Throwing Up Huevos Rancheros in a
Motel in Napa, 1pm
Natalie Eilbert
This is what I decided to do today. I moved to the small
corner of my hotel room that receives wifi in order to transfer the small
amount in my savings to the small amount in my checking. I did this to pay the
$30 for 7 unlimited days of Bikram Yoga during my time in Napa. It is a good
decision. My body needs constant preening. It needs to be alone inside itself. For this reason, I have always had major distractions. When I bend in
yoga, there is the distinct sense that my body is becoming taut. When I’m bent
over myself and fucking, a consummate heat rises from my folds. I have folds.
Sometimes, depending on the position, I’m forced to stare into their
elephantine hills. I remind myself in these moments that everyone has folds
when their ankles are at their ears, but not like this. This is my unique
shame. I like exercising because when I exercise, there is a clear
subject-predicate of effort and control. Society would capture this condition
of power differently though, because society is normally wrong: my effort and
control in exercise are in direct alignment with the ideals of beauty because
it is my hope, through exercise, that I merge with the ideals of beauty. Let me
be clear here: I do want to merge with the ideals of beauty, and yes, my
control does hinge on my exercising my way to thinness. Society might not be
off here, but as a feminist with a damaging history of eating disorders, this
kind of thinking demands recalibration. I don’t want to be my society. But I need to exercise to arrive anywhere
else.
In Chicago the public transit operates so that all ‘L’
trains meet in a center, a downtown, a loop, a place without residence. Due to
the infrastructure, it takes a long time to travel between neighborhoods. It
takes an hour and a half to commute from Rogers Park to Logan Square, for
example, but a quick ping at Uber and you’ll be at your destination in fifteen
minutes. I only recently experienced this geographically. My body runs and yogas
and runs and yogas, but I am still far away despite this self-contained
intimacy, despite how I target these rituals with Super Food Decisions. I touch
my clit and note its deep charge. I’m supposed to feel a pure yonic sensation
of body, but I feel only the act of this function and not the transcendence of
the act. I’m supposed to understand this same transcendence in collective
breathing exercises, but my breath feels as acutely part of me as when, for
Jane Jacobs, a space in a city loses its economic function to its surrounding
economic developments. My body, when prompted to focus on its very function in
yoga and when made to consider its central valves, must always be at risk of
being disenfranchised by a foreclosing exterior. Perhaps a stubborn and persistent
21-century era patriarchy. Perhaps the agony of aging earns its hum and frenzy
from such a patriarchy, so that, at 27 years old, I’d choose to twist and sweat
inside this autoclave of a yoga studio over resting in the soft warmth of UV
rays. In fact, I no longer desire rest.
I worry what my anxieties are doing and have done to my desires. I am
sitting down to write this and the touch of my thighs against the cloth seat
sickens me. Even when I set forth to do what I love, which is write, the sensation
of skin disturbs me, removes me from the very ritual I’ve sought to construct.
Why is this, and how does exercise solve this problem? Or does it merely
perpetuate my disturbances?
Gertrude Stein says Act
so that there is no use in a center. I’ve always interpreted this point in Tender Buttons to be an axiom on writing
and art, to suggest that one should never stop long enough to explain their
art; but it comes to me now to mean physical redaction, a desire to remove the
body from the act, to restore an entire historical moment to the invisibility
writing can offer. Writing on the outerbanks of explanation. I suppose these
two thoughts can exist on the same plane, though one can see how this might
draw out certain anxieties of creation: how should we both resist explanation
and visibility when, as women, we are taught only apology and exposure. I am
beginning to suspect my clit lacks a center but I don’t want to omit anything
and I don’t want to explain what it is I’m doing in this gaudy hotel room futilely
rubbing my twat in the heat.
This may explain why I’ve replaced masturbation with
exercise nearly altogether. I am invigorated with the idea of constant motion
and crippled to paralysis by calculations, especially where the unique math of
a building orgasm is concerned. Pleasure desires an algorithm and I’m into
suffering these days, which carries its own special grief tautology. I grieve
my physical body because I own my physical body in a way that I will never own
anything else; in a way, it is my only possession, because the female body has
always been a special commodity. Body ratios charge and recharge the gaze.
Beauty feels like ascendency, even as the Bible teaches that women’s external
beauty is a blight in the Lord’s eye and that man must punish them with their
just desserts. From Ezekial 28:17: “Your heart was proud because of your
beauty; / You corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor. / I cast you
to the ground; / I exposed you before kings, / to feast their eyes on you.” I
do cherish the notion of external beauty because I’m fascinated by its
temporary honeymoon with us, and fascinated still by its decay. Women need a
proud heart in order to face the men of all ages on the streets who feast on
the splendors of our bodies. My obsession with exercise begins to feel like a
subjugation of my own making even if all I actually want to do is run in public
and burn some calories.
I view my body as the ultimate object which I can shrink and
fatten depending on my will-power. I don’t want men to perceive me as an
object, but, because I must be seen, I opt to resemble a two-dimensional avatar
as much as I can. Because I must be seen and I do not want to be seen. Because
I crave a radical profile and I object to the knowledge of this profile. In
intellectualizing exercise and its effect on my psyche, I know I’m
contradicting myself when it comes down to how I want others to perceive me.
This knowing contradiction has to do with an important intersection-play with
Stein’s center: To be part of today’s feminine iconography is not to
participate but to be thrust, pushed into a cajoling realm of parts. If I am
contradicting myself about my desires, it is due to the imbroglio of these
perceived personas of female identity. My feminist poet self versus my girly
vain self. They should not be different but are, though feminist bloggers are
doing an incredible job of solving this problem by brazenly occupying Girly. So
many women operate under the deadly schism of beauty and brains, as if to be
one should negate the other; as if to lack one trait should behoove you to be
the other; as if to possess both earns you a very special eye. I am reminded of Anna Leventhal’s brilliant
essay written last year, “Other Girls,” where she writes about the allure of
the manic pixie dream girls (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) over the terrors of
being seen like “other girls” (Spring
Breaker’s pink balaclava’d girlgang). Misogyny wants us special, to walk in
bold stencil outside the blur of girly superficial norms, so that we might
satisfy a package deal. Where I used to chainsmoke and wear Doc Martens and
torn fishnets and Grandma Marion’s vintage slips, now I wear Lululemon and
hydrate regularly. Ubiquity, which at its roots means “omnipresence” and which
at one point in Lutheran theology pointed to Christ, now paints a scene of
faces in a crowd. The Internet balms over this ubiquity with free and open
access, so finally these quintessential other girls merge with the singular
intellectual. It gives us the opportunity to choose between two modes: Now I
have a body; now I do not. I am as special as I am not, and it doesn’t concern
you.
But back to having a body. Female masturbation implied
feminist subversion when I was growing up. Because rural Republicans can’t get
a grip on female sexuality, female masturbation still ridiculously can and does
imply subversion. As a child, I was forced by a man and then several to see my
body as sexual. I am one of millions of girls whose first sexual encounter
happened without her consent, so it’s no wonder that I desire to remove my
natural womanly curves. It’s also no small wonder why I might see masturbation
a form of control, albeit insatiable control. Shakespeare’s famed description
of masturbation, “having traffic with thyself alone,” is a compelling phrase
when put into the context of female sexuality, and then again when put into
context of any type of lone physical release we perform. Exercise,
masturbation, nervous breakdowns. To call what happens in our bodies traffic is to make more complicated
traffic. Though of the terrible traffic, exercise is the one that is socially
acceptable to perform in public, and the visibility of my exercising is often
part of what makes it so vital in my life. Such admittance feels problematic,
because the question Do I want people to
acknowledge my hard work? implies girl-specific invectives like
“attention-getting,” “superficial,” “shallow,” “empty.” It begs Other Girl
status. Do I want people to view my body as hard when so much of my impression
of the female body growing up was that it was—I was—to be soft and weak? Do I
sometimes publicize selfies of my post-workout face, the sweaty cave of
collarbone below my neon sports bra, because I want the world to appreciate the
labor of my time? Do I sometimes run harder and faster when I hear catcallers
cluck and kiss over my headphones? Fuck yes I do. This idea that such a
confession might “make” me attention-getting/superficial/shallow/empty puts me
in no more a disrepair than it puts society. Remember this is the same society
that tells me I can’t even catch a fish or open my own doors.
----
I’m in Napa now because D has a conference all week. I’m
left to my own devices during the day and I worry that I won’t have anything
else to do but consume. I don’t have anything else to do but consume. I’ve been
going to 90-minute hot yoga every day since I’ve been here, in an effort to
wring out the work of consumption with the work of declension. I haven’t
stepped on a scale since when I lived with a different D in Manhattan three
years ago, noted the ways in which my dissatisfactions in life manifested
themselves in units per pound, and worked to lower the number, lower the
number. I am not a big person, so the work was immediately apparent. At 5’6 I
moved from 128 pounds to 118 pounds in a week, 118 pounds to 108 pounds in two
more weeks. It was very easy to do. And I could do it at any time.
The scale assumed the potency of a god or the IRS: when it
fed me numbers, it fed me the shame of numbers. Despite my being alone with
myself, naked in the bathroom (because I had to remove any shred of excess
weight to determine exactly what I deserved) over a scale, I felt the number
was publicized the moment it blinked up at me. Sky-written, burned into my
forehead, TurboTax’d. Having an eating disorder was the closest I’ve ever come
to being religious. I also think capitalism is religious, and I think it is
relevant here to point out how, in capitalism, one serves an entity with the
purpose of individualized reward; that the work becomes sui generis a method for profit and worse, control, and this work
signifies a kind of Apostles-like ascension to achieve a “Career” and be linked
faithfully to a predetermined future. Replace capitalism with exercise, career
with The Body You Deserve. We can absolve ourselves from anything so long as we
obtain good credit, so long as we pay our taxes, so long as we get paid for our
good work.
Ever since I learned about the definition of “work” in
Physics, my notion of work is quite different. That is, work happens when a
force acts on a body, and when, consequently, there are counter-forces against
that body. When one lifts a phone to take a selfie, the work done on the phone
is the force it takes to lift it multiplied by the height from which it is
lifted. That means it takes more work to angle your iPhone just so; in other
words, so the ribs appear perfectly knit, the hips extend perfectly outward. I
apply this definition of “work” to my relationship with writing: If I exert the
minimum amount of force, my piece will not lift. This is, without perhaps being
aware of its mathematics, what people mean when bad art earns its casting as a
“dud.” I apply this definition of “work”
to my relationship with exercise, though interestingly, the conclusions are
more pathological than even writing: If I exert the minimum amount of force on
my body, I am a fat piece of shit who doesn’t deserve her next meal. If I
measure the weight of my desire to be thin against the heights I yearn to
achieve as a poet and feminist thinker, the work will always need to be greater
for any lift at all. Therefore, I must exercise my way out of the dysmorphia,
society’s most successful funhouse mirrors, in order to see proper change.
Exercise is as much a curse as it is a solution to my bodily anguish. I want
the sweat pouring out of me to be the liquid of choice for my ablution to
vanity when, of course, the only thing exercise can truly be for me is vanity itself.
I blink away the urge to take a selfie in my lonely wanderings
through Napa. In my more curmudgeonly moments, selfies infuriate me for the
very fact that they perpetuate the self-obsession that the Internet has so
swiftly culled in the last five years. Often what infuriates me about selfies
is the effort involved in omission. Omission is
always trending. The clever selfie-taker knows that ducklipping smacks
of trash, but then there is also the shorter pout now known as swallow-lipping
which is less policed. The selfie pose, which acts as a removal of an accurate
personal record, has since assumed the role of the quotidian record. Nobody
looks like their selfies, but people tend to look good in their selfies. Rare
is the person who can wander around with a half-pout and uplifted chin in the
druggy haze of Amaro. Lately though, I’ve found pleasant irony in the selfie
for this very infuriation. That no one really looks like their selfies offers a
kind of Internet mask, a temporary annihilation of the yucky responsibilities
in their everywhere yuckiness. I have used the word temporary to describe beauty too, which can be a mask as much as
it can be a weapon.
The selfie can also become a mask of inactivity, a way to
freeze gravity and oppositional forces and bad shadows. A beautiful all-face
shot of a woman gazing out in her bedroom, not moving, not needing to move.
Disembodied. Our choice to fragment ourselves one part at a time, whether as a
staring face or a shot of our legs or a our feet standing here, resting
there—this nacreous focus on our body parts communicates a need for an
immediate gaze, and this troubles me most of all about selfies. Though I too participate. I too need the
immediate gaze at times. “To probe oneself is to recognize that one is
incomplete,” says Clarice Lispector. I return from runs red-faced, sweating,
inspired by my own spirit. Aside from sex, it is the only time I am the most
charged inside my body and the least aware of my self. In these moments I am
the least compelled to seek out approval from a public eye. I am willing to
spit my healthy spit in a public eye. I am complete until I remember I am a
body again. I compulsively pinched my sides just now and thought, The side-planks aren’t working. “Nothing
works until it does,” opens one of D’s stories. This is obvious but it needs to
be said constantly.
As a girl I took no pictures of myself. I believed I had too
much face, too much body, and that a photo capturing these things would be an
insult to the photographer and a further injury to myself. I always believed
myself chubby, and after a great loss in my life took place, any photographic
evidence of my childhood was destroyed, so I maintained this notion that I was
indeed a fat little girl. The quick accessibility of the mediated self has
encouraged and obliterated self-affirmations of body. We are all like Virginia
Woolf’s Orlando when he/she says, “I’m sick to death of this particular self. I
want another.” Despite the appeal of a double-life Instagram can give, any
given Instagram account might do the work of conveying the cautionary tale of
Narcissus’s pool without the obvious fact of drowning—though of course vanity
can drown us if it can so thoroughly consume us. Orlando had centuries to
experience him/herself. I take selfies when I feel old or fat or sorrowed in
some other way, but I immediately delete them if they seem to communicate that
I feel old or fat or sorrowed. By the
truth we are undone, again says Woolf. A few years ago, I found a photo of
myself as a girl in my aunt’s photo album: I was rail-thin. I had always been rail-thin.
As I said earlier, in the Bikram studio, there’s a scale in
the bathroom. I thought about it, decided that I was above the fray of past
Natalies, stepped on the scale, and closed my eyes. My hope, and this was my
mistake, was that I would look down and see a small number smiling up at me. I
would feel the full girth of pride that, even without starvation, I could
maintain a tiny number with healthy exercise and diet. Then wings would form
from my neat shoulder bones, and, by a golden hymn illumining my path, I would
fly into the clouds a weightless exceptional thing. But this is not how Work
works. And so I opened my eyes. The number frowned. My muscular frame placed me
back in that Manhattan apartment, 129 pounds of living wellness inside me. A
darkness filled the bathroom like the stink of singed feathers. Even now in
contemplating this number, I know my shame is ludicrous, but I also assume
someone is thoroughly judging me. I feel the deity of my neurosis like a bad
light shed somewhere nearby.
Dietary restriction is an amazing feeling. There is power in
refusal. I have a choice in saying No
thank you to any number of dishes and this therefore shirks me of the awful
shame later on. I’ve never understood how anybody could feel tired after
eating. It suggests a complacency that is entirely mysterious to me. After I
eat, I want to do anything but remind myself that there is now more content
accounting for my body. I’d walk forever after I eat. To remove the act of
eating from my daily work implies a new engagement with the work. I romanticize
the artist who abstains from nourishment because I imagine a sharp and exacting
power of the intellect instead. I work a 9-5 and I either exercise before work or
after work, so I’m often writing while I consume. I have no choice, so I dream
up an alternative. Like everything, the alternative is so much better than the
stuff of my particular life.
Starvation gets artists incredible points in retrospective
discussions of process. Performance artists and especially long-durational
performance artists like Marina Abramovic, Frances Barrett, and Kate Blackmore,
enter into a kind of purifying trance of processing their art. Whether watching
a week of The Simpsons while fasting
or living on public display without sustenance, starvation imposes itself as a
sufficient trope on artistic sacrifice. Starvation is difficult to replicate,
but it is also easy to do, at least theoretically. I want to be the kind of
writer who can relate abstemiously and psychotically to artistic endeavors, but
daily exercise enforces a diet necessitated by routine. At the hot yoga studio
in Napa, my instructor can relate to my jetlag during our practice because
during teachers training, she was required to endure weeklong sleep-deprivation
and fasting. She means to say she relates, but it stings like an immediate
judgment call on my will power. No extra flesh peaks on either side of her. Committed. For a long time, eating was
such a self-indulgent act, which I now see as an extremely privileged take on
food, but also, exercise is an extremely privileged take on mobility and time.
Either way I am a nest of privilege in spite of myself in that privilege.
What ultimately happened was this: I had seemingly infinite
time in Napa to make the right or wrong decisions for my body, and, like
everywhere else, I made both and focused on the wrong decisions as if they were
committed by a self divorced from my true self. I get why Catholics have
Confession boxes. I am constantly ill-at-ease with the idea that we each only
have one life, so the idea of singularity starts to become a myth with time’s
pull. I correct my choices to the point of dismantling my choices in favor of
some higher authority of Good versus Bad. I will do 270 minutes of hot yoga
over the course of three consecutive days during my vacation, allow myself on
the third day to consume a post-Bikram huevos rancheros, remember the scale’s
clinical fact, and chug two Nalgene bottles worth of water until I vomit all
the eggs and black beans and water up from my guts. It feels like erasure: my
indulgences can be removed with only the act of exercise remaining. There is a
delicate material which divides my fitness from my deprivation. My center is a
clearing out of joy and I am working on solving this quality of my life.
I accept that I am the type of person who spirals into
obsession. I could conclude and say that all my life, I’ve been forced to
scrutinize my body by an outer group and this is why I can’t find equilibrium.
I could also say that it is my ego which is at fault in this regard. Exercise
has made me deeply conscious that I am a thing in need of repair, and why
shouldn’t it. We are all of us damaged things in need of repair. Yes, I do bad
things to my body as I also do good things. Yes, I am only just linking my
occasional heartburn with my occasional need to purge. Should this be an essay
written in hindsight that acts as a story and its addendum to one of those
Inspirational memes? Emerson opened his essay on “Self Reliance” by saying “Our
age is retrospective” but I don’t believe our ruined conditions can lend a
third eye to those selfsame ruins. Every day I exercise. I preen. I challenge
my own take on myself much in the way one checks their harmless but problematic
bigotry. Everyone needs to change their dialogue. It should constantly be in
flux. Exercise gets complicated when you introduce the female body into the
equation. There is a pressurized ghost of the perfect woman’s body hidden in
every machine, and as we ellyptical, as we lift ourselves up, a new iota of
self creeps out. We notice the dimples of cellulite now more than ever, the
light that doesn’t radiate out from between our thigh gaps. Exercise
re-navigates our investigations of mind to inspections of the body. And yet,
despite this potential obsession, exercise is very good for us. And so we
embrace the need to do it while reconciling its imperial presence over our
psyches. But it is good for us. It is good for us. Nothing works until it does.
Natalie Eilbert's first book of poems, Swan Feast, is forthcoming from Coconut Books in Summer 2015. She is the author of two chapbooks, Conversation with the Stone (Bloof Books) and And I Shall Again Be Virtuous. (Big Lucks Books; Oct. '14). Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Kenyon Review, Tin House, The Philadelphia Review of Books, West Branch, and many others. She is the founding editor of The Atlas Review.
Perfect.
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