Wednesday, December 05, 2007

around the sleeping body - some thoughts.



The beginning of architecture is the protection of the body; a shelter from the outside- The shell around the soft insides too delicate to expose.

How do we begin to define the edges of the intimate? The ‘zero’ of architecture as it were. It cannot lie in the making of the building. That is too far down the line. To make one must first be able to imagine, and to imagine one must first need to exist. The consciousness of the self is perhaps a place to construct our argument from. And even lower than that, the place where this consciousness is surrendered.

The sleeping body lies just on this side of death. Reposed, horizontal with its eyes closed, unaware of itself and of its surrounding it is the symbol of innocence and fragility. It entrusts itself to its context.

We identify with what we see. To see is to possess. We project our desires optically. This acceptance of the desirous gaze is frightening to us. To admit to it would be admitting to the essentially transgressive nature of the gaze. It projects outwards from our bodies and is able to cross frontiers that are otherwise forbidden. It is able in a sense to penetrate through. The sexual imagery here seems inescapable and revealing for it does allow us an insight into the eroticism latent in every act of watching and concealing; the fetishization of the hidden and the simultaneous fabrication of replacements through technological substitutes.

The danger we feel lies in the image that seduces us- that keeps us entrapped in a constant becoming, Our desire for sublimation constantly frustrated by the edges of our beings. The ‘felt’. Although we would like to dissolve our disintegration is always out of reach. Is this what is called the death wish?

It is no surprise then that so much of our pathologically optically obsessed society develops codes regarding what can be seen and what cant. There is an industry of desire that is born out of this condition – from advertising and porn- To see and not be able to touch; the perpetual condition of visually stimulated escalating desire.

Yet another system of discipline tries to enforce a regulatory mechanism to keep us safe from ourselves. To protect us from plunging deep from the precipices into a vortex of dangerous and destabilizing currents other structures of security are put into place. Censoring what is seen and not seen using the rationale of law, religion or morality they seem to be our ways of regulating the otherwise anarchic possibilities of freely roaming vision. Like the seat belts that we are forced to wear in cars, these are imposed regulations to protect us from our own selves.

In such a case, after all, our body is not only our own. It also seems to belong to the collective system of do’s and don’ts that the existence and propagation of existing power relationships depends on. However artificial they belong to a code whose basis needs dismantling ever more today.

When we see a sleeping body we yearn to protect it. Or violate it. We embrace our responsibility as protectors of the sleeping or use the opportunity to transgress boundaries that society / the gaze enforces upon us. A sleeping child asks us to protect, a desired lover asks us to violate – to rape? We are caught in the vice of opposing forces tearing us in scissoring vectors. At some level the embrace of a sleeping person is always a violation of a boundary- as the embrace is never returned.

To sleep then is to give oneself us to the outside. Completely. It is the space where we actually do dissolve into the outside, paradoxically with our eyes closed. Sublimation by surrender. And that is the strange bind about surrendering. By being most vulnerable, by dropping all our defenses we exude a strange power around us. The world begins to feel responsible for our protection. A line is drawn.

What does one make of the spaces of sleep? In a bourgeois bedroom it is the house of pleasures that lies on this side of sleep. in a sheen of satin and silk, with mirrors and chandeliers, the room dissolves in a haze of the exotic. Some of us sleep in foetal positions. Luxury is the ability to return to a pre-childhood without fear. It is also a retreat from the anxiety of adulthood. Softness and smoothness in the interior make up for the lack of the womb that we all want to return to. The walls dissolve in mirrored surfaces, the floor into marble.

The honeymoon suite is the idealized space where this fantasy of pleasure takes shape. Removed from everyday life it lies in a distant faraway land. A bed without a home. And around the bed materials and objects that make the bed even more remote; a view of the ocean perhaps, or artifacts from distant lands. I am sure we all have heard of the themed honeymoon suites where in the interiors a menu card of exotic experiences all the way from las vegas, bali or china are offered.

The wedding bed on the first night is bedecked with flowers that hang from the frame around. The bedspread is covered with rose petals and marigolds making visual and mythological puns. The imagery tends to deflect and draw attention at the same time. While the flowers ‘naturalize’ the sexual act, they also at the same time make it the ‘other’. A classic double bind that we often come across when we look at the way society deals with sex. By drawing attention to it, and simultaneously making it abnormal.

No comments: