The Body Ecstatic

I’ve been doing CrossFit for seven years, but it feels like so much longer. I do it when I go home to my parents in Pennsylvania. I did it in New York, and it was the first thing I looked for when I moved to New Haven. The names of my coaches run in my mind: Chris, Ashlyn, Zack, Joe, Rivka, Jared, Mike. I once did a race known as the Ragnar, in which I ran 200 miles with eleven other CrossFitters (don’t worry, it’s a relay race) and on the mile-nine leg, which I ran at 3 a.m. through a deserted town, I experienced a sublime sensation of being nothing but a body. I get a diluted chunk of that feeling daily at CrossFit.

“What do I do when I bodybuild?” Kathy Acker asked in her 1993 essay “Against Ordinary Language: The Language of the Body.” She wrote about how difficult it was to capture the experience of exercise in language. Her solution was to write while she worked out:

I visualize and I count. I estimate weight; I count sets; I count repetitions. I count seconds between repetitions; I count time, seconds or minutes, between sets from the beginning to the end of each workout, in order to maintain intensity, I must continually count.

Acker proposed this minimal, repetitive language as “the bodybuilder’s language,” one that might also be called “the language of the body.” She could be describing my own experience of CrossFit: four squats / four squats / four squats.

Compared to the language of everyday speech, the language of the body is “an aural labyrinth” whose meaning derives not from its content, but from its repetition, and the difference that emerges from that monotony: “For though I am only repeating certain gestures during certain time spans, my body, being material, is never the same; my body is controlled by change and by chance,” Acker wrote. In this way, the monotony of exercise language—counting reps—provides access to our bodies in a way that regular language cannot. The body is like a house, Acker believed, a house with no exterior windows, dark and cool, its only windows facing inward onto a sunlit central courtyard:

This architecture is a mirror of the body. When I reduce verbal language to minimal meaning, to repetition, I close the body’s outer windows. Meaning approaches breath as I bodybuild, as I begin to move through the body’s labyrinths, to meet, if only for a second, that which my consciousness ordinarily cannot see.

I’m not a bodybuilder. If anything, my relationship to CrossFit is characterized by my antipathy to the aesthetic reign of bodybuilding; I love CrossFit because it’s about what my body can do, not what it looks like. Yet Acker’s description of exercise as meditation helped me get closer to understanding my relationship to CrossFit, which is inseparable from my relationship to my body, which is inseparable from my relationship to writing.

*

My first CrossFit gym was on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, and I followed it when it moved to Dean Street. I had just moved to Brooklyn after college, and I went to a free week. I loved how grueling the workout was and yet how much it didn’t feel like work. Again, it emphasized what my body could do rather than what it looked like, which was important for me as a gay man—I've always associated the gym with the specter of sex, almost involuntarily.

Although CrossFit has become known for its cultlike social atmosphere, I mostly appreciated how it modeled a kind of non-verbal togetherness. I spent weeks with people whom I saw every day, and yet I knew nothing of what they did outside the gym. My time with these people felt like a waking dream, heightened by the fact that I went to 7 a.m. classes, barely awake.

CrossFit is addictive. Whenever I go on vacation, I look for a gym like a junkie. I’ve been to gyms in Berlin, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Korea, Turkey and Japan. Although the discipline is distinctly American, I’ve been to many gyms in which English is not the operative language, and the most common members are not American, but “locals.” The social awkwardness of going to a new gym is a toll I’m willing to pay to get to access my required sense of oblivion. I often don’t speak the language, but the body is the lingua franca.

I once held my birthday party at that CrossFit gym on Atlantic Avenue. Chris, the owner, a kind of benevolent uncle or older-brother figure to me, was nice enough to let me host it there. If you haven’t been to a CrossFit gym, or “box,” they’re typically large, vacant spaces with lots of padded areas. It’s a great space for a party because it’s usually already outfitted with a speaker system and an empty dance floor.

I think about that party a lot. Sometimes when I’m in the midst of a workout, I try to infuse my actions with the idea that we’re all participating in a strange, synchronized ballet or some modern dance piece by Yvonne Rainer and that we’ve been asked to isolate various movements with our hands. CrossFit has a particular obsession with the idea of “functional movement,” and many of the actions translate to real-world activities: lifting a heavy box, raising something from the ground to above your head. With a bit of imagination, it’s not unlike the funny, minimalist dances of the ’60s and ’70s.

But in practice I like CrossFit because it gets me away from that kind of thinking, about theory, about language; I usually treat it as a kind of reprieve in the middle of days when I’m writing. It grants me access to parts of myself and my relationships and my eroticism that might later traverse the path of language.

*

For the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, exercise was a route to ecstatic oblivion. Mishima was a deeply eccentric figure, nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in Literature in the 1960s (“the Ernest Hemingway of Japan”), but as he aged he became a radically conservative proponent for Japanese isolationism with a troubled, perhaps closeted, relationship to his homosexuality.

My boyfriend, Ekin, introduced me to Mishima through the beautiful Paul Schrader film, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), which tells the story of the writer’s life through his short stories. Beauty, death and overexertion pervaded Mishima’s life—as did aesthetic rigidity, which led him into political extremism. Mishima climaxes in a dramatic re-enactment of his real-life suicide: On November 25, 1970, he and four members of his militia entered a military base in central Tokyo, taking its commandant hostage. After unsuccessfully trying to inspire the Japan Self-Defense Forces to rise up and overthrow Japan’s 1947 constitution, he gave a rambling speech, screamed, “Long live the Emperor!” and committed seppuku, a type of suicide believed to be honorable.

I am concerned by all of this (don’t worry), but I am also intrigued. A central tenet of Mishima’s thinking was a worship of the body that coexisted with a hatred of its fleshy earthliness. Muscle became a way of escaping humanity, of moving closer to God through the beauty of form. Of course, his obsession with the male form (almost a cliché at this point for closeted male modernists) was riven by contradiction. How could he escape humanity through an aesthetic standard valorized solely by humanity?

Mishima’s obsessive bodybuilding regimen is documented in multiple collaborative photobooks. In Barakei—Killed by Roses (1963) and Yukio Mishima: The Death of a Man (1970), he serves as the main model. He is good-looking, ripped and fabulously extra, almost always posing nude, draping his body across rocks, smoldering for the camera and flexing in a loincloth. But the images have an unsettling morbidity: In Death of A Man, he poses in various states of seppuku as a fisherman, a sailor, a samurai and other archetypes. It is an uncanny twist that in the months before Death of a Man was set to be published, Mishima took his own life.

In his 1968 manifesto-essay “The Sun and Steel,” he lays out the connections between his writing, the body and transcendence. In much the same way that Acker brings feminist politics into her bodybuilding essay only at the end—arguing that “the language of the body” might alleviate self-alienation, a view of our own bodies as “dangerous others”—Mishima also rarely speaks in direct politics. His interest is primarily in politics via aesthetics. He describes the kind of beauty, or brilliance, he hoped to achieve through his writing. “Later, much later, thanks to the sun and the steel, I was able to learn the language of the flesh, much as one might learn a foreign language. It was my second language, an aspect of my spiritual development.”

Unlike Acker, who sought a language of the body, Mishima wanted to free the body of language; writing was an “intellectual corrosion” responsible for his “abnormal bodily existence” and was best purged:

…the ideal body—the ideal existence—must, I told myself, be absolutely free from any interference by words. Its characteristics could be summed up as taciturnity and beauty of form.

Conversely, he laid out what he believed to be ideal writing:

I decided that if the corrosive power of words had any creative function, it must find its model in the formal beauty of this “ideal body,” and that the ideal in the verbal arts must lie solely in the imitation of such physical beauty—in other words, the pursuit of a beauty that was absolutely free from corrosion.

For a writer, Mishima was almost comically disdainful of words. Ecstatic oblivion could be experienced only through radical em-body-ment. A language of the flesh had to escape language, and the best writing was a perfect body.

All of this—Acker, Mishima, CrossFit—is very gay. Eroticism is the subconscious thread that runs through this discussion about bodies; it is what masculinity tries to ward off, what is elided in the gym. It is one of the key elements of my relationship to CrossFit. I hated high school sports because they were where my gayness was most at risk of being revealed. Nothing like being good at kicking a ball to portend the size of your penis, to indicate how well you can attract girls. It was all so evolutionary. And I was so bad at sports. No matter what my brain did, my body could never wield unselfconsciousness the way the other boys seemed to be able to.

CrossFit saved me from this. There are no winners or losers—it’s about achieving a state of harmony with your body. When I was no longer closeted but imprisoned within that other cell, the cell of gay body standards, CrossFit freed me again by emphasizing what my body could do over what it looked like.

*

The Holter monitor results came back with good news: no arrhythmia. But in losing the monitor I had also lost the newfound consciousness I had developed in listening to my heart.

The next time I am in New Haven I go to visit Jared. He’s the same. He’s recently purchased some Taylor Swift merch. A new person comes into the gym and Jared introduces him to the movements. He starts simple: squats, push-ups. I see how deeply unfamiliar the movements look on the new guy, how the sinews move in his legs. I’ve considered becoming a CrossFit coach myself, many times. I’ve heard that people enjoy it. I’d probably enjoy it. The workout starts.

Sometimes in therapy, I bemoan the fact that I’m able to analyze and name the emotions I feel in my body and yet I have trouble accepting them. I get disappointed with my therapist because she’s unable to give me physical exercises to deal with this problem, to understand the interior of my self—where it hurts and how it hurts—and then I remember that, for me, that’s what CrossFit does.

–

Simon Wu is a writer and curator. His first book of essays, Dancing on My Own, was released by Harper Collins in 2024.

Devlin Claro is a photographer based in New York.