Tachyphylaxis
Kimberly Campanello | Tolka Issue Seven, July 2025
The poets K and G live on neighbouring islands. They have never met, but they follow each other’s writing and know the look of each other’s haircuts, vacations, spouses, G’s child and K’s nieces and her friends’ children who chalk her garden walls, pots and statues with flowers, faces and I RULE. The two poets know the look of their mutual commitment to bodybuilding. The two poets write about traumatic historical and personal events. Rather than coming up with their own words, they locate language that has been used already to write or speak about these terrible things. They carefully separate parts of this language from the body of the texts, shaping it to reveal the form of what is really there, what is really felt.
Eventually another poet remarked upon their respective gym photos and suggested that K and G write about the body and its building. This sort of writing had been done before in a famous essay in which the writer says something like the tension between growth and destruction is how art is made. Someone else had written poems about men’s gym culture and sex. K and G aren’t sure what they might have to say about bodybuilding, about the particular pain that they bring upon themselves every other day, especially if they must say it in their own words, rather than the words of others. They decide to create a chat.
Their chat begins with basic information about how they came to bodybuilding and how, despite decades of internalised gender norms, they now eat and don’t remember what it was like to want to become wisps, let alone attempt the process. They also don’t worry about the conundrums and metaphors they previously encountered when doing yoga or other sacred or patented movement systems, including whether it’s true that one should transcend the body, treat it as a vehicle for liberation, harness its energy and use it to direct your life rather than being at the mercy of its flow, or mortify it like a wise man holding his arm in the air for decades until it rots.
The beauty of it. There is no philosophy of bodybuilding. You lift, and again, to failure. Tear and grow. These insights can’t be held for long because the weights require all your holding capacity. You let go, release, drop. Sometimes you make a sound, but only if it’s earned in the context of your burden in relation to your body and its circumstances. It’s not about anyone hearing you. No one is listening. Everyone has their own load, and we lift or carry it by ourselves in a space, together. Bodybuilders talk about this, but they don’t mean anything by it.
There can be fear. Squatting for example, weights or no. K’s trainer says that some people either have little flexibility in the necessary places and so have to work slowly towards taking themselves downward, or they can go down but fear not coming back up. This fear leads to half measures, incomplete form, lack of activation, taking it all in all the wrong places. Whenever K goes up in weights, or she squats after visiting other stations that involve exercise that shocks the whole system rather than a single aspect, there is fear. Her trainer stands behind her and floats his arms outward under her armpits so that she feels as though she can be raised up if she fails. There are internet forums on this fear, the irrational sensation of irreversible descent into the earth that is induced, in particular, by repetition. The threads emphasise overcoming fear with form. Form will keep you safe and lift you up. K and G could discuss this focus on form with reference to poetry but reading poetry doesn’t exactly induce fear. People turn to poetry to cope with it. Writing poetry can be fearsome, of course, but much of that comes from needing to find or make a form rather than fill one.
K sends G videos of her bodybuilding form. K’s form is exactly as it should be, especially her deadlifts. K does not send G videos of her walking taken by the neurology department’s physiother- apist. K’s brain is unpredictably and continuously separating both the concept and reality of movement from her body. Sometimes she can override this separation through an act of will or through short-circuiting the automaticity of her movements by doing something difficult, like walking backwards while carrying heavy bags in outstretched arms.This can work for a few steps.Sometimes an ankle turns itself inward and takes K down to the ground.
This separation and inconsistent override capability are really happening to K despite the long-term trend in modern thought and popular psychology that rejects separation of mind and body, and despite the fact that K’s body is otherwise strong and durable. Her brain, whether or not it is linked to, or contains, or simply is her mind, or her soul, if such a thing exists, is, through no fault of its own, taking movement and removing it from the space she shares with others until practically all of it is gone or gone haywire.
The form of movement that will be left after her brain’s ongoing chance operations remains to be seen. Undoubtedly, meaning will rest on the remaining movements K can make. This meaning will emerge via interpretations and assumptions made by others and through interpretations by K in response, whether afterwards or in anticipation. This meaning will be whatever K’s movements appear to reveal about what is really there for her, what is really felt by her, in a given moment.
All this back and forth and minute calibration. All this could be said to be K.
K is, is becoming, via this accumulation of meaning derived from her movements, or lack thereof. This way of thinking that valorises process, rather than essence, is also on trend. K is uncertain whether the people who came up with this angle on existence did so from an assumedly stable position of relative health, or from within a rolling wave of degeneration, or whether that matters. So far, she knows it’s impossible to grasp essence in the face of the process she is experiencing, and she thinks, wonders, if this situation is different from what such ideas are said to mean overall.
The videos show the form of her walking, as it usually is, and then again when she is using physical and mental cues her physio- therapist taught her to address the formal tendencies that impede her forward progress. Each video, filmed some months apart, demonstrates that she has some capacity to reshape her walking so that it is less open to interpretation and, instead, just is. The most recent clip shows her just after she started a medication that can temporarily ameliorate some decouplings, but cannot halt the brain’s overall agenda. With the medication, her walking is slightly better, but as she says in a note for her neurology appointment, WALKING IS THE PROBLEM. Despite this statement, her neurologist explained that now is not the time to raise her dose.
Her doctor says that if she experiences side effects on the higher level and has to go back down to the current one, it may not have the same effect as before. This sudden drop in efficacy has a name, which reminds K of the word that describes the difference in the apparent movement of objects when viewed from different positions. The trees near the train rush by. The farmhouse in the distance appears motionless.
K thinks she would have found the neurologist’s word very useful in her twenties when she was about to graduate with her first degree. Her dose of artistic work had gone too high – playing symphonies, deciphering new compositions in a scratch ensemble, writing poetry, classes dedicated to reading the entire oeuvre of two major twentieth-century novelists, and another focusing on the mediaeval dream vision poem, including the one with the mysterious rose in the garden that she read in its original language, along with those poems that continually ask, as if in all caps, WHERE ARE THOSE WHO HAVE GONE BEFORE? These poems remind the reader that everything has gone to hell,
and that nothing lasts.The fall is ongoing,conceptually and literally. Alongside all this, K also read a twentieth-century poem mourning the death of the poet’s mother. It takes its title from an ancient religious song of mourning. The original religious text is only a few lines long and does not actually mention death or the dead. Instead, it praises God and commits the speaker to religious observance. Under this same title, the poet unspooled a long poem that praises death and chronicles his own and his mother’s situation in relation to God and religion and his country and its politics.
At that time, K had been learning a new arrangement of a viola piece by a famous composer that her own famous viola teacher had created using the original draft scores. Her teacher had been rescued from his country that had been under the control of an oppressive regime. He was rescued by the famous violinist who had himself played a concert in one of the camps for liberated survivors of another oppressive regime, which had committed itself to the total annihilation of entire groups of people. The famous violinist and the pianist-composer who accompanied him were members of groups that had been targeted. The final piece they played uses the tune of the ancient religious song of mourning from the group that had nearly been annihilated, which was the same religious song the poet would write a version of to mourn his mother years later.
The piece they played in the camp was written by a composer who died just before all the particular pain and horrors that were to follow had begun. In that composer’s version, there were no words, only sound. The composer-pianist who performed the piece with the violinist that day in the camp went on to write his own long piece in the musical mourning form of his religion. He used words from the poems written by the soldier who refused to celebrate war, even and especially the one in which he fought and died.
The bench in K’s teacher’s office was covered with rough and colourful woollen pillows he had acquired during his travels. K explained why she was weeping. She told her teacher that she was engaging with the heights of art of all kinds. Yet she felt nothing. She was not moved. This was a crisis because she was entirely committed to art as a sort of religion. Her teacher told her that this loss of feeling and heightened experience of absence and inertia was good. Her yearning and sensitivity had led to this depletion.
K’s inability to be moved lasted only to the end of her teacher’s story, which closed with the ancient tune without words that broke everything open. K’s teacher told her that his teacher and the composer-pianist and the survivors had reached holding capacity. They had been carrying it all, what they had plus what they had just seen and experienced, by themselves, but in a space, together. In that concert they failed at last to hold it. They dropped it all. In those moments, they made a sound.
K’s walking is worsening so she does more of everything else. As long as she is not moving, she can nearly forget what is coming, what is happening all the time to make what is coming occur. If she moves, she prefers to bodybuild. Weightlifting movements are unaffected and the pain and impossibility she feels when lifting to failure resembles the pain and impossibility she feels when trying to walk. Unlike walking, with bodybuilding she can push through and make the form, what is supposed to occur, happen. This is ecstatic. Then, between the stations she must face it all again, the walking, the illness, the unknown degree and speed of degeneration. The confrontation that occurs as she moves from station to station is like the clash she feels when she gets good news, the sort of news that ought to be convincing evidence that all will be well, every manner of things will be well, as the famous saint is quoted as saying.
For K, this good news is, in fact, painful because all will not be well. Whatever the saint says, whatever the good news says, K herself will not be well. For a moment K touches it, the well, the good, the new, the form. It is always painful, just after that moment.
Soon after her diagnosis, K sat with her notebook at the café near the museum that was, for the first time, showing artefacts, including shields and ploughs and jewellery, from the ancient civilisations that built and lived around the famous stone circle in the centre of the island for thousands of years. K was writing something about this feeling of movement, of being moved, that arises powerfully in the presence of such artefacts. A pair sat down at the table next to her. They had not seen each other for a few years because of the pandemic. Every statement was a revelation.
The man talked about his new cycling habit all around the capital. The woman discussed her swollen knee and eventual surgery and recovery and her new phase of not drinking at all.The man described the death of their mutual friend’s father from the same disease K has. He went into great detail, the closing down of walking and moving, then swallowing and breathing, until nothingness. He said the friend’s father was aware of it all until the end. The man said to the woman that it clearly is the worst disease. The pair placed their orders. K stopped writing. She paid with her unshaking hand. She decided against revealing to others what is really there for her, what is really felt by her, in that given moment. At that time, she had the option to conceal the links between movement and feeling by paying with the one hand and lifting the other from the page.
In the chat, K tells G that bodybuilding and the distance between stations prepares her for receiving good news though she is not well. Bodybuilding prepares her for pain and impossibility and failure and beyond. Maybe this is an ascetic relationship to the body, as was cultivated by the saint who developed the quote. K wonders if by ‘well’ the saint actually meant the tearing, the breaking open of the muscle, the soul, to grow, whether by ‘well’, the saint means ‘pain’. And, of course, K wonders why pain is necessary in the first place, for muscles or souls or minds or bodies, even for growth. And, of course, this question has been asked many times with no satisfactory answer, at least not for those feeling pain they did not cultivate themselves, all those who work against general degeneration by inducing tiny pains, as in bodybuilding, or as in the famous quotations from the philosopher and the writers who said the experience of art and literature is like being pierced or split open by sharp objects, or the poet who said it is like having the top of her head removed.
K must give an account of her pain on a regular basis, to friends, family, the government, her employer, her colleagues, her students, taxi drivers, airport attendants, the person she spilt her drink on. What seems most incredible to all of them is her physical vibrancy, which is the result of her bodybuilding, and the contrast with her diagnosis and the way she moves, as well as the mobility aids she requires at different times, and her accounts of pain. Her vigour makes her suffering seem less credible, less worthy. The saint from K’s family’s homeland knew this and may have painted his hands with acid to ensure they bled suggestively in the appropriate places. His credibility is both undermined and furthered now by the silicone death mask that conceals the decomposition of his face as his body is laid out for millions of pilgrims lining up in hope of healing.
K and G continue to talk about bodybuilding. The tiny tears that lead towards the muscle getting pumped, the new gym bag and gloves. The skin that is hot to touch, red as if slapped like a newborn in olden times, a procedure no longer done because it is not necessary to create suffering to encourage the breath. K and G’s mutual suffering and vibrancy are neither credible nor incredible. These things are irrelevant to their task and, therefore, to their experience of continual change.
In the mediaeval texts K read as a student, there is often a conversation between soul and the body. After death the soul returns and speaks to the body, usually to upbraid it for its fallibility, its drives, its flaws. K thinks and feels that the soul and the body are always speaking to each other, even in life, and that there is no each other at all. This is despite her earnest wish to be outside pain when it arises and beyond future suffering when it comes. Some viewpoints suggest that this lack of separation is why we can be moved, why we can feel what others may be feeling, and that, perhaps, art is a way of priming this capacity. Others point to past and continual annihilations as evidence that this priming doesn’t work, or work well.
Soon after K’s conversation with her viola teacher, a famous poet visited her university and declaimed his poems in his language without books or paper. He ran up and down the aisles of the lecture theatre while the translator stood at the podium and read out what could not be sensed solely from the sound and movements the poet produced. K saw the audience was moved and so felt a sensation of moving without movement, like when the train on the track next to yours moves and you feel as though yours is the one moving. When others move and are moved, you feel moved, like you are moving, like you are in a queue leading you underground, taking you to a body in its shrine.
All through the summer, K and G exchanged their thoughts and their regimes and their meals eaten on separate trips to the same country, the country of K’s ancestors. It seemed for a while that one of them had to be training in earnest in their home gym in a cold wet island country and that the other had to be in that hot peninsular country with its glorious food.
This pattern persisted until it was time to go back to school, to work, and onto public stages to talk about the body of the texts they had made, how they had shaped them over time and through intense processes in order to reveal what is really there, what is really felt. K and G’s chat dies down, as does their bodybuilding.
By this point, things have changed, become more difficult in some ways, and easier in others. They don’t elaborate. They both say they have returned to the basic movement. Lying flat on the ground with eyes closed, trying not do anything, trying not to try, whether it is breathing in a particular way or stopping tears. K and G send no photos of this and say nothing more about it in the chat.
They know the look of it and how it feels for the other. You can put your hands at your side or on your stomach or you can open your arms wide. You bend your legs and rest your knees against into each other. You can put a book behind your head to align you. You can pay attention to your jaw and tongue.
In the country of K’s ancestors where the body is laid out in its shrine, gloved hands folded on chest, jaw set under silicone mask, there is a tiny restaurant.
A man and a woman stand at two old stoves set among the tables. They cook for you what is available, what they think you should eat. There are few ingredients and many forms. The mainstay is bitter greens.
The key is in how you prepare it all, how you build it up in the space you share, and the sound you make when you finish it.
It is nothing elaborate. Its absence has brought you here.
Kimberly Campanello is the author of the poetry-object and durational performance MOTHERBABYHOME (zimZalla, 2019). Her latest poetry collection, An Interesting Detail, was published by Bloomsbury Poetry in April 2025, and her debut novel, Use the Words You Have, was published in June 2025 by Somesuch Editions.
‘Tachyphylaxis’ was first published in Issue Seven of Tolka (May 2024). You can subscribe to Tolka for a year for €22.
