The body one watches perform — kinetic beauty, altered perception, and reconciliation with having a body
echoes
From: Federer Both Flesh and Not
- Early text: "human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having
a body" [fn 1 anchor]; "a creature whose body is both flesh and, somehow,
light"; the perceptual shift — "it will seem to you that the tennis ball is
quite large and slow-moving", play in "intervals of time too brief for
deliberate action". [mid-essay] [e-text]
- IJ echo: Hal's dissociated, self-observing sensorium — the interior that
watches its own body play, the estrangement between the performing body and the
consciousness inside it; the novel's rendering of tennis as a heightened,
altered perceptual field (the ETA matches; Hal's terminal sealing-off). Where
the essay's title conceit ("both flesh and not") is a benign transcendence — the
body made light by grace — Hal's version is the catastrophic sealing of
consciousness inside an unresponsive body.
- Weight: shared-preoccupation