for Queer Ecologies
Submerge
You enter the ocean from a beach. The water is cool and brings the edges of your body into sharp relief. You become aware of every inch of submerged skin surface as you wade further, and the water holds more of your body until at some point you cast off into a breast stroke. You swim out. It’s early summer in the Atlantic, small waves pass every five or six seconds, and a light wind textures the surface. Think about how your body behaves in the water like that, if you can. What kind of effort do you need to sustain in order to float? You swim one hundred feet offshore, how many room lengths is that? Your head is just above the surface of the water, and as waves pass, the beach comes in and out of view. What does this distance feel like to you? and how does your brain measure it? In breaths? In effort? In strokes?
In water, space and distance become reoriented. Lungs and arms become differently important, gravity is turned off, and our legs seem to change their function as well. Our relationship to the body changes in the water: its seemingly-prescribed, biologically- and genetically-fixed land functionality dissolves. The threat of predation and possibility for communion are directly related. To enter a body of water is an act of vulnerability that puts us out of our element. In that vulnerable state: isolation, but also: connection. A tangible substrate unites the body to both the shore it came from from and to the next continent, as well as to every living and non-living thing in-between. [see COSMIC FOLD]
Ryuichi Sakamoto recovers a piano from the Pacific Ocean after the Fukushima Disaster and composes with its altered, detuned body on the album async. Submerged, re-emerged changed, new sounds become possible.
Under water, one’s body is placed in direct co-existence with a soup of molecules, microorganisms, and history—it all runs off into the sea. To submerge is to open one’s self—body, mind, soul—to the whole of it.
“The body without organs is not a dead body but a living body all the more alive and teeming once it has blown apart the organism and its organization.”[i]
[i]
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 30.
Joanie Cappetta with QuERC, 2023