Introduction | Sequence | Religion in Composition Classrooms | Sharing Others' Stories | Multiple Media | Multiple Cultures | Case Studies | Anonymous | Lauren Goldstein | Charissa Coleman Muhammad | Elizabeth Jones | Final Thoughts
Reflect Elizabeth describes her own uncertainty with whether to use the term “spiritual but not religious,” noting that some have given her that label but not claiming it herself. Initially I debated whether to include her story among the case studies; Ultimately I chose to include her narrative because it came up with the keyword search for “religion,” and the narrators typically have the option to choose their own keywords, which suggested it was okay to loosely use that label/category for her while still trying to attend to the unique nuances of her experience. Her narrative is also interesting in that she lists it as a poem remixing a print narrative—so in some ways, through the remediation I’m entering into collaboration with her in her own act of remixing her narrative. She focuses especially on embodied experience as spiritual experience: swimming, playing music, feeling emotion, gathering with others. Her emphasis on the dynamic bodies made me especially curious to explore her narrative as a video focusing on bodies in action.
I chose to foreground one segment of her narrative that she describes as her “most transcendent” experience, being on a snowboard. To aim for a brief, tightly crafted video segment, I used a “Concept in 60” format that aims to present a video idea in precisely 60 seconds by combining non-matching audio and video. Using Creative Commons-licensed YouTube videos of snowboarders, I tried to balance a transcendent atmosphere of majestic mountain scenes and twinkly snowflake-like music with first-person shots that put the viewer in the snowboarder’s shoes (board?). I especially liked a clip in which the snowboarder digs into the snow in a tight curve and the recording device picks up a deep, vibrating growl, which contrasts with some of the more ethereal shots of smooth gliding or aerial maneuvers. The pacing, too, aims to give some time for Elizabeth’s beautifully crafted words to sink in by contemplatively spreading out the space between each line. The final shot is an image of snow that shows the tracks of the body’s passing, even as the body itself is no longer present, evoking dynamic between embodied presence and absence that Elizabeth explores in her narrative. The video very deliberately doesn’t incorporate any traditional religious imagery, just as Elizabeth avoids such imagery overall in narrating her own spiritual experiences of literacy. Instead, I tried to use the images and ideas that Elizabeth herself describes as spiritually significant in order to create a remediation that invites the viewer to consider the ways in which embodied literacies themselves can be a form of spiritual experience.
Respond