ThoughtPerformances Jill Jichetti ThoughtPerformances Jill Jichetti

The Body

I thought for sure that The Body should be the Curator at the beginning of The Da Vinci Code, found dead in the gallery, arranged with particular symbolic meanings. I thought about it: my body is alive. Is the symbol dead?

I think: the Curator should be in the pose of Vitruvian Man.

The next Body is Tyler Durden in Fight Club, in the chapter in the book where he’s on the nude beach. I try to remember: was he making a sundial? It was something like a sundial. It’s in the book; it isn’t in the movie. I could imagine Brad Pitt as the character, having begun to read the book a few years after having seen the movie.

A different Body than the Narrator’s own as the symbol of time.

Then there’s The Body of the Actor—I thought about John Gielgud as Prospero in Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books. Gielgud was still alive when I was an undergraduate watching the movie, which was then only a few years old.

Philosophize: the Body of the Actor.

And then I thought of the younger-than-Gielgud Shakespearean actor Patrick Stewart, who I had seen play Prospero on Broadway. That was the mid-1990’s.  I was thinking this in 2008. The Living Body of the Stage Actor who has to show up to crowded Times Square, among any manner of people who could harm him. Patrick Stewart has to show up to the theater every night.

****^

I have to walk with the ghost of Uncle Owen from Star Wars. Luke Skywalker is an adult to my age of youth. That would be Luke’s uncle, so… that makes him Grandpa-sized to me. Granpa Uncle Owen.

And elderly Kenobi should be with me.

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