Notes on Embodiment

“Blood, bile, intracellular fluid; a small ocean swallowed, a wild wetland in our gut; rivulets forsaken making their way from our insides to out, from watery womb to watery world:

We are all bodies of water “

(Neimanis 1)

I remember the day my own sense of being was forever altered. It happened so quietly, I might have missed it. I was on Lake Manitoba, a guest of an old friend at her family cabin. On that day, the soft humid air of the late afternoon wrapped itself around me as I gazed out at the rough steel grey waters of the lake reflecting the overcast sky above. The water lapped against the mix of sand and rock that made up the small beach, with that gentle yet powerful rhythmic movement you can only experience on a large lake. As I opened to this new place, I felt a silent gush of tears stream down my cheeks.

The tears astonished me. I was not having an emotional moment. I was not from this place. I was not connected to this landscape, all flat prairie with few to no trees. Something else was happening, something purely visceral. I didn’t fully understand it at the time, but my body seemed to be weeping for what it knew to be an intimate part of itself. While relaying this story to a friend years later, it occurred to us that, although the landscape was not a familiar one to me, the body of water was. This body of water ultimately connects to the body of water I was born on (Lake of the Woods), and to the body of water my 5th Great Grandmother is purported to have drowned in (the Albany River). My own body in all its fluidity had a very physical and intimate knowledge of being a part of all of these interconnected bodies of water — as did the clearly animate landscape I found myself in. The many voices of that landscape were somehow speaking directly to the body of water who was me. And this body heard their whispered rhythms clearly even if my busy mind did not.

Astrida Neimanis eloquently introduces her intricate investigation of posthuman feminist phenomenology, Bodies of Water with:

“we are not on the one hand embodied (with all of the cultural and metaphysical investments of this concept) while on the other hand primarily comprising water (with all of the attendant biological, chemical, and ecological implications). We are both of these things, inextricably and at once –
made mostly of wet matter but also aswim in the discursive flocculations of embodiment as an idea. We live at the site of exponential meaning where embodiment meets water.” (Neimanis 1)

This is me. This is us. I physically carry all of my ancestors in this body, and all of the lands they and I were born into. I also carry all of the bodies of water they lived and died in. I am held to the land, lakes and river systems around northern Manitoba and Ontario by delicate and ancient threads, as is my mother. My mother also has a great deal of Scottish ancestry, but she has never been to Scotland — and certainly did not grow up in that culture. Yet she weeps uncontrollably whenever she hears the bagpipes. It is a vibration that every cell in her body knows intimately thanks to her rather unbelievable mess of DNA. It is a powerful ecological reality, those physical ties to the environment we are embedded in now, to the environment that was before us, and to the environment we are co-creating. All of my encounters with other life forms, and other thinkers and ideas, become embodied along the way with that messy history which I am already holding — am being held by. My job as a human is to do my best to navigate through it all and make some sense of it, in so that, however I evolve, I evolve well, and whatever I shape, like Jack Shadbolt, I shape well.