The Body Electric  

By SIEANNEN BELL
All Photography ©2004 Fred Ellis

If anything is sacred the human body is sacred…
 “I Sing the Body Electric” Walt Whitman

         Even indoors, I can taste it. The desert on my tongue is like a drug pumping me full of light and vision. There’s nowhere better in the world to see the stars than the desert. The sky appears to be naked, set free to dance atop the jagged fingers of distant mountains. Even here, behind four walls with music beating wildly against my body, I can feel the surge of the Sonoran through my veins.

This is not the land of my birth. I was born on an island in the Florida Keys. I was raised among mangroves and live oaks. I grew up speaking the low, shifting moan of the language of water. Here, water is scarce and I have walked for miles without seeing more water than what was stored in my own water bottle. I have learned to appreciate what I once took for granted. Here, I sing the low whisper of the desert blowing itself free. I am at the bottom of an ocean that’s been empty for millennia.

Other, more frantic bodies stumble and fly past mine. They flow around me, dancing in raucous abandon. I have my own desperation, but I pace it.

I spin, slow and steady, in the center of the floor, letting the lights bounce and reflect off of my body. I hold my arms up above my head, one hand tangled in my hair. The other is holding a lit cigarette in the air like a candle.

I dance alone with my eyes closed to a song with unintelligible words, but a deep tribal beat. My long red skirt flies out and then wraps around me over and over again. I am lost in my own body. I am lost in my own mind. When I dance the world becomes pure color, sound and vibration. The night reels around me and I am willingly consumed by it.

A warm hand brushes my naked back, a slow, deliberate touch that I find myself leaning into. I open my eyes to the constant swirl of men and women pressed all around me. I look for whoever might have touched me but there is only faceless body after faceless body packed wall to wall in a smoky room.

Feeling slightly unnerved by the intimate touch, I navigate my way back to the bar. I order a whiskey sour and sit with my back to the bar watching the crowd swirl frenetically around me.

In a corner there is a couple, both dressed in leather, both wearing excessive amounts of dark makeup. Their steps are discordant and go against the rhythm of the song. They dance against instead of with each other. Their dance is a brutal flailing of limbs. It is as if they are purposely fighting each other and the pulse of the music the entire way.

 A narrow-hipped Mexican woman is dominating the dance floor with lips the color of crushed red chili peppers that are turned up in a tightly controlled smile. She believes she is seducing every man in the room. She is sweating profusely and her tangerine colored dress appears to be digging uncomfortably into her soft flesh. The men gathered around her resemble nothing so much as jackals as they circle floundering prey.

I shake my head and sip my drink. I laugh both at myself and at the crowd. Why do we come here night after night?

Some are here because they want fresh meat, a new flavor to taste for a few hours before it fades to dust in the morning light. Some are here to willingly provide that meat: to allow themselves the release of being weak and vulnerable, whispering catch me-catch me to the night. Most simply want amnesia, a temporary escape from bad jobs, failing marriages or clinging children.

It all comes down to the most convenient form of sedation.

Me? I’m just a hungry child. A crazy girl with a craving for life. I want reality jacked up to surrealistic proportions. I want it all and I refuse to settle for the half-lives most people choose to live. 

I’ve been hanging around blues and jazz clubs, honkytonks and raves since I was a kid. Since I first learned to sneak out of my father’s house and find my way downtown into dimly lit rooms filled with irrepressible sound. I have loved the hypnotic quality of good music and the fast fix of dancing for as long as I can remember.

It’s not that I care much for people, because I don’t. In fact, outside of the dance-floor I avoid people as often as possible. It’s the combination of music and the desperate banging of bodies that I love. The energy is electric and I plug into it, I draw it into me like a current until I am high on it. I fill myself up nightly with the burning and wander back into the wilderness of city and desert.

            Never mind the ephemeral nature of my addiction. I’ll take what I can get. I am that hungry.

lean and hungry

wolf smile

creeping through

these hills

on quiet feet

I am no longer

content to

chew on

sun-bleached

bones

I want to

taste flesh

and fruit

rich with

marrow

and pulp

calling down

the rain

calling up

the green

beneath

the ground

crying out

for vision

and song

I will dance

until I fall

down dead

or the world

blooms new

around me

I am weary

of hunger

and longing

I track

the live

wire of

lucid dream

back

to its den

I hunt

ecstasy

as if it

were an

animal

capable

of being

caught

           I finish my drink and head back out into the center of the rush. The beat is quick, close and ringing like a thousand bells with a woman’s whispered chant echoing in successive layers that repeat-begin-repeat again. I step into it with my arms raised, smiling as I turn. I bring my hands down and merge myself with the music.

            Halfway through the song, I feel a hand on my left shoulder. This time, the hand doesn’t fade away. In a moment, I feel another hand on my right shoulder. Both hands hold onto me gently but firmly to keep from being swept away into the crowd. I want to turn around and look at my partner, but the crush of people and the firm hands prevent me from moving very far.

            My partner presses against me and begins to dance in earnest. I know that whoever she is, she must be woman because her hands are raised up to the height of my shoulders rather than pressed down and I can feel the soft curve of breasts against my back.

            The song fades out and a new, heavier beat takes its place. I grasp a small but strong hand on my left shoulder and spin myself around towards her. She laughs, head thrown back, shaking her hips to the music. Her dark hair is streaked with tawny blonde and there are crow feathers hanging from her ears. When she looks at me I see that her eyes are amber, the perfectly clear amber of a wild animal. She winks one eye at me and laughs again, I can’t hear her voice over the music but I know already what her laugh will sound like. Belly laugh, the rush of chimes caught in wind, a shameless and rippling laugh.

She slips her hands out of mine. She pauses for half a second with her head down. She dances for me. She dances slow with her arms out to the side. She shimmies down to the ground with her shoulders shaking and then back up pressed against my body. Her boots pound the floor in perfect time. Her hair hangs over her shoulders and obscures her face, but I can still see that she is wearing an elated smile.

We dance together in the way that electrical sparks dance, flaring and whirling off of each other in furious abandon. I don’t hear the music anymore, I don’t dance to it’s beat. I dance only to the rhythm of this woman’s feet and hips. I match myself to her and I imagine the floor falling away from beneath us until we are alone in the desert together. I imagine the night as a funnel cloud around us. I imagine that we are at the perfect center, sure and steady.

            I am finally so caught up in her movement that I stop dancing. I stand in place, just swaying, content to watch the whirlwind in front of me. I know that this moment is why I am here tonight. I know that this woman, ecstatic in her own wildness, is all the reason I need to breathe.

            She looks up at me suddenly. Despite the madness of her dancing, her eyes are completely sober and unclouded. Her expression is thoughtful. She raises one eyebrow and gestures towards the door with her eyes. I’m not sure what she wants and to be honest I don’t really care. I follow the swing of her hair through the crowd towards the door.

            Outside, there is a gentle but steady rain just beginning to wet the pavement. I breathe in the cool air. This is monsoon season, the oppressive heat of the desert briefly gentled.

            The woman leans her back against the wall and lights a cigarette. She’s of medium height and build and one arm is covered from wrist to elbow in the silver and gold bangles favored among Mexican women. The other wrist is bare except for a single silver band inlaid with polished turquoise.

                        I look closely at her face, but I can’t pinpoint an age. She could be twenty-five or she could be forty. Her skin is dark with a tracery of almost imperceptible lines. It’s impossible for me to tell whether she’s Hispanic, Native American or something else completely.

            She takes a deep drag and smiles at me. Her smile holds absolute delight, as if she is infatuated with the night, with the rain, with the very act of breathing.

            “I love the rain.” She says, looking around at the puddles starting to form in the street.

            “But not here.” She makes a broad gesture towards the surrounding buildings.

            “I love the rain out in the desert, the way the flowers appear overnight.” Her voice is musical and harsh at the same time. She has the burnt velvet voice of a blues singer who has spent too many nights in small, smoky rooms.

            I find myself completely entranced by her, by her voice, by the way she moves as if she is dancing even in her simplest most unconscious gestures, by her careless familiarity and easy grace.

    On the other hand, the necessity of speech puts me on edge.  I’d like to think of myself as the quiet kind. Truth is, I’m just skittish as hell, too ready to get up and run at a moment’s notice. Despite all my written raving, I am wary of conversation.  I’m also very aware of the fact that no matter what comes stumbling out of my mouth, I could have said it a thousand times better through my dancing body. Social graces may not be my forte, but I know damn well that I can dance.

I look up and see that she is watching me as closely as I am watching her. We are two feral creatures standing each other off, pacing and sniffing out neutral territory. This stiff social game seems foreign and false to me after the passionate intimacy of our dance but I can’t seem to bring myself out of it.

            “Do you live out in the desert?” I ask, continuing the small talk while fumbling clumsily with a cigarette.

            “Yeah, up near Catalina.” She leans forward and lights the cigarette for me.

            “You ever been up there?” She’s scanning my face for more than the answer to the question. She’s reading me.

            “A couple of times, I moved here only three months ago.”  I tangle and untangle my fingers in my hair, letting it fall across one side of my face. I’m trying to play it cool, and not betray myself with my blushing face or shaking hands. But she’s not buying it.

            “Shy girl, yeah?” Her voice is gentle as she reaches out and pushes my hair from my face.

            “Shy girl.” I repeat. It comes out as a whisper. She rests one hand on my shoulder and we stand there in the night staring at each other as if we could divine a way to communicate without any words at all. And strangely enough, we succeed. There is no revelation, no psychic miracle. There is only the bond of two bodies and minds that have connected in the ritual of dance. It is all that is necessary.