The Floating Girl
In Teraoka’s Wave Series paintings the cephalopods seduce young female divers, spread tentacles massing from corner to corner in erotic landscapes; despite the stark Ukiyo-e inkstrokes delineating these contours into parabolic clarity, the scenes of “loving cunnilingus” between beast and woman creates a fantastic aesthetic confusion: you can barely differentiate the ocean waves from the indigo tattoos surging in breakers up her body, the tide of legs engulfing her (you nearly miss the spread, fine-haired holothurian of her sex in all the visual noise)…And how can such an encounter end? Does she succumb to the enamored, oceanic maw of her lover, a feast ravishing and ravished to be digested in the massive pouch of some lightless Marianas? Or does she survive, but spend moonless nights in her husband’s bed longing for a confusion of limbs unencumbered by bone? Or perhaps there is no end to this, only an abiding Möbius strip, chiral and irreconcilable, a lesson in how ardor ignites not in unlikeness, but unlikelihood: desire’s sought-after moment of dissolution when What surrenders entirely to How.
Originally published in Fugue
