Discursions

on the Haptic

Practice of Rightly

Relishing One's Own

Growth and Decay

I Change, Therefore I Am

New Media Writing

by Sarah Stahl

To read one poem of a poet's complete oeuvre, to behold one painting, to know a person through one socially mediated dimension, to understand a product only through its monetary cost and use; these are all acts of synecdoche where the moon of Part eclipses the sun of Whole.

Our bodies are seen as a synecdoche of self under the order of things. A woman is seen as a collection of parts and personas which might be used and exploited, as boobs, belly, butt, feet, sex object, nursemaid, wife, secretary, housekeeper. When we only see people as collections of parts, instead of whole, integrated humans, or when we see products separated from the natural resources and hands that made them, or one work of art outside of the context of an artist's whole body of work, we can see the glint of only one facet and not their whole sparkling mess of adamantine radiance. We are not able to understand other people or our world in the way that they ache to be known in their full vulnerability and realness. We are alienated from each other, ourselves, and our environment by seeing the world bitwise, only in pieces and parts.

At the same time, to see the nouns of existence, all its people, places, and things, in their wholeness would show such a tangle that our little mortal minds might be trapped in threads forever, marveling at the web. So to love the world properly, and maintain our sanity at the same time, we have to look from a position of forced and perpetual parallax, opening one eye to see all the parts, squeezing it shut and shifting to open other eye to see the whole.

Body of Work/Body of Play