Kama in Excess
Kama in Excess Rekha Menon Ohio University "A Man possesses nothing certainly save a brief loan of his own body," wrote James B Cabell (1919), "and yet the body of man is capable of much curious pleasure." In Indian art, in essence, the universe in all of its abundance and multiplicity of life and form, finds in and behind the complex whole an omniscient, omnipotent, and transcendental presence. It permeates forms and is itself, in the last analyses, without form (arupa). The evolutionary pattern of the aesthetic in India, is traditionally couched in a language of myths and symbols. This paper will place emphasis on Mithuna sculptures which explore the impulses—the excessive impulses of our eroticism—in novel ways and in remote places. The craving and longing in kama, the dismembered and the voluptuous eye, the attuned ear, are designed to seek the kamik excesses, overflows that threaten all limits without becoming infinite. The erotic–sensuous passion, desperate and desirous, animates every human posture carved in stone, with the longing for the beyond that does not want to get to the beyond. This longing attempts to transcribe the dialectic of sensuous excess into form and limit. At the same time, the form is overflown by this very sensuality that creates a tension between desire and desperate efforts to limit it. These Mithuna sculptures are made of the artifices of love, the pure effulgence of the rapturous, as the very essence of unrestricted kama. The paper will analyze the erotica (the Indian Kamic) which persists in these sculptures, portraying the topographically intimate, paradoxical realm of artistic creations. What is pertinent to the analysis is the continuous tension between the erotic excesses that intimate desire, and the efforts to close it towards the transcendent as the all unifying one. Yet precisely at this closure, the one is also regarded as formless and hence yields to excess depicted in erotic passion. The formless urge, codified into the ritual of romantic love, has contributed perhaps more than any other capacity to the enjoyment of life. In maya, as the immediacy of the enveloping sensuality, that is to say in a world in which the play, the lila, was such that both men, women and the dreams equally could be represented clothed or unclothed in a variety of poses and positions without any implications of domination or submission. It is a world of total and so to speak, playful equality—a world of all–pervasive cosmic and kamic sensuality that exceeds any boundary without going beyond the world. Art is so persuasive that it can penetrate all barriers of communication, especially the world of kamic excesses, depicted in sensuous, solicitous corporeities that are sexed but not biological or reproductive. The nonreproductive energies of eroticism are not destined for the production of pleasure for the individual, but are cosmic in their nature. There are excesses even in reproductive sexuality; the libido is the name Freud, Nietzsche, and currently Lacan, in Western thought, have given us to cover the excess in the artifices of life.
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