Negative space

DaVinci dissected thirty-two bodies because he wanted to learn to draw. In his journals he describes the heart as “vortex oriented.” You can feel it, in love. A tornado of blood and oxygen. But it’s also material, the vortex: for a fetus the heart is only one blood vessel, fused to another, and as the fetus grows the tube spirals on itself—four chambers folded from one tissue. In a cadaver you find the heart has a skin. It’s called the pericardium, and it spreads to connect to the throat. I think this is why when you tilt your head back to look at the sky, matters of the heart seem to weigh less. Everything’s connected, though, of course. My teacher used to say feel the pelvic floor mirrored in the diaphragm; the diaphragm, in the soft palate. He also said the heels are the beginning of everything. Once I closed my eyes and I saw the end of everything is right underneath the skin—a fabric made of water. In some places you can run your finger through it; elsewhere it’s as thick as rope. There are gaps in the body too—big ones. It can be hard to remember. From the bottom of the lungs to the roof of the mouth, from the roof of the mouth to the sinuses, to the nostrils. Emptiness. No different from the negative space between our noses, between our noses and the sky. So then breathing is the ultimate proof that subject and object interweave. An exchange of emptiness. Or is it fullness? One consequence of love is that the negative spaces get bigger. A physiology of awe. The throat holds something it can only wish to symbolize. The tongue lies down, the ears open up. And if the eyes had speech, they too would be without it. The first time I saw a cadaver I knew I’d never close my eyes the same way again. I could see my bones are white as lightning. Everything since, in there, for me, for so long, in there, visible, me, but then I saw you, and I saw the world.