Monday, August 13, 2012

Body Language

As a child, I would spend hours in the bathtub resting my hands against the surface of the water.  The resistance of the water pushing against my flesh but at the same time forming itself against me fascinated me.  Once I got older, I learned terms like "surface tension" and "meniscus" to describe my liquid daydreams, the behavior at the edges.  When the concepts were explained to me, it was a relief.  All of a sudden I had a vocabulary for my experiences.  I am never entirely certain that my experience of the world matches other people's.  That is a good portion of why anthropology attracts me.  It was only much later that I realized when I say trancing, other people nod and agree but sometimes have vastly different experiences.  Other corporeal states lend themselves to the same assumptions.

Everyone sleeps.  But I had horrible insomnia for the first twenty-five years of my life.  The first time I took an effective sleeping pill, it was as if I'd landed in technicolor drenched Oz the next morning when I woke up.  It was amazing.  I had absolutely no idea what good sleep was and no frame of reference.  Yet we have no easy vocabulary for sleep.  When I say I have trouble sleeping, what does that mean to you?  My dreams sometimes compensate for poor sleep.  I dream incredibly vividly, although in times of stress this often works against me.  My nightmares can be intense.  Words fail me when I try to describe the convoluted logic and skewed perspective that shade my dreams.  I only know I have vivid dreams because there was a point in time when I didn't have them.  I didn't even miss them until my practice changed and they returned.  I thought I had just outgrown them.  I would like to crawl inside someone else's head for a night to see if it is like this for everyone.

In the kinky community, there is a state known as "subspace."  It can be experienced during play as an altered state brought on by physical or mental stress in the form of pain or intense sensation.  It is easy to elide the differences in experience by relying on physiology, writing it off as the product of endorphins or adrenaline. I thought, gee, this is a lot like trancing in some shamanistic practices, possession states in Voudou, religious ecstasy among penitents, the zen of a long tattoo session .  I thought, this must be a human universal.  Even kids enjoy spinning in circles until they fall down dizzy.  People have the drive to feel altered.  Now, however, those comparisons seem too easy.  The significance of the act varies drastically.  Much like sleep (and other bodily experiences, like orgasm and eating and defecating), one only has oneself as a frame of reference.  We can compare notes, mitigated through language.  In some cases, we get to see other people doing it.  I guess it boils down to "How do you know?"  It was very difficult for me not to project my experiences onto others.  I wanted to say, "I know *exactly* what you are talking about."  Working in the kinky community expanded my vocabulary, allowing me to communicate finer distinctions about bodily experiences.  I am more confident that my experiences are at least similar to other people's, if we agree on terminology and forego naturalizing assumptions.

Sometimes, I think corporeality is numinous.  There is a mystery in trusting one's own experience.  There are epistemologies of the body, knowing things that cannot be nailed down with words, no matter how erudite the language.  And while I can't know we mean the same thing by subspace or sleep or that the significance is the same, it is part of being human that allows us to share that space.  Sweet dreams, all.

1 comment:

  1. after my first experience with subspace i wondered why i spent all that time meditating. there is something to be said for learning how to get there on your own. but it's so seductive, just being in the moment for so long and not having to try.

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