4’33” in a Body

Casey Dawson

 “Sainte Sebastienne.” Louise Bourgeois. Museum of Modern Art.

I set my phone down just as the timer begins and feel as though I’ve already lost. It’s never been easy for me to sit still for any period of time without discomfort. Even as a child, managing my body in a way that seemed to please others was one thing, and I could do it well. I was a girl, and with that knowledge, whenever and however it came to me, I swallowed up those expectations until I convinced myself that they were my own. There was always another song to learn on my violin, another book to read, another grade to earn, another something to do to impress someone else, to hear that I was gifted and beloved and a girl, or to distract myself from the growing fear that these categories of my being existed coterminously.

And then there was the problem of sleep. It required me to be alone and in the dark, occasionally broken up by the orange street light filtering through the blinds. Comfort was elsewhere, and I shifted my body every which way in the hopes that it would return to me. Laying on my sides was a no-go. There was always a rib sticking out or a hip digging too hard into the mattress. If I finally flopped onto my belly, hoping the relative softness of my stomach would offer me reprieve, it was the beat of my heart against my chest that I couldn’t stand the most — the way it pulsed against the mattress, like it wanted to leave me. The most normal sensations of bodily living were enough to convince me that my own body was a trap. What could I do with all of this me when there were no other witnesses?

Even now, it’s not easy business to inhabit a flesh suit, textured with hairs, imbued with aches, loaded with expectations. Sitting on my front steps, I shift my legs nervously, wondering how long the timer has been ticking and how awkwardly proportioned I must look to a passerby — knees to my chest, thighs too pale for someone who’s been in the sun more in the past few weeks than in the past year. I start to think that silent moments within a body don’t exist, maybe even especially when we attempt to slide in a quiet moment into our day. Silence in the way we might imagine it — total, deafening, lonely — exists so rarely that it’s nearly myth.  And when it does exist, it scares the shit out of us. Find yourself in a human body and its many rhythms (beating, pulsing, stretching, blood rushing, pounding, salivating, shitting, yawning, shifting, etc.) and you’ll quickly find that even relative silence from the outside world does nothing to mitigate the infinity of sounds you already contain. 

Yeah, I know — despite years of effort, I’m not an optimist, at heart. Many days (especially now) I pray that this life is a hallucination, and remain grateful for the hope of being a brain in a vat. In the seconds before the timer goes off, I begin to tap the tips of my fingers against my thumbs, one at a time, noting the miniature calluses that have started to form on my left hand since I’ve started playing violin again. Being in between jobs and in the middle of a global crisis, I’ve had time on my hands that I haven’t been afforded in a while. In all the time that capital takes from us, it also pulls us away from our bodies, in equal measure. But in this small roughness of my fingertips, my skin has remembered what else my body might do besides try and escape me. My other appendages will have to keep that in mind.

Casey Dawson is a writer and local menace from New Orleans. You can find them on Twitter @caseylikekc and on Venmo @kcdawson.