A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

Closes

A note from Richard

V2Melody will close at midnight on 20 January 2028

This site has been a retirement project in musical poetry: poems chosen with care and set to music, offered freely for as long as it felt right to keep the garden open.

The work no longer holds the place it once did in my life. I have gone as far with it as I wish to go. Like a sand mandala, it was made to be completed and then released. I am not attached to its permanence, and I do not believe any of it needs to last beyond the time it was given. The poems were already here before I arrived and began to experiment with them. They will still be here when these musical experiments, and indeed myself, have been swept away, like the sand of a mandala. Nothing has been lost.

I want a simpler end to my life, days of simple love and enjoyment with my wonderful wife of 20 years. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit that life.

From 4 November 2026 I will not be adding new poems or musical poems to the site.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this site.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. That is when my VPS server contract comes to an end, and it will not be renewed. After that, the server will be switched off and the site will disappear.

The Mandala Is Finished explains this more fully.

Thank you to anyone who found a poem, a track, or a quiet moment here.

The pleasure was in the making.

Richard



Embodiment

Philosophy
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Embodiment refers to the experience of being situated in a physical body. It emphasises the unity of mind and body.

Detailed Definition
Philosophically, embodiment challenges dualism by asserting that perception and thought are grounded in bodily experience. In poetry, it appears in sensory detail, physical imagery, and attention to the material world. Poets use embodiment to make abstract ideas tangible, rooting meaning in lived experience.
Example
Example in poetry:
Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of embodiment — the claim that the body is not an object in the world but the very vehicle through which we have a world — has influenced poets like Sharon Olds and Claudia Rankine, who insist on the body's knowledge against the Cartesian tradition of disembodied cognition; Adrienne Rich's "Diving into the Wreck" enacts the philosophical concept of embodiment — the diver's bodily experience of descent, pressure, and discovery is not a metaphor for intellectual inquiry but a direct enactment of embodied knowing; A poet writing about disability or chronic illness might philosophically explore how embodiment shapes cognition, perception, and social experience — the specific embodiment of a wheelchair user or a person who is blind constitutes a different world, not a deficient version of a normal world; Hopkins's poetry insists on the embodied reality of spiritual experience — the body is not merely the container of the soul but participates in spiritual life — and his attention to the physical qualities of sound (sprung rhythm, consonance, alliteration) is itself a form of embodied poetics; The feminist philosophical insistence on situated knowledge — that all knowledge is produced from a specific embodied position, and that the pretense of a view from nowhere is a disguised masculine universal — runs through contemporary feminist poetry's attention to the speaker's specific bodily location; Dance and physical performance poetics, influenced by philosophers like Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, treat the moving body as a form of thinking — a philosophical claim that poetic voice and breath are forms of embodied intelligence, not mere vehicles for the transport of mental content
Additional Notes
The philosophical study of embodiment reaches its fullest development in phenomenology. Descartes's dualism (mind as res cogitans, body as res extensa) treats the body as a mechanism controlled by a non-material mind — a view Merleau-Ponty spends his career dismantling. In "Phenomenology of Perception," Merleau-Ponty argues that perception is not a mental act performed on sensory data but a bodily skill — we perceive the world through the body schema, the pre-reflective sense of the body's possibilities for action. The body is not an object I have but a subject I am. Spinoza's parallelism — mind and body as two attributes of one substance — provides an alternative to Cartesian dualism. Contemporary philosophy of mind's debates about physicalism, functionalism, and qualia all concern the relationship between mental experience and physical embodiment. For poets, embodiment grounds the claim that poetic rhythm, sound, and breath are forms of knowing. Related terms: Cartesian dualism, body schema, Merleau-Ponty's intercorporeality, flesh, Butler's performativity, proprioception.
Other Meanings of “Embodiment”
Also Known As
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