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But the element of the body that interested me was the experience of living inside it, inhabiting a vehicle that was so cataclysmically vulnerable, so unreliably subject to pleasure and pain, hatred and desire.
To know that this was how the state regarded your own family was to receive a powerful education in how bodies are positioned in a hierarchy of value, their freedoms privileged or curtailed according to more or less inescapable attributes, from skin colour to sexuality.
It seemed obvious to me that bodies on the streets were how you changed the world.
inching progress could be so rapidly reversed. What they all shared was a desire to turn the body from an object of stigma and shame into a source of solidarity and strength, capable of demanding and achieving change.
What Reich wanted to understand was the body itself: why it’s so difficult to inhabit, why you might want to escape or subdue it, why it remains a naked source of power, even now.
I could still feel that optimism vibrating through the decades: that our bodies are full of power, and furthermore that their power is not despite but because of their manifest vulnerabilities.
The body was a device for processing the external world; a conversion machine, hoarding, transforming, discarding, stripping for parts.
Somehow it is more comforting to believe that sickness is consequential, a response to suppressed emotions or undigested traumas, than to confront the existential horror of randomness, the knowledge that anyone, no matter how good or innocent or emotionally healthy, might be afflicted at any time.
Illness functioned as a way for them to acknowledge or express otherwise inadmissible pain, the afflictions of the body providing a ready language by which other things could be conveyed.
His body was a graveyard of buried emotions; its symptoms clustered around the same fundamental terror . . .
This process created a physical shield around the vulnerable self, protecting it from pain at the cost of numbing it to pleasure.
Life demands exchange, a fact that illness by its nature reveals.
No one could describe this as total freedom and yet everyone knew things could and had been worse.
Sexual freedom is threatening, unruly. It’s no accident that authoritarian regimes, then and now, crack down on homosexuality and abortion, returning each gender to their rigid, pre-ordained duties of procreation, or that these limitations occur as a prelude to more dehumanising acts, the purges and liquidations of genocide.
It was the central revelation of her life: that violence against women is political, and therefore capable of being communally resisted and overturned.
Violence occurs when one person treats another as expendable, an object, garbage, but part of the violence, and the abiding horror of the violent transaction, is that their humanity does not vanish, but is made to coexist with being an object; ‘just some bleeding thing cut up on the floor.’
To be born at all is to be situated in a network of relations with other people, and furthermore to find oneself forcibly inserted into linguistic categories that might seem natural and inevitable but are socially constructed and rigorously policed.
‘Cloudbusting’ is a lightly fictionalised version of Reich’s life, but the entire album, Hounds of Love, has a compelling Reichian atmosphere. All the songs seem to struggle over the same dynamic, fretting ambivalently back and forth between repression and surrender, pleasure and withdrawal.
But if the stories of Reich and Malcolm X, Jacobson and Rustin tell us anything at all, it’s that any human body can be criminalised by the state, not because of a crime that’s been committed, but because that particular body has been designated criminal in its own right.
It was my gateway into understanding that essential Reichian dynamic: that the political world can make bodies into prisons, but that bodies can also reshape the political world.
The enemy body is always portrayed as being fashioned from grosser material, obscenely sexual or avaricious, greedy, primitive, uncontrolled, infectious, spilling over, barely human, a kind of disgusting fleshy jelly. It makes me wonder if what drives prejudice is at root horror of the body itself.
Hatred is a way of displacing this annihilating fear onto other bodies, asserting a magnificent autonomy, a freedom from the sullying, hopelessly interdependent life of flesh.
From feminism to gay liberation to the civil rights movement, the struggles of the last century were at heart about the right to be free of oppression based on the kind of body you inhabited:
Many things had been banned, including the word protest, so when they communicated with each other the students used the word dreaming instead. I know that dreaming is dangerous, one of them told my friend, but dreaming gives me hope.
Freedom doesn’t mean being unburdened by the past. It means continuing into the future, dreaming all the time.
