If the outside corresponded to the inner life in people, we couldn’t have “bodies” as we do. The inner life is too complex, too various, too fluid. Our bodies incarnate only a fraction of our inner lives. (The legitimate basis for the paranoid endless anxiety about what’s “behind” the appearances.) Given that they would still have inner lives of the energy + complexity that they have now, the bodies of people would have to be more like gas—something gaseous yet tangible-looking like clouds. Then our bodies could metamorphose rapidly, expand, contract—a part could break off, we could fragment, fuse, collide, accumulate, vanish, rematerialize, swell up, thin out, thicken, etc. etc. As it is, we’re stuck with a soft but still largely determinate (especially determinate with regard to size + dimension + shape) material presence in the world—almost wholly inadequate to these processes which then become “inner” processes. (i.e., far from wholly manifested, needing to be discovered, inferred; capable of being hidden, etc.) Our bodies become vessels, then—and masks. Since we can’t expand + contract (our bodies), we stiffen them a lot—inscribe tension on them. Which becomes a habit—becomes installed, to then re-influence the “inner life.” The phenomenon of character armor that Reich focused on. An imperfect design! An imperfect being! Of course, maybe we wouldn’t have so much subjectivity if the “outer” were better designed to register the interior life. Maybe subjectivity as we experience it (all the pressure, the force, the energy, the passion of it) is precisely the result of this “confinement” inside our being. (Like the pressure build up when a gas is heated up inside a sealed metal container.)
Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh (8.12.1967)
