Reading & Writing a Body
For most of my life, everything I have needed to know could be found in books. Poets and writers have supplied readers with words and images that represent and make meaning of the world around them. Scholars fill unending pages with new theoretical and analytical thoughts that help explain why we feel this desire to mark our world, to capture it on the page in a way we can understand.
We often use language as a marker to understand other bodies. In the above image, the confessional poet Sylvia Plath is literally marked and confined by by her own words stamped across her chest. Based on this artistic representation, I understand the poet to be a sentence-writing machine, dedicated solely to the black and white on a page. Plath is a marked body that is re-marked every day: the archive of her published poems, drafts, diaries, and letters allow the reader/spectator to recreate a body in their imagination. This body is created through words and text. It is not a real body, but rather an archived body that is marked by lack. What information is lacking? I want to know who the real Sylvia Plath is, the woman that falls between the lines of poetry and breathes behind the sounds of stanzas.
This image demonstrates how a body can be taken by a spectator and in turn marked by her own language. I see this relationship as a performance: the poet is on display and the spectator is viewing and imagining Plath's body of text and Plath as a literal body comprised of text.
How does this relate to the body of the castrato, a singer who was castrated before or around puberty in order to retain his boy's voice into manhood and onto the Italian Opera stage to perform as heroes and lovers (Bergeron 170)? Books, poems, stories, first-hand accounts, paintings, caricatures, librettos, and theory mark the body of the castrato. This body, like Plath's, is also like a block of text; as spectators looking back through history and searching for the remains of the castrati, we only find the evidence of other spectators.
What did the castrati feel? What was it like to have a body marked by its physical lack and paradoxically its burgeoning, blossoming, virile vocal presence? How is the relationship between the marked body and the marker (spectator) defined? Who has the power to mark, re-mark and unmark in both Operatic and everyday performance? Which will you choose?