"Body Brilliance - Mastering Your Five Vital Intelligences" by Alan Davidson
by Kilian Melloy
EDGE Entertainment Contributor
Monday Mar 19, 2007

"My best reason for doing anything in life is to feel good, or better yet, to feel great," Alan Davidson writes in Body Brilliance: Mastering Your Five Vital Intelligences. "The point of living through your body is to enjoy yourself day in and day out, NOT to suffer through agony to finally arrive at happiness, or enlightenment, or something, somewhere, sometime in the future. Feel better now."

Davidson would know what he’s talking about. A former intravenous drug user and an out gay man who saw many friends perish at the height of the AIDS crisis, Davidson was, for years, unhappy with his life in a myriad of ways: overweight, depressed, bereft, lonely. Then he started listening to the inner voice of his own needs and convictions, and this led him on a decades-long journey toward health and happiness - and understanding.

Body Brilliance is the first of a projected five-book series, each volume focusing mainly on one particular aspect of the complete human organism and its five "vital intelligences," which Davidson outlines as comprising the physical, mental, emotional, moral, and spiritual aspects of an individual. As suggested by its title, Body Brilliance concerns itself primarily with the physical - the most concrete form of our five interrelated manifestations, Davidson tells us, the one that is densest and consists of our bones, muscles, joints, and organs. To this end, Body Brilliance is illustrated with gorgeous black and white photos of models (each of them graceful, trim, well proportioned, and looking happy to be there) doing various calisthenics and yoga poses. But this is not a stretching or exercise manual. Health comes from an inner desire to embrace the vital intelligences and to live fully, Davidson argues, and physical exercise is only the starting point.

If this sounds like the beginning of a cult, don’t worry. Davidson is a humble writer, and he’s not abashed about sharing his own foibles and patchy progress toward healthful living. He explains the role that religion has had in casting the human body as a villain - the "corrupt" vessel that harbors the soul as its noblest function, but also falls prey to vulgar appetites and occasions of sin - and he argues calmly and elegantly for human reason and the innate human desire for happiness to surmount the deeply-ingrained Western dislike of the body, as an essential first step toward full human integration. But he’s not creating - at least, not yet - a system of dogma or placing himself at the head of a messianic or charismatic movement. What he wants - and he seems to desire this out of a sense of service - is to provide accurate, non-judgmental information as to how any given individual can start to live up to his or her potential.

Where any given reader goes from there is up to him: Davidson has nothing to say about sin or God or obligation, except to suggest gently that it might be each person’s obligation to himself to allow himself to grow into a mature, strong, flexible, interpersonally connected, and socially conscious human being. To settle for less - namely, to settle for the cycle of work and bare survival that characterizes our life in the Western world, with its many traditions and philosophies that are inimical to full and natural human development - is to betray some, perhaps all, of those five levels of human existence that are our birthright and our gift.

Each of the book’s 21 chapters is succinct, building on what preceding chapters have set out and taking the reader toward a more complete understanding of what the body is, how it relates to the more nebulous, harder to understand "intelligences" (like the moral and spiritual ones). Most chapters include some part of Davidson’s own life story - he starts to sound like a friend more than a mentor or guru, looking to share tips out of a generous impulse to contribute - and every chapter shows how well read Davidson is, with quotes from sources as diverse as the movies, the ancient Greek philosophers, and anywhere else Davidson has stumbled across some useful nugget. (As carefully researched as this book is, Davidson still issues the standard caution: he’s not a doctor, he can’t diagnose or prescribe, and "It is always wise to consult with your doctor or other medical professional before you begin any new health or exercise program.")

The photography by Victoria Davis is gallery quality stuff, a pleasure to look at in and of itself. The book is not produced at state-of-the-art level printing, so the photos are a little grainy, and a little bleary; the contrast and resolution are not what you might have wanted if given your ideal. (For crisper images, look up Davidson’s website, BodyBrillianceBook.com). None the less, Davis has an eye and a rapport with the models that comes through and the photos’ exceptional artistry is not compromised by the printing quality.

A review is supposed to impartially scrutinize a book and assess its strengths, weaknesses, and success as a work of art or of elucidation. Reviewing a book like this, with its many challenging (to a Westerner, anyway) concepts is a tough task, and it’s impossible to be entirely impartial in such an instance, so I’ll just have to tell you as best I can why I find Body Brilliance to possess a genuine intrinsic value. The long and short of it is this: we’re all anxious and stressed out these days, feeling like we don’t have the time, the resources, or the connection with family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues that we would like. Nobody, in other words, is happy. In large part, this is a situation resulting from our own choices, individually and as a culture. We scorn our own bodies, neglect our personal lives and personal needs, and involve ourselves as voyeurs or as moral enforcers in other people’s lives even while our own bodies and souls cry out for want of our attention. Bookshelves and info-mercials are crowded with diet plans, exercise gadgets, and body-sculpting options; mega-churches take a Wal-Mart approach to spirituality, melding marketing with hucksterism to hawk their wares to confused but hopeful consumers. Who, in that crowd of vendors, is offering the genuine article? Which voices, in that tumultuous babble, are spoken from a place of sincerity and a willingness to help?

Some of the things in Body Brilliance sound like pseudo-science to me; for better or worse (and I’ll be honest, maybe it’s for worse) I shudder at the name Wilhelm Reich, about whom Davidson writes almost as though Reich were a martyr, and whose enormous impact on the bodyworking community and its various modalities cannot be disputed, but whose idea of discrete life-force units called "orgones" is ludicrous. I have no idea what it means for a "spiritual intelligence" and a "moral intelligence" to be "nested" into successively "denser" levels of a manifold human existence that culminates at base with the material body. But judging from this first volume in Davidson’s proposed series of books, I can say this: Body Brilliance is, without doubt, a self-care manual that offers a lot of useful information in a user-friendly format, including a body-limbering workout regimen that will benefit the reader on more than just the physical level. To me, this book feels like what I (and, I suspect, a lot of people) have been waiting for: permission to exist physically, and to enjoy it.

Publisher: Elite Books. Publication Date: February 28, 2007. Pages: 220. Price: $26.95 hardcover; $17.95 softcover. Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-1-60070-025-5. Softcover ISBN-13: 978-1-60070-026-2

Kilian Melloy reviews media, conducts interviews, and writes commentary for EDGEBoston, where he also serves as Assistant Arts Editor.