Part one: cryonic dip

Part two: still dippin'

Part three: tank revisited

It had been over a year since I last floated and year since I moved away from State College, but as I entered the tank on Monday, I was on day 4 of an amazing return visit to the place and scene I hold to be sacred, and already saturated in a sense of humility and deep gratitude for All. I was also feeling quite rested already—my itinerary leading up to our visit to the REST lab was a seemlessly sequenced mix of social biking, swimming outdoors, rehearsing/writing (with plenty of feedback from my host) a talk I presented at the conference that focused my visit, and lots of gathering with friends to play and record music at the Keller house, 916, my old home and neighborhood, and the Music Building II on campus.

I entered the tank and directly rhythmized my breathing, and without effort went into a mindfulness meditation interrupted here and there by themes taking the form of scenes from my stay in State College. After many rapid-fire but smooth transitions I found silence and extension as my body awareness went into a homogeneous state best described as bliss. Eventually even slower oscillations, usually perceived to be moving “upward” in space, would activate exhilerating sequences that were quite welcome, as these uninterrupted flows seemed to require no maintanance and were easy to unlatch from. Allowing this cognitive-ish activity to dissolve and to “return towards” promoted growth and development of core themes (such as impermenance) that I had been experiencing together with my friends and teachers while biking, Wyrding, and Musiking in the valley, and these themes were associated with distinct still and moving images. The dissonant nodes and gaps of/in these themes unfolded and laced into new concordances in this diastolic/systolic process. Sometimes body awareness shifting to gyroscoping sensations, pleasant, like a sustained slow motion apprehension of a base-line jumpshot sssssssssswwwwisssssshhhhing through the subtlest of nets. Nets of differing degrees of coarseness/fineness seemed to sing like cicadas—not just in timbre but in the manner of no-place (or maybe simultaneous proximity/distance) entymologists describe as the “hidden cicada paradox.” As in previous floats, when “embodiment” began to become untethered “I” could drift between bodies of friends and loved ones and strangers alike; this Not-I perceived differences and experienced awareness of “infinite” embodiments in these transitions. In a similar rhythm, noticing circulatory rhythms in relation to respiratory rhythms induced auditory novelties, both melodic and rhythmic, at diverse tempi. At some point all of this became less noticeable, and the flickering settled into a filamental and bright glint accompanied by stillness. Om!

In terms of clock-time and in relation to the clock-time I dedicate to sitting meditation daily (30 minutes) the 45 minute float seemed a little bit shorter than 30 minutes. After emerging from the tank on Monday, I could feel that the float had effected a calm detachment on identity and a connection to All that is, and was accompanied by a paradoxically “languid vitality” and “slow alertness” of Mind, Body, and Spirit.

Much gratitude!

December 18 2007

Recently, 2 colleagues asked me if I'd like to join them on a panel they were assembling for a conference called Pop Culture, which will take place in San Francisco this year. Jill McCracken saw interesting connections between her research on sex work and Morgan Gresham's research on anorexia. When Morgan asked me if I had any projects that might fit into this mix, a metonymy came to mind between the REST research and the sexuality study. Here's a our proposal:

Sex, Anorexia, and Sensory Deprivation: Subverting Embodied Rhetorics

Examining the rhetoric of the quotidian, or “the public and personal meanings that affect everyday, even minute-to-minute decisions” (Brummett 41) provides crucial insights into representations of marginalized populations and issues. The irreducibly participatory nature of research involving the sexualized body offers ways to articulate an embodied rhetoric of sexuality. Offering a participatory and performative presentation that combines analyses of sex work, anorexia, and research in sensory deprivation, this panel asks the audience to help them answer the questions they are considering related to how sexualized bodies embody rhetorics, and how centering marginalized populations can subvert and resist dominant constructions of identity. Those questions include:

The panel will address each of these questions, and others, through the lenses of identity, choice, and participation.

Speaker 1: Trey Conner "Wiki-ing Transpersonal Experience"

This report explores the intermezzo made available by an autoethnographic experience in REST (Restricted Environmental Stimuli Therapy) research and a follow-up sexuality survey. Qualitative response to the REST experience, on wiki, renders introspective and even "disembodied" experience in language, and this information can be correlated with genetic information provided by participants. By soliciting voluntary participation in sexuality surveys from the pool of participants who donated DNA in the REST research, REST researchers enlist genetics to inquire into the sexualized body. Understood as an Althusserian interpellation, voluntary participation in genetics research can itself be understood as a site for research, and transformation.

Speaker 2: Morgan Gresham "Preferring Not To: Choosing Identities and Body Boundaries"

Popular understandings of anorexia often focus on power and control--that is, anorexia is seen as a disease of young women who don't want to grow up and thereby attempt to wrest control of the chaos of maturity by starving. At its most basic interpretation, anorexia is a separation of mind and meat. I examine these constructs in light of issues of choice, subversion, and resistance. Positing that anorexia is a construct, created in language, we can deconstruct the popular notions of anorexia by focusing on the language anoretics use to describe themselves on pro-anorexia websites.

Speaker 3: Jill McCracken "Street Sex Work: Centering a Marginalized Population"

Based on an ethnographic study, Speaker 3 presents analyses of street sex worker representations (people who provide commercial sexual services on or near the street). Examining this language reveals a powerful rhetorical situation. Street sex workers live out a range of contradictory experiences about the nature and implications of these activities. Examining these rhetorical constructions and their related effects on policy elucidates the discursive complexity that exists in meaning-making systems and illustrates why sex work is so difficult to address locally, nationally, and globally. My analysis also offers alternative constructions that are generated by the marginalized populations themselves.