Wisdom of the Body

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.