The Body is not a Noun

Musing about the poetry which is the body, I think, we can all re-think. The ‘Body’ is not a noun.

It is not a thing, a word with a label, a subject or an object. Nor is it an object owned, a possessive determiner. There is no genitive body, ‘my body’, ‘your body’, ‘their body’. It is not even an idea of a thing which may be bought, given, misused or thrown away. Nor is this body an attribute of, a predicate about. It is not the vehicle of expression and description, the target of terms and embellishments, enrichments. It is not the pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey of our real selves, or just a common source of attributes and extras, the Mr. potato head with add-ons and funnies. Its not a toy and its not the work, its not the relationship, the Mr or the Mrs, the Ms, the other half, its not the mood or the time of the month, the alpha, the part of the pack, the hermit, the unknown, the famous, the other.

Is the Body a verb? an action, a ‘what has happened’, a ‘what I do’? It is a ’what I am’, but not cut up and removed from the principle and praxis of living. It is a adjective of life expressed, but it is everything in time and space as well, the action, the description the subject and object of person and people, of place and planet. It is a verb turned into a noun, the ‘ing’ of breathing. A crisp gerund. The osteopath can only really do a kind of ’bodying’. We cannot talk of the body as a small thing, a tiny ‘it’. Yet it is hard to hold and more difficult to touch without this understanding of profound connection and wholeness.

The Body is not, as the anatomy books and physiology books and medical books would have it, a generative grammar. Rather it is all of life.