From FrameWork 5/17, Katie Lyle on Shirley Wiitasalo (thank you James).
To begin, you might lie down with your eyes closed allowing all of the room to fall away except the floor beneath you. Letting the push of gravity sink your weight, feeling the horizontal leveling of your body as it settles against the hard surface. You might let your muscles relax, and each bone soften at its edges until your skin is slumped loose against the flat, cool surface. Taking a moment to let the nape of your neck relax and the back of your head flatten like a soft, old grapefruit. Let your head flop to one side, if it needs a resting place, and let the weight of your skull be supported by the bony cartilage of your outer ear and cheekbone. You might imagine that you are a soft puddle, an onion skin or body-shaped trapdoor. An intricate outline of a body traced, around each hair on your head and each finger from the tip of your nail into the soft webbed tissue between them. We might be careful to consider the difference between imagining the body and paying attention to it.
That being said, to think about something in detail (one part of the body at a time) involves the necessity of forgetting something else. To think about the body like this inevitably means forgetting another part of yourself, forgetting about associations or narratives except for the ones presented in the very moment.
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