Log: Embodiment

Yesterday we visited Paphos for the first time.

As we drove up to the city, it gleamed under the noon sun, all clad in white and spread out along the deep blue Mediterranean coast. It’s smaller than Limassol, also hillier, and a bit perplexing. A challenging place, I realize it now.

There are angular buildings from the 90s or early 2000s, there are others that look newer and are all resorts, and it all lies on top of ruins and limestone. There are hills, elevators, and an old town populated with cotton candy-colored shops, freshly painted, on some streets, on others the buildings feel almost abandoned. I turned a corner and encountered a huge image of the Eiffel Tower inside a courtyard that is labeled “Ibrahim’s Khan.” The grey-stoned mosque is nearby. Some tavernas are lively and full, but the streets still feel somehow hollow and empty, it’s Saturday. On the roads, cars fight for space around rotundas, and it seems suddenly like that’s where everyone is, in their cars, going somewhere, if not in a taverna.

Our visit to Paphos was motivated by the Tombs of the Kings, a major archaeological site and necropolis for the wealthy and powerful of the late BCs. Stone cut niches once filled with Hellenistic or Ptolemaic sarcophagi and treasure now house pigeons, which are native to Western Asian stone, along with the recently arrived Asian hornets. They house a damp and dusty darkness too, it’s an emptiness that feels dense. Uncanny in its weight, as if the dark voids that were carved into the earth were not empty at all.

And it’s because they aren’t, there’s always something floating around us that we can’t see—oxygen, carbon dioxide, dust, UV rays, PM2.5.

What fascinates me that most about visiting archaeological sites is how the experience deconstructs a sense of normalcy; something that can also happen in a classroom, especially when studying history, astronomy, literature. But at a site, it happens in a very physical way. Suddenly, I am standing at the edge of this hole in the ground, and I see doric columns below me, rising up as if holding up the rock and ground that I stand on.

To borrow a cliché, my perspective is shifted, literally. The usual rules of the game, on how to interact with a building or a space, are challenged. As much as the exposure to different narratives through books and film and conversations serves to challenge our preconceptions, there is something about movement—moving through a space and experiencing distances, heights, depths differently—that hits home differently. It’s a very visceral reminder of the vastness of pretty much everything: the planet, history, culture, microbiology, outer space, which is fun to encounter on what is a “small” island like Cyprus.

Ever since I took a history class on Salsa music and dance a few years back, I’ve been noticing how the concept of “embodiment” pops up from time to time. And if I really think about it, my undergraduate capstone course on Cervantes' short stories also had these body-centered themes, it's what I wrote my paper on for that class. For context, I grew up very "mind" centered, which has gradually changed throughout my early adulthood. So it's interesting to think very deliberatively about what it means to be "in" a body or to be a body (and that's a whole discussion in it of itself), especially in thinking about how movement can be an act of knowledge-making or knowledge-sharing (something we usually associate exclusively with "the mind"). And what about storytelling? I also find it interesting how controlling movement can be a powerful tool in the hands of authorities, and how encouraging certain types of movements can also foster collective myths—thinking of Youth Groups in Nazi Germany or cults that have their members do physical labor or specific types of sport. And well, there is a reason that movement is also social, cultural, political, like the labor or the feminist movement.

Moving around Cyprus has been very interesting (especially without owning a car). Yesterday, we ended our latest mini-trip, daylight fading fast, at a curving pebbly beach, which myths tell is the birthplace of Aphrodite.

- Andrea