Inspired by Karl Cronin’s Somatic Natural History Archive, this past August I stood on the shore of Lake Michigan in the late afternoon creating my own somatic archive. The wind was blowing roughly in from the north, the waves were lively after a day of chopping and rip-tiding due to storms, the sun cut rays across the sky and outlined voluminous clouds, and the sand held my feet in the midst of all this movement. I thought I was just creating a dance for myself. I thought I was moving to embody a moment, but I was unaware of how I was creating a memory and how it would end up immediately changing how I tried to remember moments I did not want to forget.
The wind. I would sway side to side, hands waist level, moving from north to south. The continuous pressure of the wind was loud in my ears, across the waters, over the sands, around my body. It moved my hair and the loose fabric of my clothes.
The water. I would sway back to front, my hands forming the rolling waves coming to shore, and then the breaks that moved back underneath. Over under, the waves moved continuously. Swelling, bursting, over, under. The waves spoke in gentle roars that flattened to whispers over the sand.
The sun. I would lift up onto my toes, arms stretching to my side, offering the sun of my heart to the sun of life. Passion, heat, white and yellow burning down into my body, reaching up to the sky.
The sand. I would drop my lifted feet into the earth. The sand moved its million particles to embrace the sole of my foot. My arms dropped, everything dropped, heavy and freely, to earth, to mother, to gravity, to now.
I gathered the sequence and repeated it several times, each time trying to pay attention not with defining words but to the sensations of my body in response to attention to each of these elements. I had words available to me, I used the basic description of the element. It’s really impossible not to have words flowing and forming around everything we do. The intent though was not to linger on the words but to move back to sensation which speaks to the whole body.
It’s been two months since I stood on the beach and felt my experience and incorporated it. When I move through the sequences I have such a clear vision of the moment, if I wanted to I could write about it in detail, applying words now that I could have used then but would have created a model, a copy, that I would then have to keep accessing. The copy would not hold up to this whole knowing I have of that moment.
As an almost life-long writer, I have continually tried to record my life in words. I have tried to record my most joyful, ecstatic, amazed moments by writing them into my mind so that I could write them out later. I’ve had a horrible time of it. Memories don’t stick. They get mucked. The original experience is so far from me.
I can’t make a dance for every moment I want to remember somatically rather than by rote. What I do instead is check in and experience my emotion as deeply as I can, then I check in with the position of my body. Mostly what I do is experience the moment as fully present as possible, with my eyes, my nose, my breath, my ears, my entire body attuned to what is going on right there with me. Right then.
“Just look around you for a moment and see, hear, smell and feel where you are…. Your consciousness can partake of all that is in one single moment, but you will never be able to describe the experience.” –R.D. Laing
Leave a Reply