What do bodies reveal?
All my life I’ve been very aware of my body. I have always used it as a gauge of things. When I look at a person and I see their body, that’s the beginning of knowledge about them. Furthermore, I respect the body. It’s one thing to be smart and quick-witted, but can you back it up? In the world that I grew up in, if you said something, if you acted in a certain way, you had to back it up — and that meant being physical. It didn’t mean you had to win all your fights, but it meant you had to be willing, with your body, to back up what you were saying. I trust the body. I trust pleasure, I trust pain. You can muck around with those a little, but after a while they win. They tell you. They’re the boss. The political group MOVE features prominently in Two Cities. Could you talk about the relationship between physical movement and political movement? I recently had a letter from a woman in prison for whom I was providing a kind of independent-study course. She’s doing a degree at Antioch, a
