We are discussing beds.
Memory foam versus wool, innerspring or classic futon. A bed’s ability to comfort and contour to hold and provide rest hinges on a combination of materials and characteristics. Like the bodies it supports, a bed is an organized whole, more than the sum of its parts.
Beyond soft or firm and narrow or wide, what about hypoallergenic or open cell technology? Have you tried horsehair? Straw might be cool.
We have slept in many beds. Air mattresses, quickly deflated. Hammocks, surprisingly comfortable. Creaky brass, far too noisy. Hide-a-ways, equal parts lumpy and stiff. Water always seems fun, but consider the consequences. Latex hospital, sweaty and bright. Do tanning beds count? Only when we fall asleep. The narrow luxury of our sleeper car from Beijing to Shanghai. Our grandmother’s bed covered with a chenille blanket, the colour of cut carnations. Those periwinkle sheets swaying in the wind.
That night we tried to sleep on the stinking hot double in a cheap hotel room with the busted fan? How we dreamed of laying down in a shallow creek to let the rush of cool water slip between us? And the release we found later—floating downstream on inner-tubes, our bodies baking on black rubber with hands clasped?
Lying prone, we are released from the vertical ‘I’, the upright standing I, the individual I, the restless I, the I who scans the horizon in search of somewhere else. In a hammock, a burrow, a mat in the corner, some warm patch of grass, or soft sand, we cannot be blown down by the storms of history because we are already hugging the earth, settled by gravity’s pull, dreaming the world into existence.
With its supple capacity to yield and expand, a bed becomes a gathering place for many subjects, elements, forces, purposes, and dimensions, both human and otherwise. Flowers and ashes, fossils and rocks, corals and oysters, all these and more figure spatially and temporally to the organizing principle of beds. While qualities of horizontality and the foundational draw these examples together, they also exhibit a certain negotiation between surface and depth, exterior and interior.
Offering a kind of welcoming framework, caught between thing and concept, beds are embedded with the logic of potential—reminding us that existence is built upon productively receptive foundations. We are in-the-bed when we lie on-the-bed.
Rolling over, we feel insulated, cushioned by friendship and radical affinities. Thoughts move gently into sensation and speculation, simile and free association. We talk about Jeanne Randolph’s, The Amenable Object. She refers to art objects as “soft and floppy”, so we picture Olympia with long velveteen ears and Stonehenge as a fort of pillows. We dig how Randolph suggests that art occupies an ambiguous position between ‘exterior objective reality’ and ‘interior subjective experience.’ Within this space of perceptual plasticity, a viewer’s experience becomes an adventure, both playful and undetermined.
We turn to extimacy, a new favourite word, which Jacques Lacan coined to problematize the opposition between inside and outside. Like Randolph’s definition of an artwork, the term touches upon an internalization of exterior circumstances and an externalization of intimate conditions.
Its particularly good as an adjective—extimate. Together, the collection of clicks and breath that form ex-ti-mate turn language inside-out, performing something close to an onomatopoeia. Over and over we feel its consonant-heavy syllables trip across our tongues. The metallic first click of /ˈɛks/ pronounced deep in the mouth where the back of our taste-buds rub against the soft palate followed by the sound /ˈtɪ/ with its a hard moist flick against the alveolar ridge then a lippy /mət/ that ends with a somewhat smoother flick and quick exhale.
Like beds, breath is a familiar found object. Pronouncing extimacy reminds us how the air we breathe comes from the world surrounding us, and that to breathe-in is to breathe-in this world. A world which, after spending time deep inside our lungs and blood and bowels, becomes some new thing. With each exhalation, a mixture of body-with-world becomes a world-with-bodies—a world we inhale again and again. The external internal, an intimate exterior.
We let this idea of world-with-body and body-with-world settle into us through a series of deep collective breaths: inhale—a-a-a-a-a-a-h, pause, exhale—o-o-o-o-o-o, pause, inhale—a-a-a-a-a-a-h, pause, o-o-o-o-o-o, pause, a-a-a-a-a-a-h, pause, o-o-o-o-o-o, pause.
Our o-o-o’s and a-a-ah’s remind us of a toddler who throws a red ball outside the crib with an expression of O-o-o-o-ing delight. When the mother retrieves and returns the toy, the child responds with an appreciative A-a-a-h. For hours the child tosses and the mother catches. This articulation of call and response unfolds over a lifetime.
The baby’s babble is translated by Freud as fort / da (gone / there) to analogize the compulsion to repeatedly test the effective relationship between a body and whatever is outside a body. Many theories have proposed the nuanced possibilities contained within this exchange but, most likely, the repeated action helps the child understand they exist independently from the world while still being bound inextricably and consequentially within a complex set of relations.
Each breath-out, a question; each breath-in, an answer.
O-o-o-o-o-o, pause, a-a-a-a-a-a-h…
I saw that Beyoncé has this silver upright bed as part of her latest performance