what is essential and inessential to the thingness of the thing?  to know the answer…i listen to and engage with the thing…without any desire to make it into what it is not, to possess it or use it solely to demonstrate something about myself.

over time, i develop ever more artful hypotheses of the thing’s essential and inessential components.

and i’m never outside of the feeling of swelling Beautifulness because i’ve arrived at a place of appreciating all things as living out their suchnesses perfectly…never failing.

no piece of art fails.  each speaks equally of the human experience, and pain, and the possible, and the Beautiful and love…if we read them in this way.  those pieces of art we consider “great” do a lot of the work of listening.  they are constructed so as to be read in the light of profundity.

likewise no human being fails to be a human being.

how is this possible?  i conceptualize it in this way:

all things are using, facilitating, expending energy.  time, being and energy are, in my understanding, all one.   every moment, all things in the universe are being what they are; that can be thought of both as the passing of time and as the expenditure of energy.  human beings think, feel, perceive every moment.  and we must each make decisions about how to use our energy to fill the spaces of thinking and feeling and communicating because time limits our options.  we have only so many opportunities to notice, to say, to explore our feelings.  where we put our energies not only reflects but actively creates our suchnesses.

i come to appreciate others so much more, and so much more rightly, when i realize that in the time that has passed, during which i have grown, or thought about a thing, or authored certain words, they have been toiling internally and externally as much as i have…even if they choose to meditate on seemingly frivolous things.  the frivolity itself is held in place by the way time-energies are put to use.

i am not good at guitar, because i have not used my time-energy to explore the guitar.

i am good at thinking, because i have used my time-energy to explore thinking.

my friend joe uses his time-energy to stay perfectly in a process-moment-event.  i use mine to synthesize what i know about that process-moment-event with what i know about everything…carried along on a river of realizations.  as time passes, we can become farther and farther away from each other in our thoughts…but neither of us mind or find it alienating.  because we know how the other person is, in light of that process-moment-event, using his/her time-energy.  and frequently, we each take care to change our instinctual ways of being to accommodate the other’s.  i struggle to stay perfectly in that process-moment-event.  he struggles to hear me and join me in moving away from it, upward, at an exponential rate.

in the past i found it very hard to simultaneously become liked by everyone and fully myself.  many anorexics struggle in how to use their time-energy: whether it should go towards learning how to be “the perfect anorexic,” or whether it should be used to seek healing.

simply put, there is always tension in us when we consider how our time-energy should be spent…this tension is the essence of being human, i think.

and then there is the outcome…our time is spent, and spent in particular ways…some of which we do not ever recognize but which nevertheless constitute us.

we can only do so much at once.  and in my experience, we cannot and do not shift states without transformation.  we have to travel, build, arrive at places, new states of being.  which requires that we consciously or subconsciously put our thoughts and feelings to the uses of learning and implementing our knowledge.  sometimes it seems that life–those seeming things “not us”–does a lot of the work of introducing change and newness to catalyze our movements into new ways of being.  but that is an illusion.  we are always the ones seeing or not seeing the newness, embracing or not embracing it.

and whether we spend all of our lives sitting, in one place, inert, or growing unfathomably quickly each second, we live and with the same magnitude of living.  we exist precisely the same amount always.

sometimes, if we’re really listening, and we want to communicate what we hear honestly, we have to abandon the usual words…

these words have a gravitational pull–as simone weil defines gravity–drawing us to them when we do not have the energy to fight the pull.

too much of the language that issues from us is mimesis and performance…because we believe that the meaningfulness of the communication lies in the words…

words like “Enlightenment”

and “Truth”

and “God”

and “in love”

…words that often appear next to superlatives of various kinds–important, holy, meaningful.  these words are supposed to have energy. we sometimes choose these words because we experience things that are important, holy, meaningful…and we hang tight to that “supposed to” out of laziness.

we get lazy and dishonest.

for that reason, we sometimes feel just the smallest fear that we might be lying about what we see, feel, experience.

listening more carefully to the behavior and magnitude of our fear, especially when it is small enough to be almost unrecognizable as fear, could help.

· my thoughts are liquid metal flowing unto the brink of articulation; that articulation is a front of super-cooled liquid nitrogen.  my thoughts freeze when they meet this front, becoming a solid mass seemingly without intricacies to be explored.  just solid and simple.  that is why my theses so frequently sound solid, simple and not worth-saying.  this mass is meant to be shattered.  dropped onto the pavement from 50 stories.  each fragment in turn is meant to be broken open.  and the fragments of fragments of fragments.  many fractals at once showcase their infinite intricacy.  but the fractals that are my thoughts do not.  their infinite intricacy must be explored to be appreciated, and explored on faith, like reaching for the other side of the wardrobe to narnia for the first time…reaching for the back of a wardrobe that isn’t there.

o that i could have chosen another metaphor that “logically signifies” the nature of my thoughts as well as my liquid metal metaphor does, and that i could have eschewed metaphor altogether in my explanation highlight the extent to which the “meanings” of words exist beyond what they “signify.”  argument is not all about, or even mostly about syllogism, logical nakedness.  it is about feelings and images that grab us for reasons we do not understand, though we command them, make use of them.  we are moved by the sensorial experience of ideas…not just their content.  in fact, the experience of the idea and the content of the idea are not distinct.  (wake up ye academia).

· there is a feeling that tells me that “beautiful” and “improbable” are somehow related.

as donna haraway reminds us, we are all cyborgs now. when i put words on this screen i do not think about making them appear. my fingers find their ways not even lagging behind the words as i articulate them mentally. my thoughts are in fact made possible by the ways the words appear on this screen, the rapidity with which i can make changes to those words…the words have a lightness unlike ink on a page. i do not commit to screen words as quickly, and i am not as loath to scratch them out, for fear of marring the beauty of a perfect page.

thich nhat hanh explains that Christ aimed to shake his disciples into awareness by saying to them “this is my body you eat. this is my blood you drink.” what are Christ’s words but a koan, begging those who receive the Eucharist to allow themselves to be overcome by the question: “what is a body?”

like haraway, and like Christ, i find it valuable to talk about the interbeing of individual bodies, and in effect, the non-existence of the individual body, by talking about the reality of the body.

…

what, i ask, is a heart?

…

we all know it is real enough

when i say the word

“heart”

alone…not de-contextualized, but without context…i invoke the multiple meanings of this word simultaneously–an internal organ that sustains and counts out life, an imagined organ of feeling or caring or loving, the center or “core” (from the French “coeur”) of a thing–and the word is the heart of “heart.” the word is more than a symbol. and it is even more than a concept. it is just…”heart.”

…

when people touch my heart, i create.

over the years, i have made many beautiful things, with such care, for many people. for that reason i own almost none of the pieces of artwork i have crafted, labored over…called “done.”

the feelings in my artwork are always honest and inviolable. i never regret laboring long over a piece or giving it to the person for whom i crafted it. but i have noticed that i become very tired and sad as i give away my heart, or pieces of it, again, and again. even as i think and write the word “heart” here, my chest becomes heavy and tight. these overlapping meanings of “heart” are not a coincidence…they describe the truth as they create the truth…bridges amongst an imagined core, an imagined source of feeling, an organ in the chest, and physical sensation…

this weekend i have the chance to display my artwork at western ave studios open studio, but i have nothing to show. because it is gone and i do not know when i will see any of it again. i made a ruby ring. the ruby was surrounded by flames of brass, covering a silver background. i gave it to a man eight years ago. i haven’t seen it since. i’ve seen him once. i made a silver ring, a design inspired by a ring from the silmarillion, for my father…my masterpiece. lost in london seven years ago. three necklaces gone. three people gone. a staff, made with such love, i will never see again. i don’t know how many drawings.

the journal i painted more recently is out there…and i am waiting for it to return.

i send pieces of my heart out in this way, because it is the purest me. the core of me. and it feels natural. it is a beautiful, naked, fragile act of faith. my art says: “will you be kind and thoughtful enough to cherish me, though it is easy to forget me?”

when i receive nothing to fill the empty spots i feel just a little weakened and betrayed.

my chest tightens and becomes heavy. as it is now.

thankfully, over the last ten years, i have learned to be my own strength, to cherish and appreciate myself, to replenish, calm and heal my heart.

my heart filled by (an)other(s)…truly…not a mirage: it doesn’t make life better, worse, or more interesting. but it does make me cry.

There exists an ocularcentric focus on the visual image of the anorexic body, to the exclusion of the anorexic body as lived, in popular, medical and feminist discourses. This focus is fueled by a desire to witness the Otherness of the anorexic body that continually reinscribes anorexic subjects as strange, pathological and other-than-human. In this thesis I work from the premises that the behavior of food refusal and the physical state of emaciation are dissociable, and that the relationship between anorexia and emaciation is neither predetermined nor natural. Through exploring the discursive construction of “the anorexic body” in three historical time periods, I demonstrate how the provocativeness of the image of emaciation has played an important role in the solidification of the diagnostic criteria of anorexia nervosa, and how anorexics’ emaciation has been and continues to be pointed to as the emblem of anorexic illness, and in turn, Otherness.

In Chapter 1, I locate the beginning of the relationship between anorexia nervosa and emaciation in the medical debates of the 1870s surrounding the emergent condition of “anorexia” amongst young women. English physician Sir Wiliam Gull, seeking to gain the prestige associated with discovering a new illness, sought to establish anorexia nervosa as a new category of disease. His chief task in achieving this end was to convince his peers that anorexia nervosa was an illness distinct from hysteria. I argue that Gull successfully used the image of the emaciated anorexic to convince his peers that “anorexia nervosa” was an illness more akin to consumption than hysteria, and therefore an illness separate from hysteria and worthy of its own diagnosis. As a result of Gull’s efforts, emaciation became the enduring central symptom of anorexia nervosa. In Chapter 2 I move from the 1870s to the 1970s, at which point discussions of anorexia nervosa moved from the exclusive realm of medical discourse to popular discourse. I argue that an Otherization of “the anorexic,” grounded in “the anorexic’s” visible emaciation, was transferred from medical discourse to popular discourse. Finally, in Chapter 3, I look at the current moment. Anorexics are for the first time able to represent themselves on a massive scale through pro-anorexia websites, speaking from the position that has traditionally been talked about as other than the speaker in popular, medical and feminist discourses on anorexia. However I conclude that in pro-ana websites, the image of the archetypal anorexic body—which is a sexed, raced, classed and gendered body—represents the ideal pro-ana communities choose to put forth, eclipsing rather than revealing the diversity of experiences of eating disordered people. I end with the hope that we may strive to look beyond the visual in the study of anorexia nervosa and that we may aim to appreciate that severe pain and illness are often not readable on the visible surface of the body.