The Art of Lying Down (15 page)

Thanks to the popularity of Freud’s method, the word
couch
has taken on a whole new meaning and is now an informal synonym for psychoanalysis in many languages. When the designer Todd Bracher developed a couch for an Italian furniture company, he called his elegant creation Freud.

It seems inevitable that the psychoanalyst’s couch would sometimes become the scene of intimate sharing that went beyond verbal disclosures. Freud’s Hungarian student Sándor Ferenczi suffered from pangs of conscience on this account and, in a letter to his famous teacher, expressed a worry that patients with finely tuned senses might smell
or even see traces of sperm on his couch. The historian Andreas Mayer has described how the couch’s pornographic past caught up with its psychoanalytic present: the couch played a role in the text and even the titles of quite a few racy books. These include
Le canapé couleur de feu
(1741), supposedly by Louis Charles Fougeret de Montbron, which chronicles the sexual adventures of various church dignitaries in a Paris brothel. A number of memorable episodes play out on the establishment’s sofa. Combining moral outrage and voyeuristic impulses, the text shifts “between attacking the hypocrisy of the clergy and religious education and commending its secret beating rituals as a sure cure for aging husbands,” Mayer explains.

By adapting so brilliantly to the body’s biomechanics, the mechanized recliners of the nineteenth century not only broadened the horizons of motion technology but channeled sexual fantasies into previously untrodden regions. It was not difficult to draw parallels between the sudden action of tipping a patient over and the abrupt movements and changes in position that occur during sex. Under the pretense of examining his female patients, the young protagonist of James Campbell Reddie’s
The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon
(1881) takes advantage of them sexually. His customized couch serves him as a “veritable battleground of Venus.” He writes: “This couch
was very wide, with no back, and a scroll-head at one end, whilst what would be considered the foot was half-moon shaped.” Thanks to this remarkable piece of furniture, our hero is in a position “to administer [his] natural clyster … either standing or kneeling on a hassock.” In another enthusiastic description, the narrator explains that “this couch had a most springy motion when under a pair of lively lovers, being constructed with a special eye to luxurious effect, and it also had screws at each end and at the centre, so that I could elevate the head, bottoms, or bodies of my patients to suit the ideas to be carried out.” While female patients are his favorite prey, he receives a few male guests as well: “I used this couch sometimes to tie down and flagellate several of my old male patients, whose early excesses had made them too used up for the sport of love, and could only enjoy the pleasures of emission under the stimulating effects of the rod” adding that this activity “was one of the most lucrative branches” of his practice.

Suddenly, adjustable furniture was everywhere—for surgery, hairstyling, births, and physical examinations of reputable and disreputable varieties. It’s therefore no surprise that these devices took up a place in the artistic imagination as well. At the turn of the nineteenth century, lying down was associated with bohemian pleasures, as well as with the perilous depths of the unconscious. As technology
invaded the everyday environment and threatened to fully define it for the first time, perceptions of the horizontal world of dreams began to shift.

Heat treatment as art: Max Ernst
, The Preparation of Bone Glue

In their search for a visual counterpart to rationalism, the surrealists imbued sleep, dreams, and ecstatic states with aesthetic and political dimensions. Max Ernst, for example, frequently took material drawn from the world of commercial consumption and reworked it into surreal, disturbing collages. For his 1921 work
The Preparation of Bone Glue
, he added mechanical elements to the illustration of a heat treatment he had found in a medical journal. The resulting image shows a supine human figure that seems to have given up control over its surroundings. Thin tubes introduce or extract liquids from the body. It’s a vision of pure horror. Does this reclining
individual still possess a consciousness, or does the machine simply maintain outward signs of life? This bizarre image was intended for publication in a Dada magazine. Ernst knew that machines cannot serve as models of life and lying and that attempts to link humans and machines could turn nightmarish. His work could perhaps serve as a warning to today’s technology addicts.

Let’s take a short stroll through the Museum of Reclining, an imaginary institution housing every image ever made of a horizontal human figure. Among the more famous works is Vittore Carpaccio’s
The Dream of St. Ursula
, which depicts its subject covered in blankets and fast asleep. Of course, not all the individuals shown are as bloodless as Carpaccio’s holy nun; just think of Francisco de Goya’s
The Nude Maja
. Henri Matisse, who not incidentally painted in bed using brushes attached to long sticks, shows us a reclining nude with a most impressive backside. He produced this painting sometime after the boom years for such sprawling odalisques, and in the words of the French essayist Jean-Luc Hennig, their defining anatomical feature “had tripled in size” during the intervening period. Hennig continues: “As the model has placed all her weight on the right side, the buttocks appear one above the other in two storeys as it were; it is phenomenal … this women was heaviness that is alive. Furnished with the equipment she has, she can probably only exist lying down, for it is difficult to imagine her resisting the immutable laws of gravity.” Indeed, the lying figure can seem obscene,
awkward, comical but also elegant. By allowing us access to the intimate realms of their couches and beds, many of those portrayed demonstrate that lying down can be the highest form of life. And some of these horizontal hotties challenge and perhaps even arouse the observer.

Behind a curtain we find a gallery of erotic loungers. With her restrained exhibitionism, Audrey Hepburn is the epitome of stylish reclining. Her eye contact with the photographer implies more than just awareness of how attractive she is. Douglas Kirkland photographed Marilyn Monroe from above in bed, hugging a pillow and gazing lasciviously into the camera with half-closed eyes. The result—
One Night with Marilyn, Horizontal Classic—plays
with the observer’s expectations, even though its desirable subject remains out of reach. In contrast, reclining men, at least those shown in bed, have always been something of a rarity in art. In 1972, Burt Reynolds posed on a bearskin rug for a
Cosmopolitan
centerfold. With a broad smile, a cigarette clamped in his teeth, and an arm strategically blocking the view of his groin, he is a highlight of this unusual collection. Ferdinand Hodler’s
The Night
shows a very different scene: awakened by some nocturnal spirit, the artist finds himself surrounded by six other reclining figures, representing both genders and largely unclad. As we descend through the museum, we see unconscious figures displayed on the lower floors and lifeless bodies in the basement. Here, for example, we can admire Rembrandt’s
Anatomy Lesson
, in which a group of doctors in training gather around a partially dissected corpse.

The view from horizontal: “In a frame formed by the arch of the eyebrows, nose, and mustache, a portion of my body appeared, so far as it was visible, with its surroundings.”

The French expression
être allongé
, which means “to be stretched out,” is used only for people and animals, while the German verb
liegen
and the English
lie
can also apply to things.
Recline
, for its part, is something that only animate beings do. Arrente, the language of the Australian aborigines living near Alice Springs, contains the verb
ngarinyi
, which can signify not only “to lie down” but also “to sleep” and “to camp for the night” and serves as a handy euphemism for sex. Speakers of Trumai, an indigenous language of Brazil, can choose between two words for
lie:
the general
chumuchu
and the more specialized
tsula
, which refers to lying down on something other than the ground or floor. Korean also has two words to describe the act of assuming a horizontal posture—namely,
nwup-
and
cappaci-
. The first indicates a high degree of control; it is something done consciously and intentionally. The second can happen accidentally or by mistake and can also mean “to fall backwards.” In Chantyal, a Tibetan-Burmese language spoken in Nepal, no fewer than seven different expressions for lying down exist. Some include specific movements, and others do not. Are
we making mountains out of linguistic molehills if we ask whether lying down itself is different when it takes place in a different verbal universe? If we consider how much language shapes and influences our perceptions, then the words we have for lying down surely play a role in how we understand and perform the act.

The art of lying down is a fixture in our behavioral repertoire. It is a versatile activity that can be carried out in a variety of locations, spaces, and contexts. Anyone who has ever lived has lain down, but cycles of boom and bust are evident, too. Some epochs and cultures celebrated “cultivated,” conscious reclining more than others. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Europeans looked longingly toward the East, hoping to find inspiration for their own relaxation in real or imagined practices there. While they labored under many misconceptions, their intensive search forever altered Western furniture and the ways we lie on it.

How will the way we split our time among lying down, sitting, and standing change in the future? Will we rediscover the pleasures of Roman reclining? Or unwind the way Ottomans did? Given the increasingly apparent desire for a new understanding of time, our culture seems ripe for for a new balance between vertical and horizontal existence, and ready to embrace horizontal relaxation. Lying down could
play an important role in what the Korean-German cult philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls the art of lingering, part of an approach to revitalize the contemplative life and preventing existence from “declining into to a mere series of momentary presents.” Some celebrities enjoy being photographed in bed, forty years after John Lennon and Yoko Ono protested the Vietnam War by staying in bed for a week. The philosopher Slavoj Žižek is among them. In fact, Žižek, dubbed an “academic rock star” by
The New York Times
, goes several steps farther. Not only does he show us his underwear and provocatively display a picture of Joseph Stalin, but he lies naked in bed and philosophizes. Žižek is the best-known protagonist of a new generation of thinkers who vaguely sense that something is off about the vertical/horizontal ratio of our lives. In his diary
Lines and Days
, the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk challenges readers to simply “stay in bed.” He writes: “You don’t have to rush off into the vita activa just because the sun is already out when you wake up.” It really seems as though the age of the New Horizontal has arrived, and you don’t need genuine enlightenment or even cheap esotericism to explain why. This shift is a logical backlash to the compulsive idea that to get anywhere, everything must constantly be in motion. Our burned-out postmaterial society is thinking things over, and the reassessment of the horizontal is in full swing.

Of course, lying down requires no justification or complex philosophical basis. It is an actual down-to-earth activity. When we lie down, we are close to the ground and perhaps even adapt to it. The experience cultivates a bond. We let go and relax, taking a break from the constant stream of short bursts of attention that otherwise make up our days. No self-help book is ever going to teach us the “right” way to recline—we are born with an innate understanding of the grammar of horizontal orientation—but in the midst of a culture of restlessness, we can discover or rediscover the art of lying down, reduced to its bare essentials. Relaxing and stretching out all four limbs is a luxury. It is an art that we intuitively grasp, and although to understand it better, we can approach it from many angles, something irresolvable remains—a final secret, if you will. Without it, time spent horizontally would simply represent a physical state rather than a mode of living and being. Yet the art of lying down does not exist just for its own sake. It is inextricably linked to other art forms: the art of doing nothing, of being content with little, of enjoyment and relaxation and, of course, the proverbial art of love.