Brehm Center

So much depends upon the body.  We come to believe in the inherent self worth of our own particular form because we have consciously, or not, contemplated upon it our whole lives.  Our knowledge of the world is wrapped up in the boundaries of our own finite experience.  From birth we witness the world from atop a desolate hill, laying down our foundations of learning from which we build upon.  If we are wise we never stop building.  We send out signals into the great void hoping to hear a response louder than our own subconscious echoes.  We sound the horns, send out the messenger doves, and cast up smoke signals.  And to our constant amazement we receive reply.

Our mothers bore us for 9 months, breastfed us for 2 years, bathed us for two more, and watched us grow and mature for the rest.  They know the freckles on our nose, the mole behind our ear, the scar on our chin, and every ticklish corner of our skin.  Yet every time a mother looks at her child, who by now has grown up with years stretched across his eyes, she sees with joyful surprise that same face she beheld in tears when she was a younger woman.  She knows that body, which she bore, nursed, bathed, and clothed.

We all enter the world in the same fashion.  We sense our bodies in much the same way.  We learn to bathe ourselves.  We learn to clothe ourselves.  We look in the mirror at ourselves.  We get haircuts.  We step on the scale.  We feel our heart race.  We feel our chest rise and fall.  We feel the tingle of a soft wind blow upon our neck and through our newly cut hair.  We feel our teeth and our lips with our tongue.  We feel our fingers press and our toes wiggle back and forth.  We feel our bodies in motion in much the same way.

Yet we come to experience another person’s body in varying degrees and contexts.  From a look, or a handshake, to the most intimate of human interactions, we learn of the other.  And in that most intimate of human interactions we surrender what for so long we had always assumed was so uniquely our own yet bears the signature of a proud mother and the trademark name of a father.  In this moment we learn more fully that our bodies are not our own, but one variant manifestation aforementioned.

I raise my eyes from the charcoal lightly held in my right hand, pressed in sweeping gestures upon a blank white sheet of paper.  What must it have felt like the moment right before the Big. Bang. occurred?  Right before The Word rolled off His tongue.  A thousand violins poised in expectant, bottled furry waiting for the down-stroke of the conductor’s baton.  And then…  Creation pours forth.  From my hand as if from the very source of Life itself!  It feels like teenage trestle jumping off the train tracks at night into a pitch-black lake.  It’s that moment right before your first kiss.

I look to see what my hands have in vain tried to recreate.  Out of the corner of my eye I behold the soft toned symmetry of curvilinear shapes that merge together in V-like perplexity and force a drafted echo of a figure upon the empty space of two dimensions.  I don’t know this young woman, not even her name.  But right now I feel as intimate with her figure as though I were her love.  And in every blemish and imperfection I fall more deeply in love as such mistakes become nuanced moments of intentioned observation wrought from charcoal.  Every wrinkle, every scar, and every sag I behold in my mind as a testament to time.  How perfect is imperfection?  My own skin once smelled like butter.  Now it smells and looks like a man’s.