Hosting Bodies

Ulya Soley

 

The window has steamed up; one cannot see inside very well. The heat circulates in the cables as if circulating in veins and rises from the ground; it melts the transparent plastic bodies, and the bodies become fragile as they melt. A crack, and another one; the cracks trapped in the glass are not heard, but they are felt. A familiar fragility. A sound of breaking, which we are all familiar with. Bodies that break and fall; new bodies of old potatoes. They warm up, and as they do, the glass is covered with steam; one cannot see anything.1 One eye can never see the other eye: incapable bodies.

 

Warm is known as red, and cold is known as blue, but it is white behind this glass. The steam covers the surrounding area whether it gets cold or warm. In theory, white includes all colors, but in experience it excludes, separates, and dominates. A sphere made of sugar melts inside while changing colors. The heat surrounding it melts it; the bees it hosts melt it. The colors that have fallen off layer by layer emerge one by one. They mix together. The sugared hosting body nourishes, provides, and shrinks as it nourishes. It turns into a body where one is hosted at the cost of being destroyed: permeable bodies.

Islands are interconnected pieces that are independent of one another. Heart organs with their matte white, wet white, pink stains; each is unique. Twin and conjoined, underdeveloped veins, hearts that are not beating, which have not become one when they were two—a new one appears with each step. The only vital, mechanical heart that beats inside us multiplies on the islands with all its copies. The mechanism that reads numbers is slowly calibrated. The new bodies of old sugarcanes warm up and melt, melt and form into a shape, cool down and solidify, solidify and eternalize their mold. When islands connect with the mainland through a narrow strip of land, they are called a “peninsula.” The island is an island because it is singular and alone—insular singularity2—whereas categories can expand, boundaries can stretch, and water can leak into everything: liquid bodies.

 

The body is a part of nature; it is not separate from or superior to it. The body predominantly consists of water; water is everywhere. “Blood, bile, intracellular fluid; a small ocean swallowed, a wild wetland in our gut; rivulets forsaken, making their way from our insides to out, from watery womb to watery world: we are bodies of water.”3 Considering the body as one with its surroundings, the land as one with water; being able to see the island as a part of the world. Islands flooded by leaking waters; islands submerged. Maybe water is like air to the fish: The water that surrounds the fish bodies full of water is similar to the air that surrounds people’s bodies full of water.4 Can it be that fish make the same mistake people do and ignore the fact that there is something that surrounds them? Deficient bodies.

 

Things that touch each other, that turn into each other; things that find their way by moving with the heat, that change when they come in contact with the heat. Bodies and thoughts that physically and conceptually stick together, moving on and spreading to the surroundings. Bodies that affect their surroundings and are affected by their surroundings. Metabolisms that start moving when they warm up and change when they start moving, change and transform themselves. Wood wide web, a new meaning for www, claims that the roots of trees connect and communicate with one another through complicated underground networks thanks to fungi.5 When the limits of the body are reconsidered, the question of how these limits can expand toward the surroundings gains importance: limitless bodies.

 

The glitches constituted by loose contacts and brief errors in a system remind us that dual systems set up via contrasts are a spectrum. “The glitch posits: One is not born, but rather becomes, a body. . . . The glitch is a passage through which the body traverses toward liberation.”6 As long as the concept of body becomes abstract, we can witness the permeability, interaction, and liquidity of the structures related to their surroundings. Invisible bodies, bodies against the norm, defective bodies with glitches, stained and underdeveloped bodies that warm up, melt, break, fall: flawed bodies.

 

Guest, host, ghost. The body disappears beyond longing for never-arrived futures. It evaporates, digitizes, turns into numbers. Can ghost bodies exceed physical boundaries; can the energy that emerges while the potato’s new body evaporates set hearts on the ground in motion; can the sphere of melting and dissolving sugar, when it sufficiently shrinks, turn into a temporary host for those it nourishes?

 

Host: hospitable, comfortable, safe, solid, space, complete, limited, closed, nourishing, warm.

Bodies: flawed, perforated, permeable, sick, cracked, crushed, broken, damaged, crooked, deficient, out of order, spilled, leaked, liquid, fragile, insufficient, limitless.

 

1 Translator’s note: The author uses here an idiom in Turkish that literally means “the eye does not see another eye.” The next sentence makes a reference to it.
2 Michel Serres, The Parasite, çev. Lawrence R. Schehr, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.
3 Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. “Blood, bile, intracellular fluid; a small ocean swallowed, a wild wetland in our gut; rivulets forsaken making their way from our insides to out, from watery womb to watery world: we are bodies of water.”
4 Kerem Ozan Bayraktar, Gülşah Mursaloğlu ve Semâ Bekirović arasında The Secret Life of Plants kitabından yola çıkan bir konuşmaya referansla. Peter Tompkins & Christopher Bird, The Secret Life of Plants, New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1989.
5 Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures, New York: Random House, 2020.

6 Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (London: Verso Books, 2020).