I've always found it odd that on a Tuesday night you might go about the bodily act of having sex and then, the next morning, amid a chattering group of children, eat Cheerios.
After all, the procreative act – heck, any bodily act – is incompatible with the iTunes Store mission, right?
In her fascinating book Performing Pain: Music and Trauma in Eastern Europe, musicologist Maria Cizmic says that this piece "opens up a performance space in which a pianist feels pain, foregrounding the concrete bodily acts and sensations of suffering at a time when the violence of the USSR's past continued to be contested".
That is why Kûkai, following the Dainichikyô, prescribes the ritual practice of bodily acts, verbal acts, and mental acts.
Bodily acts involve mudra-formations — these are complex series of gestural movements of the hands and fingers in coordination with mantra-chanting and visualizations —, meditative bodily postures, and the handling of ritual instruments.
In bodily acts manifesting gendered positionality, other social positions are carried along, in such a way that it is not possible to disentangle a strand of gender which is universally present.
"Homosexual" conjures up dark visions of filthy bodily acts that arouse deeply-rooted feelings of disgust and ancient fears of Sodom and Gomorrah and hell and damnation.
The verbal formulas name the worst fears, while performance of the stepping, selling, and sipping rituals persuades through words and bodily acts that something not only can be done, but has been done that creates a new reality.
For this reason, Zen recommends the practitioner to "forget the 'I"" when engaging oneself in any action, be it a mind-act, bodily-act, or speech-act, as is seen for example in both Dōgen and Takuan (1573 1645).
I love the way that word's usage merges high-minded linguistic expression with the very bodily, mechanical act of pressing something to force its inside out.
From the phenomenological perspective, though memory need not be limited solely to bodily action, the act of remembering or recalling is predicated on being embodied.
