It was a dream. In a long marbled exhibition hall, with a vaulted ceiling of wrought iron and glass, columns gilt in gold, ornamented with silver and pewter. And I am there, my some magic or art frozen too near immobility, and nude, a stride a great bronze statue of a Roman hercules, his narrow hips fit easily between my legs asunder. Around me people talk, or stare, or reflect, or sketch. From me exudes an aura that grows as I am gazed upon. But I am not quite motionless, but instead, like a living Foucault's pendulum, am almost imperceptibly shifting, grinding my hips down, riding them back up again, slowly exposing the curve and arching my back.
It is an old dream.
When first I told this story, the person listening assumed that it was humiliating, submissive. But it is not, I am not embarassed, the way the time honored "naked to the final" dream embarasses, but instead am radiant, warm, and glowing as a living work of art. The submissive has his or her own objectification fantasies, to be treated as a thing, the target against which a storm is unleashed, which comes and goes, hammers and burns. But at the heart of both is that remark by Descartes "I am practicing separating my mind from my body." The body including consciousness itself, as that other silent self looks on at even the phenomenological racket is subjected to some scathing hostile xtacy.
In the concept of chakra, or spiritual centers, I think helps describe the sense of being an object. The whole of the sense of where "I" is moves someplace, and where it is felt to have moved, is the kind of objectification that has happened. The "Muladhara" is the Chakra lowest in the body, and we have all felt absorbed by the engorged passion and desire. But it's closest neighbor, which is opposite the pubic bone, is the consuming point of destruction. This kind of being an object is to become a sex order that pressed outwards on everyone else, in a consuming and fiery darkness. My dream of being a statue is this transition from passion of Muladhara to the destruction of Swadhisthana. From enflamed desire, to destructive aura of lust. To feel and feel and feel not feeling, but imposing feeling. Where the nerves of the skin push out upon the world rather than are pushed upon it.
The life feels so drained from the rest of the body, that we feel it as "it." Since the illusion that the body and the mind are the same is the result of a great and complex dance, this vanishing of the illusion is powerfully erotic, because all of the boundaries that one yokes upon the other vanish. Blood is free to pour, and at the same time, being it, the mind no longer sees this as rebellion against its sense of self, but as the fulfillment. We become cold as mountains in winter, as the sense of being an object falls upon us, only to flood into a purer passion, as that feeling of being "it" over powers us.
Being treated as a thing is powerfully embracing. Men fight and die for territory, to be his territory implies that he will fight and die for you. Men hold territory beyond their last breath. To be territory is to be plowed by a sharp plow, and become a furrow that is waiting for seed.
Being a thing is powerful, as things beat and break our skin and bones, slap us if we dare to bend them. To be a thing is to have the power of stone, the resiliancy of wood, the temper of steel. And have we not heard these words applied to a man's organ? Even bone, as bone, is a thing, a human rock.
And down upon this from the highest chakra we look down, seeing a body being used by the world, and using it, and within this divine bliss, touch nirvana on oblique tangent.
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