no Milk

Here is the beginning of a new painting. What do you think? As you know I'm still investigating "the male body" (Susan Bordo), and the significance of the penis. One thing the male body cannot achieve that the female body can is milk. The female body is AMAZING!! It can make food for people. Semen can be considered liquid life in a similar way as milk, I suppose. But it's totally different, right? And I'm not the only one who thinks about this kind of stuff, you know. Retired MIT Humanities Professor William Irwin Thompson noticed this in our collective history. With regards to its appearence in Paleolithic art he says, "In this visual system of punning, there is a logic of association. The breasts give milk, the penis gives the cream of semen. All the vital fluids, milk, menstrual blood, semen, have a numinous quality, and the magical powers associated with them survive into history and are fossilized in Tantric yoga." He also does a great job in describing one perspective of the male body and penis: "If birth is the central mystery for the female, death seems to be the central mystery for the male. The penis is a wonder, as what is small becomes great. It becomes tall and erect in dream, trance, and lovemaking; it grows like the shoots of plants, and like them it has its season, and then it falls. So the penis becomes the phallus, a symbolic complex for time, for the vanishing modality of time. Since the menstruating vulva is the wound that heals itself in rhythm with the cycles of the moon in the heavens, the vulva becomes the symbol for eternal recurrence, of the enduring and not the vanishing mode of time. The male dies, and though the female may mourn, it is she who endures. So it is that the phallus belongs to the Great Mother, the vanishing mode of time belongs to the larger and more enduring mode of time.

The male goes through an intensely sharp experience of temporality--of heroic life and tragic death--and then he returns to the Great Mother...Now one can appreciate the archetypal dimensions of Michelangelo's Pieta, the image of the dead Christ in the arms of Mary, and one can also appreciate how sculpture is a form of thinking." I could go on all day...

Thoughts?