping deliberately, I carry my bottomless cone back to the counter and ask the befuddled staff to fill ‘er up. When the steady dribble eventually comes to a halt, I retrace my steps, go back for more. The waffle is disintegrating, drenched in a flow of movement, loosening and softening into my hands. Hypnotised, I begin to follow its approach. From top to bottom, I stretch out, military-style. My friend hardly knows what to do with me as I start to tip my head back and forth, roll my shoulders, bring one knee and then another up up up. Then my feet are shoeless and I’m rising up and pressing down; tracing pavement cracks with pointed toes. At some point during the process, sputters of water start to drool and eventually flow clear. Clutter is tumbling through the tunnels and the light begins to pour through. It’s not a holy radiance, nor a flash of brilliance. It’s just eating up the sunlight, the elements– feeling it all cycle through. I can drift back home then, toes sliding along the sidewalk in touch like a tramline, distributing in the ecosystem a trail of swimming phantoms.
Kaijern Koo is an interdisciplinary artist & writer working on Wurundjeri land in Naarm / Melbourne. Confounded by the innate human instinct to decipher and make sense, her practice gravitates towards the fantastic slipperiness of interpretation and the strange logics which often ensue.
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