Co-ed Naked Philosophy by Forest Will

Author:Forest, Will [Forest, Will]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CreateSpace
Published: 2011-09-30T00:00:00+00:00

FEBRUARY

February

No Bodily Encumbrance Should Impede

Dr. Ross strolled into the classroom nude. A few students were still undressing. As he was pulling down the screen over the whiteboard, Dr. Saucedo walked in and disrobed nonchalantly near the back of the room.

Dr. Ross cleared his throat. “Let’s play a guessing game: imagine a man standing on a large raft in the middle of a lake. The man’s skin is gold. He dives into the lake, and on the lake bottom he sees a spilled treasure of jewels, golden goblets and statuettes. Who is this man?”

“James Bond!” yelled Alex. “Wasn’t that a scene in Goldfinger?”

“King Midas!” yelled somebody else.

Daphne remembered a page from a high school Spanish text. “El Dorado.”

“Very good, Daphne! I would like to begin today with an example of the body in non-Western aesthetics, and so I have prepared a presentation about the golden chieftain whom the Spaniards called El Dorado. What the Iberian conquistadors imagined to be a tantalizing tale of material prosperity can, in fact, be interpreted as the account of a harmonious worldview linking cognitive and oneiric thought processes to express human belonging in the universe.”

Dr. Ross dimmed the lights and showed the first slide, a map of northern South America indicating the region of the pre-conquest Muisca civilization and the location of Lake Guatavita.

“There is reason to believe that the accounts of El Dorado given by several Spaniards in sixteenth-century Nueva Granada, now Colombia, were based on descriptions of indigenous practices. Juan de Castellanos’s chronicle, for example, states that a tribal leader of the Muiscas would be painted with gold dust over every inch of his body and then ferried out into the middle of a lake on a raft. His subjects would burn incense on the raft and along the shore, enveloping the lake in a smoky haze. Golden objects were tossed into the lake, and the chieftain would also dive into the water. He would emerge washed clean, in what can be interpreted as a purification ritual. Some have suggested that Lake Guatavita was the site of this activity, although there may have been several such lakes.”

A photo of some earthen vessels appeared on the screen. “Anthropologists have compared the patterns of wavy lines found on Muisca pottery and petroglyphs to the rays of the sun, to gold and glittering substances in general, to light patterns on the retina when beginning shamanic hallucinations, and to glimmering light on the surface of water. According to one theory, El Dorado’s submersion under water re-enacted a passage into the dreamworld, perhaps what could be called the unconscious. In contrast to the incense smoke above the water, everything underwater was clear, like a window into a dreamworld. Water seems to be a universal symbol of the unconscious.”

Dr. Ross projected the next image, a pair of intertwined serpents. “Furthermore, the chief’s plunge resembles part of an extant creation myth of the peoples of that region, about a woman who arose from the waters of the lake suckling her baby son.

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