What is the similarity between an experimental artist and tuna?

I sat on the ground next to her, and she handed me two beautiful 8 gauge hooks.  The were about two and a half inches long, and had small loops at the end to run cable through.  I couldn't put them down, they were beautiful beyond belief.  We had agreed that we would do this ritual at sunset, and I would pull into the night, through twilight.  

Finding the tree was easy, but strange.  We picked a beautiful grove, but I could not use any of the trees I really felt compelled to because the ground was too terribly unstable.  We settled on a shiny beautiful tree across a small brook.  I would be standing on marshy ground, but it would be somewhat flat.  She went in and put the cable on the tree, beautiful and orange against the dark gray bark.  It was so pretty I couldn't help but say something.  

She stood and said it was time to find a place to sit.  I found a small rock (not the one I was attracted to, but chosen out of convenience).  She prepped me a bit, gave me a bit of protocol, and threw in the first hook into my right arm.  It wasn't bad at all, so she went into my left.  It hurt a bit more, but, once she was done and the hooks in place, I was so very happy.  I could not stop smiling.  (Did I mention when she told me earlier in the day she had multiple hooks and gauges for me to choose from I did an uncontrollable little girl hop and dance?)  It was perfect.  We went to the tree, and she cabled me into it, giving me lots of slack because she knew I liked movement, and would not be content to simply stand in place leaning back. 

Leaning back the first time I was terrified.  It was not that I didn't trust her, I just didn't trust my skin- I did not know its strength.  Yes, I knew perfectly well in theory that it is possible to suspend the full weight of the body on the skin alone, but this wasn't someone else, this was me.  I didn't know what to do, what to think.   Eventually I relaxed a little bit, and she left to go to the main camp to get the second set of hooks for my chest.  

She returned after a while, I am not sure how long.  I did a fair amount of singing, and it was still somewhat light out.  She took me down and placed the hooks in my chest.  It is an odd sight, to look down and see that.  The brain wants to freak out, but you just can't.  There is a strange relationship between ecstasy and revulsion.  The hooks were not level (by design, not accident) and she tied me back up.  When it came time to lean back, I had to try different postures to reach a level of semi comfort.  I found the most balanced angle and leaned back.  After I relaxed a little bit —I mean very much a little bit.  The pain was minimal- in fact, the entire experience was much less painful than I thought it would be—  she ran her fingernail across the cable.  I could feel the movement of the sound in my skin, my bones, and, most of all, I could feel the air movement in my lungs change.  I could feel the air from one side of my lungs when it moved forward to back, propelled by the vibration of the sound.  It was amazing to feel the actual different rates of speed at which sound moves through objects directly in my body (this is what classes should be like — talk about kinesthetic learning!).  

At this point, I think it is important to bring up the fact that I am Vegan.  Where I am very much compassionate towards animals, I also do not think it is my place to dictate to others what they should eat, but that we should have total compassionate living.  I also believe that if you are to eat meat, you must, at some point early on in your development, be required to kill, skin and prepare your own "animal" dinner (yes, I did this at one point in my life.)  The second thing I need to point out is that I am, to be sure, the kind of person who has to joke and be a wise alec all of the time.  There were few points in this entire evening where I did not stop and laugh, make jokes, and generally have a delightful and wonderful experience.  (I've never been good at 'sacred', and, a very good Native American friend of mine always teases me in ritual settings for being  what he sees as a clown...  good ritual has good levity in my book — then again, few see the humor in my music, either.)  

Once I had settled to the hooks, she told me they were tuna hooks, for deep sea fishing.  It was that point that I realized that in my weird world view that you had to have total empathy and understanding for an animal before you could consider eating it stopped and said "Wait.  That means I can eat tuna now!!!"

It was shortly after this that we began to discuss our next meeting (yes, I was still up and moving and having a great time) that she played with the cable, using other sound making objects when we started talking about piano wire, bass strings and other primary resonant objects, to begin stage two of the project, having a musician play the strings that I am suspended from.

So, what does this all mean?

Turns out, you can tune an experimental musician and tuna fish.