Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
I have returned from a church service on Sunday, 8th January 2017, a service I was compelled to attend in respecting the wishes of those who invited me, a service that lasted almost eight hours, most of which I spent in taking walks outside the church premises since I am not fond of attending church services, particularly if they are not quiet as is my own preference in spiritual activity, a quiet unlike the culture of Pentecostal churches such as the one I attended.
I am at my computer, a primary zone of being for me where I engage with worlds mental and actual, virtual and otherwise, choosing to postpone the bath I must take having earlier spent hours in the Lagos streets and the heat of the car on the drive home.
What do I do at my computer? Do I continue work on my essay interpreting a particular cultural ceremony in philosophical and mystical terms, polishing the lofty and yet lucidly projected ideas I have invoked in this work of which I am so proud? Do I reflect and pray about the strategic life challenges I am not sure of how best to address? Do I contemplate the problems I have at the interface of my love of learning and the strictures of the dominant educational system, a framework created for the many when in fact the individuality of each person calls for a more flexible approach, pointing to the need for a reorientation I have been pursuing through much struggle for decades?
No.
I go to my erotica collection.
Why?
Looking through the images from that collection as they scroll past on my computer is like a bath of fresh water. The configuration of images, explicit and inexplicit, as they scroll on reminds me of the Yoruba proverb "Ile oba t'o jo, ewa lo busi", "The burning of the Oba's [king's] palace is an opportunity for him to display his wealth [in building a more beautiful one]", my summation of my experiences with Erotica Global, the Facebook group I founded and run and which has been closed by Facebook more times than I can recall for flouting the rules of the social network, the essence of that proverb being an intuition that arose spontaneously in my mind in connection with the possibility of the group being closed down at its height in its last
incarnation not long before the last deletion of the group by Facebook, one of my experiences of spontaneous prophesy that convinces me it is possible to know the future.
The images provoke me to ask why people like erotica. My tastes in erotica have been filtered over the years from immersion in the variety of explicit images and films provided by the Internet and the books and magazines I read before gaining full access to the Web. I recall some of the pornographic sites I frequented years ago, but the offerings no longer excite me. A lot of free films are on offer but since stumbling on the work of Herve Bodilis through an episode of his Russian Institute series, anything below the standard of his striking camera angles, lush color and efforts to integrate a degree of conceptual sophistication into the story, such as the use of what looks like psychoanalytic theory through a dream sequence, has steadily paled in interest. I wonder, though, if the thin storyline evident even in that film will be adequate for me again, some of misterwho's stories in the free erotic site Literotica revealing the combination of swift movement to action favoured by most explicit action centred erotica within rich network of psychological and social construction deeply enriching the erotic action in a manner I am yet to see in any pornographic film, making such creativity my preferred source for erotic creativity over even the visual force of films.
I have a torrid video of frenzied action by porn stars Asha Aikira and Dana Vespoli which I watch occasionally when interested in a sharp erotic frisson but what do I look at during those times when taking a break from the energy generating and energy recreating work of developing and expressing ideas and wanting something shorter than watching a film that relaxes me or expands my mind, my favourites raging from non-pornographic romance to science fiction?
I look at pictures of semi-naked women on Erotica Global and post similar images to the group, images of nakedness no longer being a significant turn on in and of itself and visualizations of explicit sexual activity not particularly interesting since one has seen practically all the variations possible, in the best quality available. Pictures of semi-naked women, however, remaining perennial in fascination for me.
Thus, the Facebook constriction on explicit images has simply taken me back to the roots of my interest in erotica, erotica as something that uplifts the mind and makes the beauty of the world more
evident, reminding one of the value of the simple but limitlessly profound fact of existence as a gift of nature in a world in which the human being struggles to make sense of a universe he has been flung into without any choice of his known to him and which he will exit at a time likely unknown to him to a destination unknown, the various theories of the human being's zone of entry to life on earth and of withdrawal from terrestrial existence being at best controversial efforts to explain what is largely, for now, inexplicable.
In the spirit of sharing the beauty and power of existence, therefore, my own contribution to the celebration of being represented by Sunday as Christianity conceives it, a commemoration of the intersection of the human and the divine in the person of Jesus Christ, I would like to share with you images from my erotica collection, selections demonstrating the potency of the inexplicit erotic image, images suggesting the undying power of the female form in any way it is framed, fully clothed or partly clothed, from a leg to something more expansive.
Erotica is a nexus of moral conflicts. The celebration of human embodiment through sexuality and the possibility of human degradation converge within it. Jesus is quoted as warning against lust in the declaration that a person who lusts after a woman has already committed adultery with her and of course, erotica could inspire lust. Interestingly, erotica does not necessarily translate for me into interpreting my physical world experience in such terms. Erotica, for, me, represents an idealized universe that does not always correspond to concrete reality. True, some women correspond to the images in some of the more flagrant forms of female beauty in erotica, but not all women. Erotica shapes a world in which selections from a spectrum of possible expressions of the female form have been sifted in order to move the viewer beyond the banality into which everyday life is often in danger of falling into or which it may consist in to a greater or lesser degree for many people. Erotica is therefore both factual and yet not fully expressive of the factual.
I now leave you to whet your appetite on selections from Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju's erotica collection. Great thanks to all those photographers whose pictures I showcase, such artists being often unnamed where their pictures are sourced from and not all of the sources I am able to locate again. Those sources I can identify are listed in the last page of this piece. My primary source for such images these days is the Female Depot Yahoo group whose members post daily images collected from various sources.
I have included one image that is very different from the rest in that it is not meant to generate erotic titillation although it has erotic undertones, the picture of an elderly woman holding with reverential earnestness a statuette of the Yoruba deity Esu, her forehead touching the phallic head protrusion of the figure in total identification as her eyes seem to narrow or close in concentration, a picture by Marilyn Houlberg from Sarah Watson Parson's academic article on the phallus in Esu iconography, Esu visual symbolism. At the fringe of the erotic imagination is a borderland inhabited by images that do not align with the convergence of youth and erotic force that shapes the conventional erotic cosmos, imaginative reformations I have encountered only in rare but potent instances and this image might be one of them.
"After taking as a support the earth which is forever cleansed by a sprinkling with the essence of amazement, I worship you with flowers which arise spontaneously from the mind, which pour forth their own fragrance; I worship you according as the priceless vessel of my heart brims with the nectar of bliss; I worship you, O God, together with the Goddess, in the temple of the body, night and day."
"I bow down to the deity, Pratibha,
the ever creative activity of consciousness
the spontaneous supreme Consciousness
Para Sakti [ the feminine identity of supreme deity]
I bow down to that deity who is like lightning
naturally produced from the rainy cloud spread out in the sky
and who rests in the dancing body of Bhairava[ the masculine character of the Supreme]."
Quotations from Abhinavagupta, Indian Hindu Tantric master.
Anowa Adjah
"The First Full Figured Fitness Phenomenon"
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