Tag: language

There’s a moment in Kidd Pivot’s Revisor where someone exposes an atrocity by presenting “extensive abstract physical evidence” in the form of a dance solo, and it works. When I watch someone move their body, I can sense in my body how that would feel. We can communicate abstract things that way, and we can have a shared understanding without language.

I knew this before, but the phrase “abstract physical evidence” comes in handy surprisingly often.

(Revisor is streaming on Marquee if you need some dance theatre about corruption, comedy, and the relationship between language and the body.)

Anyway I think about “extensive abstract physical evidence” in relation to ME/CFS a lot.

A disease that doesn’t even have a satisfying name so we put two flawed names together with a slash, a disease where it’s not defined by specific symptoms so much as the meta pattern of how symptoms come and go, a disease where nobody knows the root problem or how to explain how all the symptoms and patterns fit together. A disease where we have fatigue “but different from normal fatigue”, where “malaise” can be life-threatening and “exertion” can mean something as small as perceiving light.

Just a trainwreck of inadequate language, and yet, people with ME manage to know so much about the situation in, like, an abstract physical way.