What is missing from this impressive image?
This is missing. A tentacular monster from the sea in its distance. But what are the sources of the erotic charge that gives the fisherman wife’s dream its unusually powerful impact? For one, the creature from the sea symbolizes the oceanic forces, the origins of life, the Jungian drive to be something that breathes, bathes, brushes and brims with being. We all come from the depths of the sea and often we have sex that looks and feels a lot like swimming.
The rocks, the crashing waves, the creature, the naked woman. The image’s erotic charge is also triggered by the creature’s tentacles. The octopus has many ways to keep pleasing the fisherman’s wife. If one tentacle goes limp, there is another one ready and erect. And as all straight men know, to satisfy a woman, more than one tentacle, one session of sex is needed, which is why the most ridiculous ménage à trois arrangement is two women and a man. How can one man hope to satisfy two women? It’s a situation that must resort to lesbian sex if it hopes to find any happiness. Two men and one woman, however, makes total sense. Two men are well on the way to achieving that tantacular bliss the one on the beach experiences.
Lastly, there is this marvelous passage from Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past:
It is in sickness that we are compelled to recognize that we do not live alone but are chained to a being from a different realm, from whom we are worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body. Were we to meet a brigand on the road, we might perhaps succeed in making him sensible of his own personal interest if not of our plight. But to ask pity of our body is like discoursing in front of an octopus, for which our words can have no meaning than the sounds of the tides, and with which we should be appalled to find ourselves condemned to live.The body, like the octopus, like the tides, like the sea and sex itself, is alien to us reasonable mammals. The mind is the idea of the body, said Spinoza in an an imaginative effort to reconcile Descartes’ terrific split. But even the idea of our body looks strange and alien to those who are “condemned to live” in a body.
