3 days after the operation...

Instead of musings about the world and idle daydreams, today's entry is reduced to my body. I woke up to the bright purple bruises around where the incision was made on Saturday (I had a hernia operation). Just the site of so much pulped flesh makes me shudder. The surgeon told me I must not rest too much, so I had a test-walk this morning. I found myself shuffling at quarter speed, unable to step more than perhaps 1 1/2 feet at a time, people glancing at me as if looking upon an unpleasant spectacle. Perhaps they thought I was a smack addict, dressed in my tracksuit and baseball cap. I walked down Leather Lane market in search of a chemists to buy razorblades (I'm turning into a yeti just now). Everyone was darting about, a Brownian flux of motion. Leather Lane is a combination of chav street market and lo-brow series of eateries for the office workers who work around Holborn. Meanwhile, I walked in pain, ever more slowly. How frustrating to be in London and yet be so immobile. It reminds me of the experiments of my childhood: spending a week going to school in a wheelchair (I was 10) and being called 'spastic' by my peers, and then going to Birmingham and wearing a Jewish skullcap and being threatened and called a Yid by a mob of yobs.

Its obvious, and so obvious that most of the time we dont notice it: but the condition of our body, and the form of our embodiment (black, white, female, male, tall, fat, one-legged, blind etc) in part constructs the world we occupy. The physicality of our being brings our world itself into being. We occupy different worlds on the basis of bodily difference. How we engage with these forms of embodied difference in the context of a shared world is the beginning of ethical consciousness. Hence Franz Fanon's final prayer at the end of Black Skin White Masks: Oh my body, make of me a man who always questions..