On bodies without organic hearts

Or: cities as bodies that pulse and want

Embodiment is syrupy and thick. It is not a simple feeling of presence. It is catching a fleeting moment. Exiting your own body to enter another. An etheric body, a story body, a city-body. Embodiment is shapeshifting, is glamour magic, is lived.

I’ve been contemplating bodies a lot recently—can you tell? The 4th issue of The Weaver is all about cities. I called it Magnetic Metropolis because I was interested in the enchantment of cities. How we interact with their push and pull. How they take on our energies, how we take on theirs.

“Amsterdam” panel from Ferdinand van Kessel's Ansichten aus den vier Weltteilen mit Szenen von Tieren, circa 1689

So when I call a city a body, what I mean is that it lives.

Flickering street lights like heart palpitations and the comings-and-goings of people are its very breath. This body feeds on noise and lovers in hidden alleyways. This body yearns for rain slapping down on hard concrete to cool it down. This body does not move, does not flow like water nor walk with legs, but the city as a body is constantly changing. New buildings in old neighbourhoods, trees planted where they were not before, bike lanes added, and sidewalks stripped away. One district the eye of the city, one as the mouth, another the colon. Each an organ working to keep it alive.

This organism—alive and breathing, slithering nowhere—is magnetic, is it not?

Some come with promised opportunities, they hold reputations of grandeur and class, and so we shape-shift into them, wear them like flesh-suits or auras to fit in, to achieve something. We move and migrate amongst bodies, finding new lips to kiss and new people to become. In cities we embody potentialities. One city might offer a body so firm and worked-to-the-bone and that’s who we become. Another might be palm trees and a certain forgetfulness of time and so we melt into a being who only knows to keep track of moon cycles. At times we are exiled, politically driven to be without home, untethered to our birthplace. And that pain of growing into a new body with odd arms and shallow breaths never really settles. It regenerates as an unfamiliar tail or a kidney stone or a twitching eye. And that body is magnetic, too, for suffering is a condition experienced by those with bodies. What if the city-body is magnetized by us, too? By the energy we bring to an unexpected sunny day? When the collective of humanity is gathered in one place, abuzz with something new, on the precipice of trance. We dance to the music of subway carts, watch leaves fall, we are enamoured by the glow of a moon and by sea shells at the shore.

This body, in all its animality, is primal, primal, primal. This body abides only by one law. That of nature.

The witchery of living is my whole conversation with you, my darlings. All I can tell you is what I know. Look, and look again. This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes. It’s more than bones. It’s more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse. Its more than the beating of the single heart. It’s praising. It’s giving until the giving feels like receiving. You have a life. Just imagine that! You have the day, and maybe another, and maybe still another. — Mary Oliver

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At the end of each issue of The Weaver, I offer a book, a movie, and a song to dive into the monthly theme. As an exclusive on substack, please enjoy this episode recommendation from one of my favourite podcasts:

Magnetically,
Kimmy

P.S.—submissions for 005 just opened! The theme is hunger & desire. Submission guidelines here.