Reclaiming my Animalbody through my tail

 

The process of unlearning some of the socialisation that a capitalist, patriarchal world throws on us is and has been underway within me for quite sometime. What of the mind-body divide given to me through schools, sitting still and focusing on my head and my thoughts as superior to my body has taken away from me? What of the instinctive, intuitive nature or wisdom of my own body can I relearn, reawaken and re-embody? This is a process that is ongoing, in me, in us collectively, and in you reading this, perhaps too. 

One of the ways of embracing my animalness was through an outer, hairy accessory of a tail, which I embodied for 1 year and 3 months. More than an light humorous act of having and “wearing” a tail, a cute cosplay of an animal character, it was about creating a connection with my actual tail, re-awakening the tail that I have and instinctively feel as having, that makes total sense for me to have, that is more than imagining wings or having horns, to have a tail is closer and nearer, also evolutionary speaking.  The tail, my backside, my bottom, my whole pelvic floor, especially the tailbone, (the coccyx) and the sacrum, in alignment with my whole spine. The tail was and is the outer expression of my midline, my soul, my me-ness. The tail is the magical bodypart that blesses my pelvic region, the region of life and miracle yet imagined collectively and historically through fear and taboo for years and years.

Intergenerational memory if I go way way back can imagine, can remember, can feel what having a tail could feel like. 25 million years ago I too waved my tail around, hung from trees, could use and grab to branches with my toes. 25 million years ago tails made total sense to humans. What then happened evolutionary and why we lost them I’m not quite sure about. There is speculation that humans lost their tails while starting to walk on two legs, that a tail was no longer necessary. Or maybe taillessness was a necessary step in the evolution of our spine to become a two-legged creature from four-legged one.

Yet the memory of a tail is much closer, much nearer than millions of years of evolution, it is in the cells of this body, the cells of the embryo which had a tail in the 4-6th week of gestation. Can you remember having a tail? Can you feel your tail now? Can you remember being an oceanic creature swimming in the amniotic fluid waving your tail around

 

Can you feel your coccyx wanting to be 

 

Embodying my tail-reawakening my animalness- chaingn my body image, identity

 

The outer expression of my inner tail was of course an appendix, an accessorize. It was not muscle and tissue and bone and I could not move it like I move my hand, even if I desperately wanted to. This is how some unfortunate accidents happened. In the beginning, much like becoming pregnant and not being aware of one’s body changing, having an enormous belly one gets stuck in doorways thinking one can fit through only because my bodymemory remembers having fit though such a crack before.. But when oneäs body image hasnt integrated the change in the body it takes some time to adjust. SO at first I would accidentally pee on my tail while peeing outdoors or I would forget it and immerse it in the toiletwater. I would leave it between cardoors or sometimes accidentally step on it. However, with time my body reimagined itself and started to remember. The act of lifting it up before doing my business became automatic, and tending to it without consciously thinking about became the new normal. My body identified as having a tail

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Kuvat Iida Liimatainen, Kaisa Käärmemaa​