Imagine that you see before you a scene, one which you could
easily observe in a museum of natural history, or else, if you were so placed
in the history of time, in front of what is happening. You see before yourself
a woman, standing with the weight of her body swung to the left, hip protruding
to accentuate her waist. You see the hair between her legs, thinning as it
reaches her thighs. One hand is resting between her two bare breasts, the other
looks as if it should sit on the head of a child: hand raised slightly, fingers
apart. Her dark hair is swung down her back, and she is focussed on some
distant view. As for her environment, we see nothing: the scene is incomplete. As
your focus moves from the slightly indecent exposure of this woman (filling
your modern mind with a sense of modest unease, or else a perverse enjoyment of
a scene which you have been taught ought not bring enjoyment unless in the
right circumstance, regardless of natural instinct) your eyes will begin to
roam, searching the rest of her environment for clues to place on her a ‘what’
and a ‘who’.
As observers, we might begin to discuss the ‘what’ of what
she is doing. Removed from context, you may begin to explain, as all who are
faced with an uncertainty tend to fall to, the ‘who’ that she could be. After a
moment of deliberation, you say she could be any woman in history, a
prehistoric dweller of caves, tending to her family, a matriarch of sorts, or
else a Roman prostitute in the moments before the Pompeian landscape was
caressed by the power of Vesuvius. At my silence your uncertainty is magnified,
you begin to doubt whether you were correct, and begin to offer more
possibilities as to what this woman is doing. An Icelandic native perhaps,
relishing the moments alone as her husband leaves for his morning duties; the
victim of a horrendous crime; the maid caught in the act of sodomising.
You, as the reader, now placed through address a fraction
above the observer in levels of omniscience, may begin to notice a pattern in
the explanations of the observer, that being an attachment of a ‘who’ to the
‘what’ that we see. In order to explain to ourselves and to compartmentalise
the world, before understanding a ‘what’, we almost certainly rely on a ‘who’
to contextualise, to colour our view with what we expect is typical behaviour
of such a ‘who’.
Imagine now that our discussion as author and reader had
happened before the discussion as observers. As I ask you in a conversational
manner of the ‘what’ that you think this woman, motionless in front of you, is
doing, you may reply that she is doing nothing, with all the knowledge of a
partially omniscient being, that which knows information which before he did
not and now thinks of himself as supremely wiser and more enlightened. However,
most times that is as far as the ‘what’ can go in the minds of those who
require an identity to attach meaning. If I were to say to you that she was in
the midst of watching her lover silently leave her, immediately you, as
observer, would place around this woman an environment fitting the ‘who’ that
your consciousness, after observing your own world with a singular intensity,
found to be most fitting for such a character. In this woman’s blank
surroundings, you would place bedchamber, rumpled sheets, the sound of a sleeping
manor, or else the murmurs from the neighbouring rooms in a brothel.
This, however, is a flawed interpretation, for every woman
in the history of the world has had the capability to watch her lover silently
leave her as she stands motionless and naked. A ‘who’ needn’t be attached in
order for an observer to sympathise with the feeling that part of oneself is
being stretched further and further away, that watching a lover leave whilst
one stands completely exposed is in a sense, a universal emotion of sorts. Two
galaxies for example, caught in a dance for millions of years, may find that
the gravitational pull of a nearby galaxy, rather than being an ineffectual
force of nature in the background, is actually pulling one galaxy further from
the other. In that moment, stretched out slowly into thousands, perhaps even
millions of agonising years, one galaxy watches, exposed as its lover silently
leaves. Even this woman’s nudity need not be a definite, for one does not
require a lack of clothing to stand exposed as a lover leaves.
Having now established in our mutual understanding that of
the ‘what’ this woman is doing in cosmetic terms, perhaps we should delve
further into the deeper realms of ‘what’, before a ‘who’ is finally attached to
this anonymous woman. This is where I pull forth from the depths of the past
our post-enlightened conversation regarding the ‘what’. You may recall that
after removing the ‘who’, you were left with an inconsistency. With no way to
assign context to her position, you stated that she was ‘doing nothing’. There,
I shall address a flaw. An expected flaw, but a flaw just the same. By
declaring that the woman before us is doing nothing is an understatement.
Underneath her skin, the central nervous system is tingling, shaking her
insides so she feels as if she could not bear to stand anymore. Adrenaline,
blood, oxygen and sugars are all being pushed through her veins, thundering and
throbbing and reminding her that she is very much still alive. Her brain sends
commands to each part of her body, tightening and relaxing muscles, causing
lungs to pull and push air through her pipes and nose. Her stomach muscles
tighten, sending a message to her brain that she might be hungry, which she
dismisses as unimportant, while being a little amazed at her body’s
insensitivity.
Burst blood vessels are forming a deep bruise on her right shin
from where she knocked it against something as she hurried to stand. You notice
again that her weight rests on her left. Cells are constantly dying and
becoming re-born, repairing and repelling. DNA in its many varied states twists
and turns in its double helix, declaring the irregularities that keep fingers
in their places. Atoms of carbon and H2O move, protons, electrons and neutrons
dance in their distant loneliness. Gluons twist and turn and hold together
quarks and deep down, the vibrations of tiny strings of energy give it all
meaning. Even that is not all. As she stands without moving herself, the earth
that she stands on is rotating, spinning around the warped space that the sun
and its gravity makes. At 486,000 miles per hour, the sun is speeding around
the centre of the Milky Way as the Milky Way dances it’s own pattern of steps
across the grand distance of the known universe. Each movement we make brings
us into a place that we have never yet been, and even standing still breaks new
ground as a pioneer.
And this woman stands still, one hand reaching for her
heart, the other lost in unexplored space as her galaxy is pulled further and
further away.
