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015 Adina Glickstein

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Courtney Love allegedly named her band Hole after a line from Euripides’ Medea: 
“there’s a hole in my soul.”

Openings, and our drives to fill them, are the propulsive engine of desire. Gaps between bones enveloped in fascia form the interior scaffolding of a body, which is also a record or index of experience. The fissures and unfinished edges. That is where the knowingness shines through. Without voids, where would the light get in? I fantasize sometimes, in the sauna or at yoga class, about undoing layers of my body’s habituated patterning as if removing pigment with paint stripper. One of my yoga teacher’s favorite queues is: “organize your pelvis.” Moving in two directions at once from the back of the knee — a mature soul is capable of simultaneously playing opposites. Stretching, sloughing. Cracking open the carapace, unwinding the doing-ness that has crystallized in my soma as I carry out the roles I am made to perform. 

Quoting the geographer Marijn Nieuwenhuis in her latest book On Breathing, the psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster highlights how “a holey body is rarely accepted socially or politically.” The revelation of a body’s porosity (the disorganization of a pelvis?) “triggers emotions and feelings of discomfort, pain and revulsion...” even though, in truth, every body “leaks all the time.” Like in Kristeva’s definition of the abject: the inside thrust outside, made unfamiliar by being laid bare. Webster concludes that the problem of our holes is the same as the problem of breathing shared air, porosity belying that self-containment is fundamentally a fantasy. The conundrum of sex is the crux of the social relation. Try as we might to be boundaried, we are more-or-less liberated layers of tubes, rims, and holes. 

Digits, vertebrae, hearts, udders, all spilling in the manner of something getting freer. Which is another way of saying dislodging. Encroaching into the cleanliness of geometry, penciled lines and measured angles. We are fossils awash in feeling. Accretions and secretions borne forth by digestion and gestation and decomposition. All organic forms deform. Bodies are a kind of durational media, archives of what we take in and what we close ourselves off from, negotiating permeability over time. Sometimes, transparency conceals more than it reveals. Penetrability is a cipher. It is not desirable to be excessively impervious, either. Ideally one lands somewhere between a mirror and a membrane. Bodies aspire to strip themselves of ill-fitting roles and that’s all well and good. But don’t forget it: Love requires holes.

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