Page - 9 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/01

“I Sing the Body Electric” – Editorial | 9www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/1, 9–14 Alexander D. Ornella and Anna-Katharina Höpflinger “I Sing the Body Electric” Editorial The natural perfect and varied attitudes….the bent head, the curved neck, the counting: Such-like I love….I loosen myself and pass freely…. and am at the mother’s breast with the little child, And swim with the swimmer, and wrestle with wrestlers, and march in line with the firemen, and pause and listen and count. […] I do not ask any more delight….I swim in it as in a sea. There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well, All things please the soul, but these please the soul well. – —Walt Whitman, “I Sing the Body Electric”, 18551 In his controversial poem “I Sing the Body Electric”, Walt Whitman glorified the hu- man body in all its forms. The world according to Whitman is physical and sensual. Bodies are our fundamental way of being – being in the here and now, being in time and space. Bodies we have and bodies we are are as much sensed, felt, experienced, seen, or heard as they are material objects.2 As bodies, we are in space, and through our bodies, their processes, their practices, their skills, we leave traces in space and time and extend ourselves in space. Bodies that extend and reach out and commu- nicate through voice, as well as how voice materialises the immaterial, was the topic of a colloquium, “I Sing the Body Electric”, held at the University of Hull, United King- dom, in 2014, which in turn inspired the following special issue of the Journal for Reli- gion, Film and Media (JRFM). Following on from the colloquium’s inspiration, this JRFM issue is dedicated to the interrelation between religion, body, technology, and voice and its analysis from an interdisciplinary perspective using approaches from musicology, philosophy, and reli- gious studies. The underlying idea of this issue – and thus a common thread through- out the articles it contains – is that the body and being embodied are fundamental modes of our existence. We rely, as Walt Whitman expressed poetically, on the body to interact with each other and our environment through material practices, sensu- 1 Whitman 2010, 225–227. 2 See Ornella/Knauss/Höpflinger 2014.