The Body In Motion
There is a particular quality of stillness that arrives sometimes when a man has been on the table for twenty or thirty minutes and has stopped managing himself. I notice it because it is different from sleep and different from relaxation in the ordinary sense. It is more like the stillness of a body that has stopped performing and simply is.
The face goes quiet in a specific way. The breath changes. And then, occasionally, without any prompting, a man would say something—not to me exactly, more to the room—that he would probably not have said anywhere else. One man, who had played rugby into his forties and whose body carried the accumulated history of that in ways I could read through my hands, said: “I was beautiful once, when I was running.” He paused. “Not handsome. Beautiful.”
I have thought about that word—beautiful—in the context of a man describing himself running, many times since. He did not say it with regret, or not primarily. He was making a distinction. Handsome was a social quality, a matter of features arranged pleasingly for other people’s inspection. Beautiful was something else: a quality of the body doing what it was made for, visible perhaps to others but not primarily for them. He was describing the experience of being in a body moving at full capacity. The beauty he was describing had an audience only incidentally.
I came across a document some time ago—private notes, apparently, of a man identified only as Count Percival el Ánade, dated 1879, and titled with characteristic dryness “On the Distinction of Sport.” He was Spanish by birth, English by adoption and inclination, and he wrote about watching men play sport with a candour that his century would not generally have permitted in print. “I tell myself that I watch in the spirit of the patron, the amateur anthropologist, the philanthropist even,” he writes at the end of the notes. “But the truth—well, the truth wears very little, and moves astonishingly well.”
I notice that the candour arrives at the end, after several pages in which it has been present throughout but dressed, like his athletes, in something more acceptable. This is not hypocrisy exactly. It is a kind of layering—the legitimate framing and the other thing kept in the same piece of writing, acknowledged obliquely throughout and named plainly only at the finish. The civic argument and the erotic response are not contradictions in his account. They inhabit the same sentence without apparent tension.
He writes about rugby: “It is Prometheus in muddy gaiters; it is the Renaissance nude repainted in sweat and bruises.” The comparison is not decorative. He is saying that what he sees in a rugby match is continuous with what he sees in Michelangelo or Titian—that the aesthetic experience of looking at male bodies in extremity is not categorically different depending on whether the bodies are marble or mud-covered and nineteen years old. An Anglican mystic he quotes, Agnes Crowthorpe, had written: “To touch the suffering of the strong is a manner of prayer.” He doesn’t dispute the formulation. He notes, with perfect accuracy, that he “conducts his devotions from a reclining chair.” His devotions are real. His posture gives away what they actually are.
The men who came to me included, over the years, a number who had been athletes—not professionally, mostly, but seriously. Swimmers, rowers, rugby players, a former sprinter. What I noticed in those men, almost without exception, was a particular relationship to their own bodies that the other men often lacked. They had spent years in bodies being used at full capacity, in changing rooms and training sessions where other male bodies were simply present, unremarkable, functional. The body, for them, was primarily something that did things rather than something that was assessed. Many of them arrived with considerably less of the hesitation—the half-buttoning pause, the brief covering gesture—that I saw in other men. They had been too long in bodies that were instruments to be easily distracted by the body as an object of inspection.
And yet several of them said things, at various points, that suggested the boundary between instrument and object was not as stable as it appeared. The man who said “beautiful, not handsome” was one of these. Another, a former swimmer, lay on the table and said, with what sounded like genuine surprise: “I never thought about what I looked like then. We just existed in those bodies. It’s only now I wonder what we were to each other.” He meant, I understood, his training group—twelve young men in a pool, five mornings a week for several years, in the abbreviated swimwear of competitive swimming. They had been to each other, for those years, bodies in motion. What they had been looking at, whether they had been looking at all, was a question he was apparently asking for the first time in his fifties.
The Count would have had thoughts about the pool. He is most animated in his notes on aquatic sport. “The competitive swimmer is an anatomist’s dream,” he writes; “everything is declared, every sinew legibly striving toward some invisible victory.” The word declared is careful. At the level of competitive swimming, the body makes no concessions to concealment—not because the swimmers have decided to reveal themselves but because the activity requires it. The declaration is functional. The Count’s response to it is not. He is not watching them swim. He is watching them, and they happen to be swimming.
He finances a regatta on the condition that the uniforms be of “continental cut.” The English protest. The result is, he reports, “exquisite.” There is something pure about this moment in the notes—a man who wants to see more of the bodies he finds compelling, using the available mechanisms of patronage to arrange the conditions of his own viewing, dressed as institutional support for athletic endeavour. The Thames gets its most devoted public. The rowers get their financing. The Count gets his afternoon. The arrangement works for everyone without anyone being required to say what it is.
I begin to wonder whether this kind of arrangement—the erotic response given a legitimate frame through which it can be expressed without being named—was not simply the Count’s personal ingenuity but a structural feature of the period’s relationship to the male body. Sport, in the late nineteenth century, was being institutionalised as a moral and civic project with considerable energy and very little acknowledgment of its other functions. The muscular Christianity movement, the athletic public schools, the Olympic revival—all of them framed the cultivation and display of the male body in terms of character, empire, national fitness, Christian virtue. The Count quotes from an 1878 issue of The Monthly Register of School Hygiene: “The cultivation of the physique is the foundation of every dignified ideal.” He tells us he underlined it twice, and notes with a precision I appreciate: “perhaps for reasons less hygienic than humane.”
The institutions that promoted sport did not require their benefactors and spectators to be the Count. Most of them weren’t. But the institutions created conditions under which the male body in motion was available for prolonged inspection in a context that framed the inspection as wholesome and civic. The Count was an outlier in candour, not in response.
What strikes me about his notes, alongside the experience of the men who came to me, is a phrase near the end that I keep returning to: “the body in motion is both instrument and music.” He is quoting or paraphrasing a poet friend in Cádiz, and the formulation was apparently considered too indecent to print in 1879. I do not think it reads as indecent now. It reads as accurate. The instrument is the functional body—the swimmer’s arms, the rugby player’s legs, the rower’s back at the catch. The music is what that instrument produces when it is doing what it was made to do: a quality of movement that is more than mechanics, that has something in it the observer receives as beauty rather than efficiency.
The man who played rugby into his forties was describing the music. He had been the instrument and, in retrospect, understood himself to have been the music as well. That the observation arrived on my table, thirty years after the fact, in a context quite different from a playing field, seems to me neither strange nor ironic. The body that had been beautiful in motion was the same body I was working with. The beauty had not transferred to some other location. It was still there, differently expressed, not performed for anyone including himself.
The Count’s notes end at a slight angle to everything that preceded them. He has been writing about civic virtue and institutional support for athleticism, with the other thing present throughout but not foregrounded. Then: “strength refines itself into grace; admiration discloses appetite; discipline succumbs, inevitably, to delight.” The verbs are a sequence—refines, discloses, succumbs—and they move in one direction. What arrives at the end, delight, has been there from the beginning. The civic framing has been doing what frames do: giving the content a context in which it can exist without requiring explanation.
I am not suggesting the Count’s enjoyment was the same thing as the experience of the men in the pool, or the rugby player’s memory of running. They are different positions in relation to the same phenomenon. What I notice is that the phenomenon—the male body in motion as something that produces in observers, and sometimes in the body itself, a response that is not purely instrumental—was present in all of them, and that none of the available languages of the relevant centuries was quite adequate to describe it without either eroticising it completely or stripping the erotic from it entirely.
The word beautiful, used by a man of the body he had in motion at nineteen, does some of the work. It holds the functional and the aesthetic in the same syllables without resolving them into either category. He was not describing himself as a sexual object. He was not describing himself as a piece of athletic equipment. He was describing a quality of being fully in a body doing what it was made for, and his word for that quality was beautiful, and he seemed slightly surprised, all these years later, that no other word would do.
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