The Body, Its Environment, Its Exercise

Northrop Frye captured something of the imprinting that happens when good models abound. And are taken up, bodily.

Now if we write in a way that we never speak, the first thing that disappears is the rhythm. It is hardly possible to give any spring or bounce to words unless they come out of our own bodies and are, like dancing or singing, an expression of physical as well as mental energy. The second thing that disappears is the color. It is hardly possible to use vivid language unless one is seeing the imagery of oneself: even abstract words, if they are genuinely possessed by the person using them, will still retain something of the concrete metaphor they originally had. The third thing that disappears is the sense of personality, which only a basis in personal speech can ever supply.

My emphasis
The Well-Tempered Critic

There is a neat twist here. By focalizing the passage through the plural "we" we gain multiple "bodies". Our Bodies Our Selves. Our Poems Our Lives.

And so for day 2363
02.06.2013