WISDOM OF THE BODY: SOME REFLECTIONS
R. K. Singh
We live in a sexually
pluralistic world and whatever our conviction, sex is here to stay. No use
decrying it. It is a fact of daily life and provides humankind with significant
components of meaning. Through the realities of sex and sexual experience we
can gauge a person’s inner-most truth, his/her consciousness. But how sad,
despite global interaction and expansion in awareness, most people still tend
to conceal bodily experience; they do not recognise wisdom of the body, which
is worth loving for its grace, truth and reality.
Painters,
photographers and poets view the human body with all its senses, emotions and
intellect as a repository of actual pleasure, pain and ecstasy. They express it
with imagination and philosophical intuition, making us conscious of our varied
realities. They are not inhibited by false shame. They know human sexuality, if
presented properly, may help us fuse the primordial male-female polarity into
one energy which could then make life in harmony with the original source,
bring the individual and humanity closer, and promote stable sexual relations.
If used unwisely, it may degenerate into a diffracted and miserable world.
Artists do not
question the cult of pleasure or the reverence for abstinence as they explore
the naked physicality in all its dimensions. They do not create, a work for the
sake of casual stimulation. Rather, they know that sexual symbolism becomes
devalued and inexpressive if it loses the wealth of its experience and fails to
illumine one’s inner landscape; they seek to illuminate the realities of
life through body-images.
Sex is a metaphor: the
encounter of man and woman, woman and woman, man and man to express feelings,
to feel valued or loved, to explore relationships, concerns, roles, to react
against false ethical and cultural values, against stereotypes and prejudices,
against hypocrisy and dubious social standards that discriminate and enchain
honest aspirations as lust or vulgarity.
Against a gnawing
sense of loss of meaning and purpose in the computerised, simulation-filled
emptiness of our life today, including gimmicks, imitations, romantic
overtures, and even plain silliness that are often noticed, sex serves as an
antidote to the fast dehumanising existence: Its expression is a means of
defying the sociopolitical world without; it is a form of active resistance to
political manipulation day in and day out.
No Narrow View
With their erotic
presentation, artists and poets seek to create what is physically balanced and
confident, and elevating to the senses. They know that the naked body in a work
of art can be made expressive of a far wider and more civilising experience. As
Kenneth Clark observes in The Nude
(1956), “It is ourselves and arouses memories of all the things we wish to do
with ourselves”. There is a sense of purpose in a poet or artist’s eroticism or
sexuality – love of the self through exploration of the body or naked
physicality leading to love, or libidinal sublimation or sexual union of two
consenting adults.
It cannot be
objectionable to express the real human needs and experiences, the physical
body artistically re-formed. The sexual imagery indeed conveys a mixture of
memories and sensations, a desire to perpetuate ourselves in the complex of
living.
Octavio Paz writes in The Double Flame (1955) that eroticism
is a social form of sexuality which is transfigured by our dreams. I see it as
a means to rediscover the original magic of life just as sex is the mainspring
of one’s psyche and constitutes the sensory experience besides being the
balance-point of various beings.
It is in no way being
“low”, “vulgar” or “obscene”. In fact, in ancient Indian writings, love and
eroticism carried the same connotation or concept: the pursuit of its language
and emotion in various forms is art. In the Atharva
Veda there are lot of ashleela Suktas – obscene only according to
narrow view of morality.
Sexpression: Indian Heritage
Many of our
thousand-year old temple sculptures are an undisguised exaltation of physical
desire; the sensuous friezes of the temples at Khajuraho and the figures carved
on the stone walls of the Sun Temple at Konark are great works of art because
their eroticism is part of the Indian philosophy; it is an aspect of our
cultural heritage. We should be able to appreciate the purity of intention, the
desire to distil from the smallest experience the largest, most universal
insights, something which unites us all.
The process of erotic
creation, like Kamalldhyatma, pursuing sex to spiritual height, is
something positive in Hindu ethos; it is an important psychological fact of
life, sort of libidinal sublimation if one also performs with an awareness of
the rich and ennobling pluralistic dimensions of the Hindu culture.
Love and celebration
of womanhood, as part of erotic experience through a process of exhilaration
and relaxation – swimming through the river of heavenly happiness, uniting the
eye, mind and imagination, and losing ignorance – is both physical and spiritual.
This is what keeps an artist going, giving birth to new works, one after the
other, reaching a height to feel silence through spirit in the body.
Orthodoxy Undesirable
But somehow, in recent
years, largely due to lack of the spirit of enquiry and appreciation of the
Hindu culture, tradition and values, discussion and expression of sex in public
seems to have been denigrated. Authors and artists have been frequently
subjected to violence of the orthodox right wing which seeks to ban honest sexual
self-expression and is intolerant of recreational and non-procreative sex
acts.
There was a time when
even prostitutes in India were an integral and respectable part of the Hindu
society. There was no social tension for this reason. Sex practice was not
looked down upon just as men and women enjoyed healthy emotional relationship
both within material and larger societal contexts. The writers of the ancient
Sanskrit manuals like Kamasutra,
Panchasakya, Smara Pradip, Ratimanjari, Kokashastra, Ratirahasya, Ananga Ranga
etc., educated men and women in the art of courtship, foreplay, intercourse
etc., they treated love not only as a matter of giving and receiving pleasure,
but also as a means of access to the realm where the human and the divine meet.
Emotional lyrics of
poets like Kalidasa, Bhavabhuti, Bhartrhari, Amaru, Yashovarman, Jayadeva and
others reflect frank eroticism but create a transcending spiritual effect and
meaning with their expression of the primordial Purush-Prakriti or what
the Chinese call Yin-Yang interplay.
Because God created
human beings as male and female, He created sex and ordained sexual union (in a
socially acceptable form) to bind man and woman together to make them dear to
each other as husband and wife to lead a healthy emotional life through love
and sex and thus ensure personal and social stability.
In the Vedas and Upanishads too, sex seems to be the source of happiness in
equality, in oneness of man and woman, in love.
The search for love or
desire for sex even if erotic, is essentially the aspiration for entering into
another to know, to understand. It is rather a search for the ‘whole’ in daily
living and giving. It is the search for a bridge between the uncontrollable
external events and the often impulsive, subjective or internal responses.
Body as Soul
In brief, depiction of
sex in art and literature has been metaphysically serious in India, just as
sexual desire and fulfilment is an action of the spirit in body, leading to
pleasure and harmony. The body images illuminate the realities of life; sexual
metaphors in art make it possible for artists to convey what it feels like to
be filled with desire, transmuting and transmitting memories of experience.
Artists visualise
human body as a picture of the human soul; they celebrate it to understand the
world and the self. If they glorify nudity, it is to explore the consciousness in conflict with the muddling external chaos.
As a poet I realise
humans are flesh in sensuality and there is divinity in it. The fleshy unity is
the reality, the passage to experience divinity, and its expression should not
be repressed through governmental interference in the name of morality.