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The Iconic Body Waits at the Bar:
A List of Evolutionary Dysmorphia
Sarah Blackman
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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents
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1.
The Pregnant Body
2.
The Body that is Ill with a Scourge (cancer, plague, syphilis that blooms on the face, the golden nose, the rotten jaw) recognizable, marked, feared by populace as opposed to by individual.
The populace fears in waves. What is communicable. What reveals private practices. The populace fails to consider ill luck (a singular encounter with hidden pathogen) and requires, instead, causality.
The populace fears so well that there are certain words it will not say. Words it replaces with nicknames or whispers or euphemism.
The French Disease instead of syphilis.
Accident instead of suicide.
Sick Somewhere Below the Belt is what my squeamish real estate agent said instead of testicular cancer.
Evolutionarily, this is understandable. When we live in a cyclical geometry (a pack, say, loping through the grass lands) it is necessary, if not easy, to isolate those who fall to disease, those who can no longer hunt, those whose aberrant behavior makes them detrimental to pack well-being.
This after other options have been exhausted. The pack relates its sense of self to its sense of the other. The pack is because it is all together.
When the grass land becomes a city. When the pack grows so large it cannot recognize all its members. Or, when there is only one pack; a vast heaving pack that has grown too immense to organize itself to the hunt.
Evolutionarily, the pack must now anticipate secret causality (private deprivation or perversion) because the mission of the pack is to ensure the survival of the young.
“Do not lick or touch or smoke or drink or huff or fuck or step off the curb or lay in one place too long or let yourself get caught. If you are caught, do not resist. If you must resist, do not scream rape, but fire.”
Why are the young in the bar with us? Why are the lights in here so bright?
3.
The Wasted Body is an Iconic Body in that the source of its weakness can be pathologized.
4.
A Victim’s body is an Iconic Body if the victimization was sufficiently grand in scale and sufficiently well documented.
(Armenia; Holodomor; Rape of Nanking; The Holocaust; The Cultural Revolution; The Khmer Rouge; Rwanda; Darfur; Iraq; Syria; Gaza; ; )
Incomplete lists are documented by pictures of bodies stacked like lumber, bodies flung in heaps; children with blown bellies; a mother beside her five children all wrapped in sheets, the smallest one laying with its head at her feet. Any Body can see these pictures. They are available for speculation and comparison. My young are not stacked like cordwood, flung in heaps, lying wrapped in a sheet in the mud. The pack can say this after looking at these pictures. Though, of course, some of the young are all these things. This is a part of the concept of the Evolutionary Pack that is too large for the individual members of the pack to intuit.
Outside of the Iconic Body, outside of the figure of this essay, I, too, admit that my young are not stacked like cordwood, flung in heaps, lying wrapped in a sheet in the mud. My young are at after-school camp, learning karate, climbing to the top of the jungle gym. I look at pictures on the internet to assure myself of this. I weep. I weep. I go pick up my young from the YMCA and sing them songs as I drive them home.
5.
A Self-Harming body is an Iconic Body as it denies itself comfort, food, rest, satiety. It shows its scars. It puts its scars on Instagram. Sometimes, when it is older, it gets tattoos over its scars but they are still there. As is the nature of the scar.
To mark, as in, to hold a place. A permanent thumb in the book. What was the story? Where did the telling break off? If the story interrupted is grand in scale (perhaps even Evolutionary) can it be resumed along the line where the scar peters out? Where the blade lifted, the skid ended, the tooth broke, the flame was doused?
If so, does the story resume unchanged? A clearing of the throat. Ahem. Excuse me. Where was I?
6.
The Desired Body is an Iconic Body.
7.
The Child’s Body is an Iconic Body.
8.
The Disabled Body is an Iconic Body.
9.
The Pregnant Body is an Iconic Body.
10.
How to define the Iconic Body.
The Iconic Body is one whose condition contains a causality apparent to the Evolutionary Pack.
Causality enforces worth. IE: Desired Body = Health and Reproductive Accessibility; Child’s Body = Lack of Threat, Psychic Vulnerability, Fetish, Tchotchke; Disabled Body = Object Lesson or = Object; Pregnant Body = Sexual Disengagement, Future Vessel, Warning Shot.
This very day the Iconic Body, who is in a different city from the one it normally inhabits, has twice observed a second Iconic Body which is male, both legs amputated above the knee, one arm amputated mid-bicep. The Observed Iconic Body is navigating the ice buckled streets of this foreign city by skateboard. The Iconic Body has observed his mode of transportation but not as clearly his face because the Iconic Body does not know how to navigate this gaze without looking in a way that seems to exploit the Observed Iconic Body’s inability not to be seen. However, not to look means not to see. This is a problem the Iconic Body is mulling over, at the bar, as it waits for what is supposed to begin here to begin. Other Bodies (undoubtably some Iconic) will be on stage in a moment. A sort of a stage cleared out by removing chairs and tables from a space on the sticky floor and setting up a microphone. The microphone is currently being set up. It wobbles. It whines.
If not looking means never seeing then the Iconic Body is complicit in erasure. If looking means exploiting through the satiation of curiosity, the development of causal implication, the reinforcement of the Observed Iconic Body as a marker of social progress or retrograde and not at all the property/identity/housing for the non-Iconic human who does not perhaps wish to but cannot avoid being observed, then the Iconic Body would like not to partake but does not know how to signal avoidance of partaking and so fumbles awkwardly with her own face. Look up, look down, smile, observe the sky. All this reinforces the Iconic Body’s lack of visible lack. Addition, rather, as the iconography of this Body, her Body (my body) is generative. The Pregnant Body, belly button beginning to pop.
(But his face, in a glimpse was rather raddled, was it not? Was there or was there not a certain bashed-up quality to the kind of life he might previously have lived? And then previous to what? His disability? Does one then conjecture that disability is in-and-of itself a climactic moment which automatically seems to relate it to comeuppance or consequence which automatically seems to relate it to punishment? This is incorrect. Demonstrably incorrect in that no body is a consequence but only a body. No body is a moral to a story.)
Recently, the Iconic Body has begun to feel the fetus move. It moves like fishes. It is very close to being a fish. Still. Evolution is not linear. Though what does she know (I know) what does a Body know other than: I am here and sometimes I am we.
11.
The nursing mother’s body is not Iconic. It is too varied, too dependent on a third party (the baby). The body of the nursing mother is utilitarian. It functions as a tool functions, though an awkward tool that leaks and sweats, that bolts out of bed at the baby’s gummy cry so suddenly it tangles its feet in the sheets and crashes to the floor, startling everyone: the baby, the mate, the sleeping companion animals who race from the room in alarm and then keep racing for the joy of that alarm in their otherwise untranslatable lives.
The Iconic Body, at the bar, waiting for the poetry reading to begin, worrying about the Observed Iconic Body which did not worry in the slightest about it, is both a nursing body and a pregnant body. Only one of these shapes is Iconic. The other (because it leaks, sprays, is sucked in a convulsive consumptive way; because it is consumed;) is merely embarrassing. The nursing mother body is embarrassing because it engages in sexo-capital (it is exposed, it is erect, it is sucked) but disregards the value of the sexo-capital (porn commerce) that takes place within, around, upon the body part in question. The breasts which, nursing baby having been left at the hotel with the Iconic Body’s mate, are pricking now with milk that wants to be drained. Drawn into the puckered mouth. Lapped at by the soft, pink tongue.
Conversely, the Pregnant Iconic Body—which is now being scowled at as it sips from a wine glass (so late in the term the baby within can withstand a little of the world the Iconic Body thinks)—is engaged in a contract. It is valued as the consummation of the sexual act and as a place holder for presumed ownership.
“I am now going to read a series of poems about my vagina,” says a body that has seated itself behind the microphone. It has a tablet glowing on its lap. It spiders its fingers across the tablet’s surface and smiles as the members of the Evolutionary Pack represented in the room laugh. “Also other people’s vagina’s,” says the body behind the microphone and the Iconic Body thinks of her own vagina, the baby in the hotel’s vagina, the baby inside of her uterus’ vagina, none of which are the vagina’s the body behind the microphone means to enact on this small, sticky stage, as the event the Iconic Body has been waiting for begins.
12.
The ownership that is presumed as a result of the Pregnant Iconic Body has something to do with the mate (this in a hetero-normative context which is the default because this is commerce of which we speak) and something to do with the baby-to-be. The baby within. A part of the Pregnant Iconic Body is presumed to be owned. If the ownership is enacted by the mate the part is the vagina. If the ownership is enacted by the baby within the ownership is both more vague and more total. There is a certain amount of physical comedy inherent in the Pregnant Iconic Body. The Evolutionary Pack holds its breath, kind of/sort of hoping for a pratfall.
The hetero-porno gaze, which is the primary gaze of sexo-capital, is very interested in parts. Not so much interested in the whole. This is where the popularity of the up-skirt shot comes in. Remember, in the early part of this century when the famously beautiful girls who had become famously (scornful/troubled/flirtatious/fuckable) women spread their long expensive legs as they levered themselves out of the back seats of cars to reveal handspans of inner thigh topped by the tight little smile of a freshly shaved vagina? It was the part we looked for and at. The forbidden part we were allowed to glimpse. The expensive part we could look at for free but never touch.
Remember how excited the part of the Evolutionary Pack most vocal on the internet became when these famously beautiful children became officially adults and thus legal in the parlance of the times but still too expensive and too far away except for the tight little part we could glimpse for free? How excited consumers of the sexo-captial were to legally be allowed to fuck even if not ever, no chance, never chosen to fuck by the owner of the part in question?
The Pack is large, however; almost inconceivably so. Included in this complex economic negotiation (what could be versus what is possible to be) are those pack members who would not touch, who thought they were children still in spite of their documented age, who recognized in the shaved head and brandished umbrella that came only a little later a familiar grim-knuckled grip on a world that was whirling away so fast so fast.
Those of the pack who recognized parts of our own bodies (the brain is a body, the self is a body) in the parts of the famously scornful/troubled/flirtatious/fuckable women of the early 21st Century were still capitalizing on the parts. We purchased them glimpse by glimpse because we do not know how to see without purchase. Our eyes are extensions of our bank accounts. Our bank accounts are symbols of our pack status. Without them, our pack cannot recognize us. If we get to the home cave after everyone else and without bank account, we will be torn to pieces, each part carried off separately, each part made fetish by its severance and/or eventual decay.
13.
The vagina poet has finished her poems. The Iconic Body thinks they were good. She examines good. They made her feel something inside herself that was neither herself nor the baby within. They made her bubble up in a way that could have been a laugh or something more dangerous. This is good. That is good. “She was good,” the Iconic Body says to the bartender who shrugs.
The Iconic Body takes another itty-bitty sip of its wine. Recently, due to the double demands of nursing and brewing, the Iconic Body’s teeth have become loose in its mouth; its hair has started to come out in clumps. Nutritionally, her doctor has said the Iconic Body is not yet a disaster. “The fetus will take what it needs,” said the doctor. “You could nurse them both after the fetus is born.” The Iconic Body imagines both of the bodies of her children separate from her own but connected to her own by the thread of milk that issues from her nipples. She imagines that thread unspooling longer and longer as they go further from her body into their own separateness. Forever? Could I nurse them forever? the Iconic Body wonders, but she knows she could not. There is a limit to her extension. At a certain point the connection between the Iconic Body’s body and her children’s’ bodies will snap. But why should this be? Why should there be limits to our intent, our influence, our care? Why should there be limits to our selves?
14.
When pregnant, the Iconic Body reads about genocides. It reads about eco-disaster, climate change, unsolved murders of children, the bodies stacked like cordwood, the lonelier ones interred under the floorboards of a house. This is an evolutionary strategy. The Iconic Body believes that is she is scorched so close to her living pith by these horrors there will be nothing left to hurt. If she cannot be hurt then there is no need to take anything from her. Not her mate. Not her sleeping baby. Not the baby within who turns now and presses one assertive heel or elbow against the rosy wall of the Iconic Body’s interior.
A second poet has moved onto the stage. This poet is male, his poems are angry but he, because male, is wary of the appearance of anger and instead opts for wryness. This is not ‘good,’ in the Iconic Body’s estimation. It makes her feel something inside her that does not shiver, but lays like glop. A wad of sputum. A mucus plug.
Why should there be limits to our selves?
Why shouldn’t the male poet’s anger and the female poet’s animated vaginas occupy the same air at the same time and with the same intensity?
If the male poet was writing about animated vaginas and the female poet writing about anger the Iconic Body’s assessment would shift because a part one does not have is a part one can purchase. The female poet knows her subject (vaginas) because she has one herself whereas the hypothetical male poet can only know his subject (hypothetical vaginas) in purchased glimpses? However, come to think of it, without the purchased glimpse who is to know or say or assert or care what is hidden by the female or the male poet’s clothing? And is a glimpse freely given, a glimpse that lingers into a gaze, a gaze that lengthens into an entire afternoon of 100% off exploration, does this still indicate a part unknown or merely a proximal part, unowned but concurrent?
The ownership of the part or feeling in question vs. the perceived appropriation of the part or feeling in question is only a matter of presumption on the part of the audience or assertion on the part of the self.
Which means the extension of the body does, indeed, go on forever.
By my intention I make for myself a penis, says the poet’s assertion of maleness. By my intention I recite vaginas I have known, says the poet’s assertion of femaleness. Though this does not explain why the male poet cannot extend his anger because he has asserted his maleness. In the pack, anger is a defense not an offense. To save the food or the cubs or the shelter. Perhaps then the metaphor is incorrect.
Not a pack but a hive.
Not a lack of recognition based on distance or unfamiliarity with the way the Unknown Body presents itself, but rather a lack of instant accessibility to thought (lack of the Hive Mind) necessary for communication through process rather than chemical reaction. Is it language? Language that keeps us apart?
The Pregnant Iconic Body thinks this and lifts her glass. Someone at her elbow stirs but does not speak. The Pregnant Iconic Body feels the wash of their gaze (actual? imagined?) and puts down her glass. “Water?” she mouths to the bartender, who is young and female and tired and doesn’t like poetry, but who nods and fills the glass.
15.
The elderly body is not an Iconic Body.
Why not?
The Evolutionary Pack knows the underlying condition of age, has experienced within its pack-self the aged and within its individual-self the experience of aging. There is no causal warning attending the elderly body, however. Only a sort of mawkishness. The Evolutionary Pack will not venerate what it cannot dismiss. The elderly body is not dismissed from the Pack but is subsumed by the pack. Reabsorbed. In the Evolutionary Hive this process is similar. The body fails, the body’s nutrients are redistributed, the body’s remains are discarded, the next body is born. Sometimes all those fallen bodies are rolled up into a ball and pushed out the hive’s front door. C’est la vie, the hive drones. Below, a presbytery of robins scuffles happily through the waste.
16.
(The Iconic Body wishes it was having dinner with women tonight. It wishes it was talking to women about being inside a woman’s body and writing poetry from that inside. Also about value vs. worth and about consumption vs. commerce. There are plenty of women with her in this bar. Some of them have even brought their young, older young than the Iconic Body’s own young who is hours asleep by now, tucked back into herself in a shape reminiscent of the shape she made when she was the baby within. Yet, the Iconic Body cannot join them. It is a stranger here. It would be odd (particularly after the vagina poems) and, anyway, the Iconic Body is not, right now, a woman’s body but a Pregnant Iconic Body which is different re: ownership; re: commerce.)
17.
The Iconic Body of the Scourge Sufferer is about social symbiosis. The Evolutionary Pack lives with its diseases. With its suffering. The Evolutionary Pack fears communicability, but if the sufferer is not communicable than the value of their suffering is statistical, not causal. To the body who is well, the Iconic Body of the Scourge Sufferer is valuable because of their visibility. The sight of their illness makes it less likely, in the Evolutionary Pack’s estimation, that a witnessing member of the pack is also a current sufferer of scourge.
However, scourge is often invisible, unannounced. It is most frightening that way. There is great relief for the Evolutionary Pack at the sight of the Iconic Body of a Scourge Sufferer because it renders the frightful invisible into a manageable world of curiosity and superstition. The Iconic Body is aware statistics do not work this way. There is a woman at the Iconic Body’s baby’s preschool who wears bandanas of different colors over a hairless head. She has no eyebrows, no eyelashes. “Cancer?” the Iconic Body has thought. “Alopecia?” The hairless woman at the Iconic Body’s baby’s preschool has her own baby who she picks up with vigor and into whose mouth she blows her own laughing breath.
The Evolutionary Hive suffers Scourge differently. Instantly communicable suffering has the effect of instantly communicable absorption. One Hive Member’s suffering is all Hive Member’s suffering. One Hive Member’s Scourge is all Hive Member’s Scourge. This is why there must be so many hives, so many members. The Evolutionary Hive cannot admit individuality because the individual is by definition a disorder. A disorder within a Hive is a threat. Hive’s are most susceptible not to attack from the outside but to disorder from within. Re: bees. Sub-re: cancer.
The Iconic Body would not like to take comfort from other body’s misfortune. The Iconic Body would not like to categorize other peoples’ identities as misfortune. The Iconic Body would not like to be in this bar, she would not like to be in this bar RIGHT NOW, but she has come to this bar for an event that is only half over and asked her mate to watch the baby and outside it is beginning to snow.
18.
“I’m going to start with a poem written in the fifteenth century,” says the third poet body to take the sticky stage. “Then, I’m going to sing a song.”
19.
There is something wrong within the Iconic Body. The wrongness is within its brain which it counts as a part of its body. Not wrong. There is something complex, a complexity. Sometimes this complexity fills the Iconic Body with so much joy it shakes and has to pull the car over and call out to the baby which is turned around backwards behind her, “Look! Look! All the trees are in bloom.” Sometimes this complexity allows the Iconic Body to know that within her is a shivering cold light that pushes outward toward the extremities where it jitters and makes a high whining buzz. Sometimes this complexity fills the Iconic Body with rage, or causes it to know an acquaintance is trying to push it down the stairs, or allows it to move so quickly it cannot stop moving, or fills the back of its throat with viscous clog so all of the Iconic Body’s emotions stick there and choke it.
(La la la la la la la la.
This is the poet body’s song.)
When the Iconic Body was a child she counted to five and every time she got to five she knew another unique creature on the earth had become extinct. David Attenborough had told the Iconic Body (who was, at the moment, inhabiting the Iconography of Childhood) this fact on his nature program. The Iconic Body imagined the unique creature’s antenna and claws, scales and gills, false eyes, glistering carapace. It counted to five. All night, the Iconic Body did this staring up at its childhood ceiling glowing with stars.
20.
The Scourge Sufferers Iconic Body is valued for the perception of its bravery: a copper coin of bad luck and stoicism. The Scourge Sufferers Iconic Body is brave because it is doomed. Not this year, but next year. Not next year, but in five years. So brave to walk around doomed. To blow laughing air into a baby’s mouth.
The Pregnant Iconic Body blooms around it a big, boozy iconography while the Scourge Sufferer’s Body is brave as an egg. Fragile, naked and smooth. Iconography is not leakage (re: the nursing mother’s body). Rather, it is packaged in static forms which depend on a fluid state for their iconographic identity. The Scourge Sufferer’s Iconic Body depends on the present reality of suffering. When the Sufferer heals or dies their body no longer contains iconography. The Pregnant Iconic Body is similarly denuded when the baby is expelled. Iconic Bodies exist in a permanent temporary now. The Child Iconic Body will age; the Desired Body will pucker or sag; the Disabled Body will pass out of the field of vision. The Evolutionary Pack does not look sideways. It has evolved beyond peripheral vision and now stares only straight ahead. The man on the skateboard traveled from the left side of the Iconic Body’s field of vision to the right. When he passed out of its field of vision the Iconic Body did not turn its head.
21.
Not to look is polite? Not to see is erasure? Not to polite is to see? Not to erase is to look?
22.
A note: Sections 1 through 22 were written by hand in tiny letters on a file folder that once contained within it the Iconic Body’s notes for a presentation it had given earlier that day. The presentation was about teaching or nursing or writing or the words that are written. It is un-remembered. Sections 1 through 23 were written at the bar with the wine beside barely sipped, the water beside filled and refilled, the poets beside flickering like liquid crystals turning to filter the constant wash of blinding backlight. We are all cilia, the Body thinks now; no longer Iconic. Thirteen years have passed. The file folder was shoved in a tote bag, stored in an overhead compartment, dropped into a cabinet, compressed under folded blankets (baby swaddler, baby quilt, crocheted baby afghan, quilt made of baby clothes), dug out again and typed against the steady wash of blinding backlight because there is something here. Is there something here? In desperation: to see and to be seen. To see and to not be seen.
Section 23 is something new. Will be. In desperation: the body ceded. What grows in it now is wholly unknown and thus less demanding. It does not have to be named. It does not carry with it the joy of its naming.
Section 24 is not a diagnosis. It is merely the future. The Body is now, now, right now. It has never been any other way.
23.
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I began this essay thirteen years ago, in a bar, while pregnant, thinking what what what is this body that I have and who is in it? Coming back to the language of then with the mind of now (that baby is newly a teenager, that body is unfamiliar in different ways) I was struck by how the act of listing created both sequence within the scope of my thoughts then and communication to my thoughts now. Like the alphabet, a list creates some security. Something precedes. Something will follow. Simple enough, until one gets to the end, I suppose. Just like life.
Sarah Blackman teaches creative writing at the Fine Arts Center, a public arts high school in Greenville, South Carolina. Recent work has appeared in The Yale Review, Zoetrope, and the anthology Significant Objects 2026: Season One. Her third book, Nobody's Here, is forthcoming from FC2 in March of 2027.
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