Conversation with the editor of Waking Paralysis in the comments on what was to be the final pre-copyedit draft: he suggests I consider cutting a line that describes roadside sellers of grilled maize as “squatt[ing]”. “[I]f the corn is grilled near the ground, perhaps it’s accurate”—even so it might strike some readers as pejorative.
I try to make life easy for editors. But in this instance—perhaps it was the end of a long day—my response was a bit combative.
I’ve given this thought, and I’d like to keep squatted. To change it would be to whitewash the scene. In much of the world, squatting remains the modal posture of static wakefulness. When I was teaching in Shanghai, in 2018, one day I had the students working in small groups and I was circulating. At one point I squatted down next to one of the groups. One of my students expressed surprise that I could hold a squatted posture. She associated an inability to squat with whiteness. This was an educated urban 20-year-old. Anyone who takes offense at the suggestion that people squat needs to ask themselves why they consider it derogatory.
Forms of the verb squat appear, I see, twenty-two times in the 79,000-word text.
Standing, squatting, sitting, lying down: consider how gravity shapes your days. I think of learning to stand in heavy surf as a child—for my partner, perhaps, it would be learning to walk in the mountains or the slot canyons where she grew up. I can only speak from the experience of this one limited body with its vestibular asymmetry and its inability to localize sound, but I sense that learning to manage gravity is among the key dimensions of becoming present to the world (an earlier draft had becoming a self). Think of learning to wear clothes, the discomfort of the weight of them—not the compressive force of clothes that hug the body but simply the added mass they represent, the added load. This is the kind of thing we forget—forget not just the sensation but the fact that we have experienced it—but you can recover it, a bit, by learning to wear an unfamiliar article of clothing later on. Skirts say, which, especially if you have no hips, pull on the waist, the weight of the thing making itself felt in way that is not the case—at least for me, at this point—with trousers.
What I am groping for is an ecology of huts, an account of how we are shaped by spaces where everything is within reach, you simply have to stretch and twist, deforming your body to meet the space now in one direction, now in another, perhaps learning, at length, to experience the structure as a kind of everted extension of the body: you learn to know where everything is by the posturokinematic sensation evoked by the act of retrieving it, or by the memory of that sensation. The artist and boatbuilder Simon Penny has described his workshop—rather, the series of spaces he has used, over the course of a forty-year career, as workshops—in this way. Setting up a workshop, for Penny, is, among other things, about arranging tools and parts so he can retrieve whatever he needs without having to look.
One place to start, if you are looking to formulate an ecology of huts, is with film. I think of the films of Hirokazu Kore-eda, Still Walking (2008) and Shoplifters (2018) in particular. Still Walking consists mainly of scenes of a family hanging out at Obon, eating, making corn fritters, chatting, enduring the damp heat of the Kantō coast, late summer, grieving the memory of an eldest son who, some ten or fifteen years ago at this time of year, drowned saving a child caught in the rip. All along, of course, they are passively rehearsing old grievances and inventing new ones: the dead son’s mother, Toshiko Yokoyama (Kirin Kiki), loses no opportunity to let her second son’s partner, Yukari, know she regards the younger woman as used goods by virtue of having a child from a previous marriage.
Shoplifters depicts an improvised family of Tokyo outcasts, held together by Nobuyo and Osamu (Sakura Ando and Lily Franky). Years ago they had a bar, but this life ended when Osamu killed Nobuyo’s abusive husband and they were obliged to drop off the map. They occupy an old machiya in a neighborhood otherwise rebuilt in concrete apartment blocks, having come to an arrangement with the elderly owner, Hatsue (again the marvelous Kirin Kiki). Hatsue has taken in Aki, the granddaughter by an extramarital relationship of her deceased husband—the young woman, perhaps eighteen, is estranged from her parents. Nobuyo and Osamu have been raising an abandoned boy, Shota, now eleven or twelve, as their own. When the film starts, a girl of four or five, Yuri, abused and neglected by her parents, follows Osamu and Shota home from one of their shoplifting forays. What is improvised here is not just the relationships and the ways of getting a living—Hatsue extorts support from Aki’s parents, Osamu deliberately injures himself on a job site for the cash payment he knows the contractor will provide, Aki works as a booth girl—but the postural habits that come with sharing cramped quarters with people on different schedules and at different stages of life.
The films of Tsai Ming-liang are good for thinking about posture too, particularly his late work: Stray Dogs (2013), Days (2020), Afternoon (2015), the last consisting of four extended takes, filmed from a single camera setup, Tsai and his longtime partner and lead, Lee Kang-sheng, sitting in salvaged lounge chairs, mid-century modern, low to the ground, positioned in a corner of an unrenovated part of an old apartment block they’d bought in the mountains outside Taipei. The floor is covered in sand, plaster, leaf litter from the trees growing in through the unglazed windows. What visual interest the film holds derives from the subtle changes in light as the afternoon unfolds and from the way Lee and Tsai hold and shift their bodies: crossing their legs at the knee, flexing their toes, now resting an arm on the back of the chair, now slouching a bit, allowing the chairs to do the work of managing gravity for them.
Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1964 adaptation of Kōbō Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes is particularly instructive, as the bulk of the film plays out at the foot of a sand pit whose occupants, played by Kyōko Kishida and Eiji Okada, are obliged to spend their nights shoveling the sand that threatens continually to bury their home. Gravity is practically a character in the film. Okada’s vacationing schoolteacher, initially delighted at the prospect of spending a night in what he takes for a traditional fisherman’s home, everything low to the ground and within arm’s reach, soon learns that he is not free to leave, that he has been entrapped by the village headman and his cronies into becoming one of them. The village’s sole source of revenue is the sale of the sand excavated by its lower-status households in their nighttime labors to a criminal syndicate active in the building trade, which realizes a profit by mixing the sand with cement used in the construction of the multistory concrete structures that form the fabric of an urbanizing Japan: thus does gravity recoup its loss, as the buildings built with adulterated cement are prone to collapse.
Perhaps no recent filmmaker has explored the ecology of huts more thoughtfully than Kelly Reichardt, particularly in First Cow (2019), which was influenced by Teshigahara and by Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1953 Ugetsu, with its scenes of Azuchi–Momoyama era (1568–1600) pottery life: seated at the wheel, crouching to enter the kiln, squatting in the market, one’s wares spread out before one. Reichardt’s use of an Academy (4:3) frame, as opposed to the anamorphic formats typical of frontier scenarios, represents part of a broader choice to depict colonization as a domestic phenomenon, one dominated by activities that mobilize the lower back and hips: fetching water, splitting wood, lighting the stove, catching fish with a net, checking a line of squirrel traps, scaling trees, milking a cow. Her protagonists, played by Orion Lee and John Magaro, spend much of their time holed up in their lean-to in recumbent postures: Cookie (Magaro) reclining in a chair at the table, whisking a bowl of oilycake batter, King Lu (Lee) propped in a corner, struggling to see a path from their trading fort confectionary operation to opening a hotel in San Francisco. The clothes they wear—henleys, camp-collared vests, trousers loose in the upper block—embody a tradeoff between the need to layer against the oceanic climate of the Oregon coast and the need to be mobile in the trunk and limbs. Clothes that restrict rotation of the hips, waist, thoracic cage, shoulders, and neck—breeches, greatcoats, cravats, vests that fasten across the sternum—are the province of the Chief Factor and his rival the Admiralty captain, men who have other bodies at their disposal to do their chores for them. The clothes of the Coast Salish combine tunics and skirts of plaited cedar bark with the knit woolens and woven cotton garments of the dismally numerous newcomers.
It strikes me now how First Cow thematizes the tradeoffs that come with going clothed. When we first meet King Lu, his mobility has been compromised by the loss of his clothing. Pursued by a party of trappers after killing one of their number in self-defense, he has been obliged to flee without pausing to dress. His nakedness makes it unsafe for him to be discovered by others in the forest, and when he encounters Cookie, out foraging for supper for a different party of trappers, he asks the other man to feed and hide him. Shortly King Lu’s nakedness proves an advantage when he is able to swim to safety, eluding the party of trappers out to kill him without drawing the attention of the second party of trappers that has, unwittingly, been sheltering him. Later, once more on the run, he is obliged to swim clothed, and the energetic burden this imposes on his body—the thermal conductance of water is twenty times that of air, and we expend a lot of energy generating heat to warm and dry ourselves—contributes indirectly to his death, leading him to sleep at a moment when vigilance is called for. When, at one point in his second flight, he asks a Coast Salish boatman to ferry him across the Columbia River, the price ends up being the buttons of his coat.
