I came to a place where all light was mute

And roaring on the naked dark

like seas wracked by a war of winds.

Their hellish flight of storm and counter storm through time foregone,

Sweeps the souls of the damned before its charge,

Whirling and battering them it drives them on.

And this, I learned, was the never ending flight
Of the carnal and lusty
Who subject reason to desire.


As the wings of wintering starlings draw them on
In their great wheeling flights, just so the blast
Bears through the tyrannous gust those evil souls.

The blast of hell that never rests from whirling
Harries the spirits along in the sweep of its swath,
And vexes them, for ever beating and hurling.


As cranes,
Chanting their dol’rous notes, traverse the sky,
Leaving the long streak of their flight in air,
So the wind drove on the wailing shadows.




From Inferno by Dante Alighieri composite use of translations by Henry Cary, Dorothy Sayers, John Ciardi and John Sinclair.


Image
Dayana Cadeau,prominent female bodybuilder and past Ms.Olympia title holder, from the work of pioneering photographer of female bodybuilders Bill Dobson at billdobson.com and billdobson.net.

This image foregrounds the relationship between this project and erotica,a relationship that emerges from the fact that I am am exploring the tension between the erotic, understood in the general sense of the sexual perception of the body and in a particular sense in terms of sexual activity and the human effort to explore the potential of this aspect of existence, either in rejection of its possibilities or in acceptance of natural urges or even in term of sublimation of these urges.The images of Dobbins' work that fascinate me strike me as having possibilities of evoking the tension between these possibilities of human existence. I see this evocation as something indirectly realized through the broad range of associations that the ladies' physiques convey, as suggested by the dynamics of his photography as realized through the manner in which the ladies are dressed,their poses,his use of light and shadow.I place,for example, the Dayana Cadeau image alongside a scene from the The Inferno,the first part of the epic poem,The Divine Comedy by the Italian poet Dante in order to evoke relationships between the sombre power of the poetic lines and the sleek ruggedness, the apocalyptic power evoked by Cadeau image by the towers of dark flesh, which, even though imposing, on account of the pose she assumes, still call attention to the cave like seductiveness of the space shaped by the globes of the buttocks, and, casting shadows, both alluring and challenging on account of its obvious eroticity and the paradoxical coexistence with a level of muscular tension and power not usually associated with the more uncomplicated visual values associated with the erotic.
The erotic and the rugged, the seductive and the challenging coexist in this image.
In placing this image alongside Dante's evocation of of the punishment suffered in hell by the lustful,I am not suggesting a correlation between the negative surrender to sexual desire depicted in Dante's work but with both the stark power of Dante's evocation,with the character of his conjuring and weaving of the elements of a linguistic spell and with Dante's evocation of the seductive moral ambiguity of sexuality as evoked,for example,by his retelling of the story of Paula and Francesca who are led into adultery by the reading of another great narrative of the seductive dangers of sexual temptation, Lancelot's relationship with Guinevere in the Arthurian cycle.The decisive and subtle power of sexual fires is suggested by the elliptical description of the climatic conjoining of mutual passion aroused by the reading of the Arthurian tale,when Paula,narrating his story to Dante recalled,that having been moved by the story of Lancelot,he and Francesca "read no more that day".
The sweet power of the erotic,which steals uninvited into human minds regardless of the social propriety of the desires and feelings evoked thereby,is suggested in this story.At the same time,the image of the female bodybuilder placed here echoes another conjunction of seemingly contradictory impulses which yet suggest the character of much of existence as a mesh of paradoxical conjunction of contraries.The lady's pose is seductive,her body lithe,supple and inviting,but it Oslo projects a sense of power that could be understood as at the same time working against and yet heightening the sense of feminine force that the lines of the body continue to display,even though she is more muscular than most men.


For more of Cadeau,see her site at http://www.dayana-cadeau.com/.

"In Yea and Nay,all things consist".
Jakob Boehme