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Feathers | Jul 25 2003

I understand that each part of my body is a part of me and that the parts, taken together, embody me, but where am I in the parts? Nowhere to be found. The I I experience, the I who experiences, the I whose experience is mine, is elsewhere.

What is it like to inhabit a body? I can never know, never having known otherwise. I think of Rilke’s poem of Leda and the swan, of the line And then for the first time his feathers felt marvelous. That line comes as the god Zeus—Zeus, that is, in the form of a swan—fucks Leda, at the moment he first penetrates her. When did my feathers feel so?