God in the body

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To say that a musician's style is cantabile is one of the highest forms of praise.  We mean by this 'singable' that it is as if the instrument were an extension of the player, another voice through which can be expressed plangency or exultation as directly as human sobs or shouts of joy might.

At the root of this phrase is a recognition of the primacy of the voice, that all music continues to aspire to its original condition of singing.  And rightly: if playing any instrument is a marvellous undertaking - producing infinitely subtle gradations of sound from mere wood and metal - how much more miraculous is the process whereby the singer's body itself becomes the instrument, both player and played.

The vocalist's pre-eminence is hard-won.  Unlike flutes or pianos, no two bodies are the same; learning to sing means gaining intimate knowledge of the body's deepest recesses and cavities, for it is these - in the chest and the head - that lend the weak vibrations of the throat their character and their impact.  The situation is complicated by the fact that singers rarely hear an accurate representation of this sound: conduction through the skull to the ear means that in singing as in speaking we are always listening to an internal impostor.  Hence the perennial disbelief we feel upon hearing our unfamiliar external voice relayed by a recording.

The coincidence of the vocalist's body and instrument means that in our inevitable identification with a singer - as with any artist - we feel the notes doubly within us: both metaphorically as the ersatz performer and literally as a physical object responding to the waves of varying pressure we call sound.  No wonder, then, that the voice dominates every musical culture - ethnic or eclectic, from the most cravenly populist to the most disdainfully high-brow: all are hopelessly and helplessly swept up by the imperious power of the the singing body and its resonance.

This explains in part the pull of grand opera, even for those who are otherwise quite unmusical.  Aside from its seductive glister, its residual social cachet and its blatant display of privilege, the real draw of this deeply implausible form is the concentration of good voices singing music designed specifically to show them off to the best advantage and to move us as directly and shamelessly as possible.  And just as the voice seems to be a stage past that of any mere instrument, so there are singers whose vocal gifts seem to exceed all human norms.  These are the voices the sheer sound of which send deep, delicious shivers down the spine, the voices everyone recognises as supremely great simply as voices.  They are the names which are exempt from ordinary fashion; they are the Carusos, the Callases, the Pavarottis.

We worship them not just for this frisson; we recognise something beyond their artistry or our pleasure.  In their singing they transcend their mortality because they are living triumphs over their bodies.  They have turned muscle and bone and sinew into a divine machine that seems to deny the brutish facts of life.  In the sublime sound they produce we sense something that surpasses the mundane: we hear the god in the body.  In this greatest of singing we bear witness to a redeeming theophany.  

(1990)

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Meta-physicality

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The social dimension of health clubs is well recognised.  Nobody pretends they join one just to become fit: for that, street-running and working out at home easily suffice.  Instead, they function as our time's equivalent of the nineteenth-century gentlemen's clubs, primary sites for meeting like-minded people.  But now the differentiating specialisations of the Garrick, the Athenaeum or the Reform have been replaced in the health industry by a commonality of preoccupations which together might stand as our era's epitaph: the post-modern trinity of youth, beauty and money.

The basic premise of health clubs - energetic physical exercise by the nearly-naked - determines the first two.  It is something of an irony that such clubs are attended only by those whose bodies are reasonably fit and good-looking to start with: the constant appraisal by hypercritical peers - encouraged by the unforgiving mirrors placed everywhere - is enough to enforce this aesthetic with all but the most self-confident or oblivious of bodily offenders.

The third element of the health club's defining triad arises from unsubtly elitist pricing.  In a rebuff to naive economic theories of demand, upmarket health clubs prosper and gain more members as their annual fee rises: in doing so, an implicitly better - that is, richer - class of person is selected, and the perceived quality and attractiveness of the membership increases.  It is the mitigated, incremental version of not wanting to join any club that would have you as a member.

But health clubs are not all crass superficiality and snobbish materialism; there is a strong moral dimension too.  It stems from the very nature of the physical work-out.  Because there is no alternative to enduring the full grind and hell of exercise to achieve its end-results, you cannot cheat.  Working out offers the all-too literal embodiment of getting only what you pay for, with the added twist that money alone cannot buy you fitness - even in a health club: you have to earn it through your personal, sweaty endeavours.  Most extremely, the gym's apothegm is 'no pain, no gain': not only must you work for your achievements, you must pay with suffering.  The reward of the resultant sense of smug self-satisfaction is almost greater than that of fitness.

One consequence of meting out this punishment is that you become intensely alive to the fact and technology of your body.  As you push harder against the flesh and its limits, your attention focuses on the battle between body and mind.  In this apparent dualism, the extraordinary nature of will manifests itself: you are forcing yourself to do something you both want and do not want to do.  But once the exercise has finished, and you begin in the tranquillity of your endorphins to reap its benefits, it is the negation of that dualism you are most aware of.  Just as those who are grossly fat seem to move their bodies as if they were huge imposed barrels of being that must be rolled awkwardly along, so those who are trim and fit have paradoxically no sense of the physicality of their bodies at all.  Instead, they become pure mind, their erstwhile limbs weightless and perfect mediators of the will.  Ultimately the health club's work-out proves to be not so much physical as metaphysical.

(1990)

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Systemic dis-ease

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One day disease will no longer exist.  Bodily dysfunctions will be treated by replacing the faulty part, and infections will be eradicated - either by destroying all harmful bacteria and viruses, or, safer and more likely, by rendering the population immune to them.  Those who live in these edenic times to come will look back at ours and its constant battle against sickness and ill-health with disbelief and a sense of superiority - just as we arrogantly regard with condescension the Middle Ages and its ineffectual medical technology.  

In one respect in particular, the spectacle today's civilisation will present to posterity is certainly extraordinary.  Leaving aside the terrible suffering born of serious diseases, there is a whole class of infections that are essentially trivial, and yet that cause great, cumulative wretchedness.  Despite this misery, people are strangely inured to them: every year, almost everyone accepts that they will catch a bout of debilitating flu once, perhaps twice, and that they will suffer from food poisoning several times.  They submit to them as they submit to the seasons, to the tides, to the sun's rising.

It is true that there is little that we can yet do about influenza, despite first attempts at inoculations.  But what is remarkable is the disease's invisibility in our culture; it is as if as a common factor to everyone's life it simply drops out of people's reckoning.  Remarkable because for the sufferers this simple, boring, tiny infection seems to strike at the very root of their being.  In the space of a day or two our body's subtle equilibrium is knocked violently out of kilter; we ache, we shake, we shiver with cold while our head burns; the whole world seems to have narrowed down to a body which itself feels crushed to a fragile sliver by the burden of its miserable existence.

Just as common and even more dramatic are the symptoms of what doctors annoyingly call mild food poisoning.  There the sense of systemic suffering - where every act is purgatory, where existence itself seems tainted with an ineradicable biliousness and bitterness - is overmastering.  It is at such moments that weakly we dare to form the beginnings of a desire for a quick death.  Not that we specifically want to die: we simply crave non-being, nirvana, an absence of this total body sensation of literal ill-ness and dis-ease.

In the case of such non-life-threatening attacks, it is a pity we cannot remain sufficiently objective to savour it all - for example, the act and mechanics of projectile vomiting, as our wracked frame reverts to pure, clenching musculature, and as we threaten to defy topology and turn ourselves inside out like a glove.  In doing so we would experience with a unique vividness the full corporeality of our flesh - a corporeality which normally remains invisible to us, cloaked by our health.

But of course no such notions occur to us, we merely groan and luxuriate in our suffering.  Nor, surprisingly enough, do we draw any comfort from the thought that all these fascinating experiences will be denied to those poor, infectionless future generations.

(1989)

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