Speaking from the gut, part one
How we lost our voices
This week, I planned to send you another exercise for writing from the imaginal. It’s a very simple practice, but one that has revolutionized my writing and my life. It focuses on connecting the voice to the heart and the gut—a connection that as we’ll see was severed long ago in many cultures, with dire consequences for individuals, communities, and the living world.
But I can’t share a practice like this—a practice that is about reclaiming the embodied voice—without mentioning the communications blackouts that the people of Gaza have been suffering for months now. The comms blackout that was widely reported last week is only the latest and longest in a series of blackouts that have devastated efforts to get aid into the area, not to mention to get news out. Telecommunications infrastructure has been damaged, and impacted by fuel shortages. To lose communications—to have your voice severed—amid famine and incessant bombing and shelling and the loss of medical and other infrastructure, is to lose a last lifeline.
If you use the practice I share in the next couple of weeks to reconnect your voice to your heart and your gut, I hope you will use that voice to call for a ceasefire.
This week, instead of sharing the practice itself, I’m going to share a little background on the history of embodied speech. Because when you hear about the ways it’s been suppressed and sidelined, and the way that suppression has changed global culture and power dynamics—that’s when this very simple practice becomes magic.
Before I share a whistlestop and necessarily selective version of this history, I will add the caveat that I am not an expert but a passionate and enthusiastic student. My studies are mostly self-directed, and there are large blind spots in them. At present I’m trying to understand the history I was born into—a European history, specifically that of white, middle-class, southeastern English people, and the harm we’ve enacted in the world. So please know that what follows is informed by that context, and there’s a lot more that could and should be said.
So. The context. Let’s go back, way back, thousands of years back, to the earliest years of our species. The years when human culture was born, back in the caves. From the little evidence that remains, we know that the earliest humans made music and that they painted images on the walls of caves. We know that they did not have writing. Which means that whatever they were doing in those caves—I have my own theories, but we’ll never know for sure—whatever it was, it was of the body. Back then, the only way to keep a story or a song alive was to store it in the body and pass it down that way, generation after generation. Stories were inseparable from living human bodies and from the landscapes that sustained them.
Then exchange grew more complex, and people began to need systems of accounting. Enter cuneiform, the earliest form of writing. It wasn’t long before people realized that this technology had applications far wider than logging how many potatoes Bill’s had this week. To memorize a story—to store it in the body—is an arduous process, and it also places a limit on the number of stories in circulation. Bodies simply cannot hold infinite stories.
But paper can. So people began to write stories down, and the nature of stories and of knowledge began to change. It stands to reason: when all cultural information had to be held in the body, in a way that could be passed down through generations, cultures were built on thoroughly embodied information. On information that felt right when it was spoken, that rang true in the bones.
But once you can write, the brain can take over. When you don’t have to pass stories through the sense-making instrument of the body, their very nature begins to change.
From the advent of writing, we can chart a clear course through the rise of literate elites, to power-over religious structures, to information guarded in impenetrable academic fortresses, and straight through to AI. All of these phenomena are rooted in a conception of writing, of imagination, of knowledge, that is strictly cognitive. A conception that has forgotten the body.
It’s staggering, really: that we are a species born into fragile, relatively slow, relatively weak bodies, which stayed alive only because of our capacity for story. Only because these bodies are tuning forks for wisdom; for the knowledge that really matters. And that we’re now so far from that saving grace, we’ve forgotten it so thoroughly, that our societies truly believe that AI is intelligent—that intelligence is nothing but a matter of storing, recombining, and regurgitating information.
In societies ruled by the cognitive and extractive modes, embodied speech and writing have always been highly threatening. This is why they have so often been suppressed and punished. Check out this thought from Peter Ackroyd’s Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination:
In England, as in the rest of Europe, women were instructed in silence by the Church; by biblical dictate, they could not preach…. Thus it has been suggested that “female silence” was a sign of “female chastity”. Female speech is by its very nature dangerous and lubricious. It partakes of the body, and indeed draws the lineaments of the body into language.
And before any men or otherwise non-female-bodied people switch off: know that this prohibition on embodied speech applies to all of us. Yes, it might have been female-coded and might have led to the silencing of many women, not to mention people oppressed by the forces of racism, classism, and other supremacies. But oppressors too have suffered, have been cut off from their embodied voices and learned to speak only from the neck up. This shift in our conception of knowledge and speech has harmed all of us. It has separated all of us, and our cultural structures, from the wisdom of our bodies.
Today, the cognitive, disembodied voice is so ascendant that to truly speak from the body is a kind of superpower.
A superpower we all have, somewhere. A superpower we can rediscover and hone.
In next week’s letter, I hope to share some tips on how to do just that.
Love,
xx Ellie