On the Corporeal and Incorporeal

Halfway through Joan Didion's moving The Year of Magical Thinking and it's more numbing and calming than I imagined it to be. The part about the grieving process rendering her invisible, so not there; her word choice being incorporeal presents a stark contrast to the film I watched last night.

In Hany Abu-Assad's gripping film Paradise Now, 2 Palestinian friends make the choice of a lifetime, to suicide bomb or to not suicide bomb. Sophie's Choice seems almost trivial in comparison. As the two friends go through their own cycles of commitment to the cause, doubt and clarity, all takes place under a foreign logic where truth is not based on reason, fact, and support of your claim, but of only one very powerful thing; the word of God.

As one of the friends describes his choices and decision he talks about how his body is a weapon. In these two texts surrounding death and dying, the body becomes visible and invisible, powerful and impotent, capable of destruction and incapable of dealing with it.

But its through the music of BARR on his album Beyond Reinforced Jewelcase which puts this issue into context. BARR's music is sortof stream of conscious musings over drum machine beats, smarter than MC Paul Barman and less-white then Eminem. Less musical then Xiu Xiu and less whiny than Bright Eyes. As BARR talks about things and stuff that don't sound like he knows anyone is listening, the album is very self-conscious, but not in the breakdown of the 4th wall kind of way nor in the self-referential kind of way. It's just superaware of its self. Like the opposite of Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking, in terms of the body, BARR gets away from the "self" in self-referential. It's not the Cartesian understanding of self which is usually where the self in self-referential lies. It's more body-conscious, but not in an eating disorder kind of way. When BARR refers to himself, he is usually doing so in an action-oriented kind of way. Lyrically BARR's music is full of verbs, he talks about things he does or is doing in a very physical way.

In thinking about corporeality and understanding of the self, in the midst of bio-power, the corporeal and incorporeal are influencing the way we understand ourselves in the world.