Nirvana Impulse – Oceanic. A dissolution of subject-object divisions. It can be so radical that one experiences the sensation of merging with the universe.
Bit by bit, thread by thread, the West has woven a tapestry in which the primitive, the oceanic, and the feminine have been banished to the margins in order to protect – or so the logic went – the primacy of civilization, masculinity, and the autonomous self.
Differentiation, judgment, separation, and difference make possible order and direction. They are the constitutive acts of connoisseurship and analysis – vital functions of secure selfhood.
Sexuality was often lurking in the male fascination with the primitive – but a sexuality that was interlaced with violent theme and that was neither recognized nor expressed in connection with more positive emotions.
Primitive Passions
Mariana Torgovnick
"The differences between us, it seemed to me, were so radical and thoroughgoing, the vocabulary and syntax of our respective lives so incomprehensible to each other, that what ordinarily should have repelled us in actuality attracted us, drew us together, so that we were like a pair of magnets clamped together, opposite pole to opposite pole. A consequence of this, or so I believed, was that neither of us took the other’s descriptions of reality as revealing any reality except that of the teller himself. I believed that we looked into each other, but not through each other, to the world beyond. Almost the way lovers do, each man used the other only to learn about himself. We were utterly opaque surfaces, I thought, but as a mirror is opaque" .