Courtney Love allegedly named her band Hole after a line from Euripides’ Medea: “there’s a hole in my soul.”

One of my yoga teacher’s favorite queues is: “organize your pelvis.”

Openings, and our drives to fill them, are the propulsive engine of desire. Gaps between bones enveloped in fascia form the interior scaffolding of a body, which is also a record or index of experience. The fissures and unfinished edges. That is where the knowingness shines through. Like in Kristeva’s definition of the abject: the inside thrust outside, made unfamiliar by being laid bare.

Digits, vertebrae, hearts, udders, all spilling in the manner of something getting freer. Which is another way of saying dislodging. Encroaching into the cleanliness of geometry, penciled lines and measured angles. We are fossils awash in feeling. Accretions and secretions borne forth by digestion and gestation and decomposition. All organic forms deform. Bodies are a kind of durational media, archives of what we take in and what we close ourselves off from, negotiating permeability over time. Sometimes, transparency conceals more than it reveals. Penetrability is a cipher. It is not desirable to be excessively impervious, either. Ideally one lands somewhere between a mirror and a membrane. Bodies aspire to strip themselves of ill fitting roles and that’s all well and good. But don’t forget it: Love requires holes.

– Adina Glickstein