A Current Media Politic of the Breast

I’m laughing: I can’t take it seriously, this flaming about Hillary’s ‘breast smile’ peeking out. I’d say about ‘ le chapitre de le clivage,‘ the Chapter of the Cleavage… quelle vue! quelle mignon: What a sweet view! How charming! Delightful. Fine. Yum. I’m cooing, yes. But also, I am saying at the same time, a soft, “Interesting if true, but so what?”

Why is a media journalist who started this whole M.C. Escheresque trek, why is any up-close journalist who is supposed to be looking for ‘what most matters’ in a political campaign, so startled a woman in summertime wears a neckline that allows one of the many aspects of the feminine to be revealed? It’s 2007, right? Or is it 1607…

I fear I wouldn’t understand how cleavage or no, is related to reporting on a candidate for the presidency, even were it explained slowly to me. I’m not always the fastest sparkler to burn out in the bunch; but maybe those smarter see something here I don’t. A cleavage story with, um, legs. Interesting picture, that.

I received this email from my friend Dr. Omed who has a long-standing blog over at Salon. He was the first of our old group of Bowery street poets (a story of poets and knife fights and general way-strangeness, for another time) to be a gifted blogger:

“How can it be that a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter at WaPo thinks that Hillary showing a little cleavage; Flash, Hillary has tits! is new???

If I was Hillary I would be going out of my way on every possible occasion to announce, “Yes, it’s true–I have breasts.”

The MSM pundits and reporters for the most part do not seem to understand that the rules of the game have changed, they’re no longer in charge, and they’re no longer able to get away with the same line of BS. Their dogs don’t hunt no more.”

“Dog don’t hunt.” Where Dr. Omed and I come from, “That dog don’t hunt,” means the dog is supposed to be attentive a pointer; to go into a forward slant, one-paw-raised, snout out, ears pitched, tail straight, the whole body aimed toward what is being tracked. ‘Dog don’t hunt no more’ means, not paying attention at depth. Overlooking the central points; not having a certain gut sense. And especially, not being able to sense what is hidden or lost.

The Politics of the Breast: A Reality…
Erasing the incandescence of the body

On the subject of pointing toward what might be hidden or lost in our culture, I have additional serious wonderings about such matters of cleavage and breasts. I wonder what is lost for every soul when we in media put up pictures of whomever… Hillary with her modest peeking smile, or more often, Tara the Tarantula action figure with bursting straps around her naked breasts, and then, whomever wishes… looks… and goes ‘pant pant’ for a few seconds over a paper image or image on glass… and we leave it at that… or else perseverate on that one image endlessly until we have deja blue.

What is lost when we speak about Janet Jackson’s breast suddenly revealed and the same old ‘shame-ons’ come out of the rotting big media timbers, wagging their antennae and harrumphing, or others playing SimpleSimon the Skeptic, rut on about how ‘she planned it…’ and not one word is said about the beauty, the arresting quality of suddenly seeing what some of us believe to be holy, the breast of a woman in full motion…

And likewise, what happens to us, to the young watching us, to other adults who aren’t sure what to think yet, when we glimpse Hillary’s ‘second smile,’ a lovely one, and all we can do is speculate about ugly-not ugly; appropriate/ not appropriate; sexual/ unsexual; good/bad; stupid/not stupid…

And what happens to all of us when we reduce the life of the body to a butchered abridgement of itself. Allowing this chapter, but not those ten others. Allowing this understanding, but not that one. The Bowdlerized body. Parting out the body like a car. Radiator, headlights, tail-lights, glazing, upholstery, bumpers.

More so than stopping the conversation: it stops knowledge. It forestalls learning deeper matters about the body. Thus, we wind up with a culture that has Breasts breasts!! everywhere, but no sensory understanding, no deeper consciousness perceived in the image, idea, or reality of breast… not by owner, not by gazer… not even by lovers.

When the body and the life of the body, is regarded as dim-witted, not worthy of being blessed, only exploited…

The cultural rant heard most is that the most sensitive parts of the body are dumb, mindless, just automatonic hoists and levers. I can’t think of a scathing enough remonstrance to all that. Insert your own fiery cuss word here. I can only say definitively, none of that is essential truth. Like some people create the world as crabbed, so too some envision the body as a limited and limiting homunculus… when in fact, the body is a colossus.

What kind of culture is it that tries to press everyone into a petrified sexuality devoid of spirit– which is the rhizome of sexuality. What kind of central trunk of culture never grows, develops, asks questions, reveals a deeper nature and doesn’t want us to either ask, tell, teach or know either?

What kind of culture says while corralling the very young, ‘Here, lie in state with coins over your eyes, coins of the kingdom inscribed against your eyeballs with the five approved sexual images the culture holds for profit, leaving out all the many, different and deeper. Repeat endlessly only what we show you. There’ll be no originality or creative life or consciousness through the lenses of your gender, your body, your sensual self, for you.’

And thus humans too often languish, while rich in resource, and understanding far beyond the culture’s. When one does not speak about the body in any more than dimmed terms and dull insights and easy reactions, then the facts of this human treasure remains embargoed.

A culture of reductionisms: When the body which is rich in symbolism is reduced to mere signage…

What of a culture the, wherein the breast has been reduced to signage rather than the breast seen as symbol of its powers… symbolic of all that one would ever want: feeling, knowing, response, nurturance, warmth, sensitivity, strength, excitement, the absolute beat of life underneath… and anyone who has ever watched a beloved woman walk, no matter the volume of her breasts, that part of her body dances as she walks, either in a

shimmer or a deep swaying.

And I would say the same of a man and his prize of body as well… symbolic of all that one would ever want: feeling, knowing, response, nurturance, warmth, sensitivity, strength, excitement, the absolute beat of life underneath… and anyone who has ever watched a beloved man walk, no matter the volume of his body, that part of his body dances as he walks, either in a shimmer or a deep swaying.

And so, tell me this small memoir of the breast here, ought be allowed to be reduced by the culture to whether a woman shows this or that.

Tell me we should forget the awe striking qualities, talents and effects of the breasts.

Tell me we all ought just be reduced to elbowing each other and acting like we’re dummling hooligans on holiday, instead of souls who can enthuse and recognize and adore the Godly living flesh and all it can mean.

Reductionism of the numinous is rampant in our culture. Making the breast ‘a thing’ instead of a element of the life force, is the difference between castile soap and Castile, Spain. Castile soap: made of ashes and animal fat. Castile, the Spanish castle city: where one of the wildest dances of Spain originated: the sevillana, an ancient thrum; one of the bloodlines behind the oldest forms of flamenco.

There are hidden places outside the over-culture that still carry the reverence…

The breast indeed has been reduced to fat and ashes in our culture. But, once it was a castle of the mysteries. As my grandmother used to say: “Listen to me now and believe me later.” This is one of several life-force matters I know something about intimately… The dance of flama flamenco is in the breasts and ovarios. That’s what I learned when I studied flamenco; the fire of the dancer is not in the legs, not even in the hips per se, not even in the arms which are often held as though chained, not even in the agonistas of the eyes and brow or the defiance of the chin…

…but in the spirit that can never be chained… and that very spirit in the dance is led by the breasts and their engenderings deep in a woman’s body, and what lies under the breasts… the heart and the heartbeat… the muscles pectoralis, the protective carved ivory cage of the ribs, the tender flesh imbedded with its jewels, which are its swirled ducts for milk and its pleasure cords… all these are the magnetos of the dance.

The breasts lead the dance, and the skin that covers the breasts knows the way… for the skin is often filled with millions of star plexus, nerve endings like microscopic open hands that each have feeling and responsiveness, and each of these stars embedded in the flesh can hear music, feel the touch of the beat vibrating, can feel the light and the darkness… In the dance, the breast can brighten, glow so as to be seen in the mind for miles, and also can sleep, as in rest.

Collusion with the uni-form. The deadened culture silences multiple ideas of the body, sense awareness, sexuality, knowledge and expansion of the psyche through eros. Yet, a finer, wilder, more cohesive sensibility was born with us. In that, intimacy comes not from mere contact, but from a depth of ecstatic ‘knowing’ that stands far outside factual knowledge alone…

In a culture busy with sterilizing us through repetitive images, and its mad busyness to make small signage out of what was once a contemplative sacred, the breast can also be put to sleep… by it’s owner’s disdain, ignorance, lack of self knowledge, lack of curiosity, lack of mirroring by the over-culture, and by others’ ‘one-point only’ superficial perseverations about the breast…

Thus, eventually, memory of the mysteries that surround the breast and the body, is limited to one idea only, when they once carried dozens. Then, a finer-tuned self, an ecstatic self, and the experience of knowing oneself and ‘the other’ is lost. One can no longer learn and teach ‘the other’ about her or himself, or oneself… one of the sharpest sweetest notes of genuine intimacy; teaching the body to one another.

Teaching the body to ‘the other’… consider this as one kind of teaching the culture fails to convey: In flama flamenco, the breasts are not conceived as hanging on the front of a woman or a man, but rather growing straight out from the center of his or her body, anchored there by the heart, and lower, as in da Vinci’s anatomical drawing “Coition.” There, this male artist, Leonardo, the one who created images of God by Pope’s command, drew a cord from the tintinnabulations of the woman’s nipple outside her body, and spiraled the cord of feeling inward throughout the breast, down through the sternum, curling like a tendril this cord, all the way down until it ends in a tender place deep in the belly.

Imagine what this long coiling curlicue might mean, what mystery is being hinted at there… not the first thing that comes to our minds, but the tenth and the twentieth, the ones buried by the over-culture that only wants us to elbow each other when we see a breast, that will give us a trillion paper and glass breasts, if only we will, at the same time we are being defeated and deadened and diverted from real meaning and intimacy, feed the machine our money.

Think of what the cultural motive might be for wanting to subvert the breadth and depth of the sensory life force… for wanting to keep spirit, body, soul, mind and heart away from one another…

What kind of culture is it really, that hopes to keep us either afraid, disgusted, matter-of-fact or screaming apelike about a one-sided vision of the body? What kind of culture cements over the intensity of precious body and soul acting together, intent on keeping body and soul divided, and us unknowing about the rapture of the body together with all of psyche in one locus?

What kind of culture is it that discourages us from being immersed in the mysteries that will take us the farthest, and turn us toward an open sea instead of into a mere pothole filled with water… what kind of culture encourages us to treat the body as stupid, dumb, a slave to be exploited for one kind of flat gain or another, not central, not holy, too hungry, a know-nothing, something to be sublimated, or made into someone’s idea of a perpetual motion machine with one excitement point only, having parts that can be judged like animals at a stock show? There’s a difference between playing games to entertain our isolation, and reaching out to live a true sane and sensory life.

… What if a voracious and deadly dry aspect of culture wants us all to be dead and dry too? What if a culture that ironically harps on propriety and yet is completely out of control with commerce ever on its mind, wants us never to find out the startling worlds that open to us by uniting the vivid body, the leaping spirit, the deep heart, the time-out-of-mind soul, and the creative mind, all in one place?

What if we turned to those aspects of psyche that create, instead of culture’s paltry predictable diversions? What if we refused to allow the radiant body to go invisible. What if we taught what we know of deeper eros instead of being timorous.

What if we learned again that placing all five of these parts altogether in regard, in love, in devotion, in arousal, creates a vehicle with booster rockets that is so magical that ego can barely comprehend it and cannot, cannot withstand it … what if the soul is let loose to drive its cruiser through the heavens, a vehicle that can carry us and one other rider beyond this place and time…? What if it was a holy prayer to pray: “Give me this richness of body, mind, spirit, heart and soul altogether, to aspire to and no other, for any one of these divided from the others is merely ashes…”

Speaking only for myself and my own trying to learn and see and rest in my knowings thus far about these matters… I’d forever commemorate the day when neither opprobrium nor instant mindlessness make up the majority of public dialog about the breast or any other precious part of the sensory body, male or female. What men lose in self knowledge of their bodies, causes others to be de-minded also. What women refuse to know and practice that is of the radiant core, makes whomever her ‘special one’ is, the poorer.

Whomsoever knows about these matters of true Eros, and yet refuses to teach what they know, causes the utter beauty and magic of the cellular body with all its firing neurons and synapses that are laid into it by an Artist greater… to take on lifelong invisibility. There is much tra-la spoken about ‘living, really living,” but what is often most missing, is ‘loving, really loving’ and ‘creating, really creating,’ beyond ‘the usual self,’ all the way to the ends of every atomic dot one is made of.

It is just my two cents worth among several cents worth… that ‘the breast’ for many souls– and you will recognize yourself if you are also aware– that the breast is a means to light up the sky inside oneself… both the one who carries these precious orbs… and those who gaze upon a loved woman who is fully alive and present to her own gifts.

Until the greater culture comes literally to its senses; those who innately understand the nuances and powers of the body and psyche, will continue to inhabit together a world unto ourselves…. whether we are practiced at these knowings or not, whether we completely understand them or are only just now trying to, whether we are brave enough to reach for them or are just thinking about returning to “know what we know, what we have always known,” again…

Some who have caught glimpses of that inner world where body and psyche are not divided from one another, will be willing to find ways to speak of these ideas, these incomparable realities publicly. No undaunting task, at least for me, to speak of these matters out loud without a backup chorus of protective humans and angels right beside me.

It takes guts to say whatever we truly know that stands outside the narrow brain pan the culture tries to confine us to… for us to break out and to live what we know, to not let others endure without knowing there is choice, top convey to them that they don’t have to submit to the ongoing and senseless cultural surgeries meant to un-ensoul flesh….

But then, I remember that the time has come, and perhaps there’s come a time when you do too… we ask ourselves what we love more– being ‘safe’ from the antennae- shakers, or endlessly joining in to humor the loin grabbers– or perhaps, far more, giving a portion of our lives to ‘unlonely-ing the lonely,’ that is…

… by speaking as stable a truth as we are aware about these hidden matters to other souls… those who also sense or know the depths, but think they are the only ones… to let them know there are others who have seen the maps, who sense the updrafts, and who know at least part of the way, or all of the way there and back.

I wondered about writing about the breast, and what it means in more depth, when the original story of ‘cleavage’ was sort of the equivalent of a journalistic public pea shooter. But I thought too, perhaps the journalist who seemed to write so breathlessly, not about breast or cleavage, but about the ‘propriety’ of it all, was just in a temporary spin. I think we all make that error from time to time, spinning out like that.

But, I also hope I can be a journalist who more of the time hopefully, is able to spin a little gold from the huge pile of dead straw given to us daily by the over-culture… an over-culture that tells us straw is the latest greatest thing for animals such as us, when in fact it is the least of what we can truly live on, the least of what we need to be fully nourished. And fully alive. Flesh and soul.

CODA
I chose this artwork although not sure of the meaning of some of the words in the fields, but wanted you to see this modern representation of an actual ancient statue of the multi-breasted Artemis of Ephesus, who is depicted with breasts from sternum to ankles. Ironically, this ‘dog can hunt,’ as Artemis is the Goddess of the Hunt and of wild creatures. There is an interesting controversy about the some of the statues from Asia re Diana and Artemis, some saying, these rounds are the breasts of the goddess, and others arguing no, they are bull testes covering the front of the goddess. Frankly, either way, I’ve only one comment: Awesome.

Image used with kind permission of the artist: Dana Patillo/ Dr. Omed Tent Show Revival
“THE ARTEMIS OF INSOMNIA AND THE MILK OF AMNESIA”
http://blogs.salon.com/0002296/categories/scissorDances/index.html