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Climbing Jennifer Lopez |
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by Ray Purcell |
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Ricardo and I were walking off of a climb when we rounded a clump of oaks and happened upon an alcove of granite with walls about twenty feet high.� As is so emblematic of Sierran granite the quartz and feldspar were dazzlingly bright, perfectly reflecting the late summer sun.� Next thing I know Ricardo is transfixed, then he starts to Ohh, and oouh.� I decide to give it a minute or two since I don't know if he's just delighted by the rock, understandable, or maybe his blood sugar was low and he's tripping out, we were way late for lunch; or maybe I'm missing an apparition, the Virgin of Guadalupe, Elvis even.� Then Ricardo sighs," That rock is so beautiful!"�� "Oh, well yeah", I respond dumbly, "Hey, lets go eat." |
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| What"s had really caught his eye was a devilishly hard line; a serpentine, perfectly parallel finger crack, that's overhanging, and slightly offset.� The kind of climb I could only flail on top-roped.� I looked over at Ricardo and his arms are out stretched with his fingers bent, and his hands rhythmically rotating, flowing through the imaginary sequence of finger jams in an airy dance that starts to resemble a caress.� I heard a faint groan and started to walk away when I began to blush.� I called back over my shoulder, "hey, lets go eat." |
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| We climbed up on to the terrace above the crack that had clearly become the object of Ricardo's desire and looked over from above.� "We gotta try this next time", I said and he agreed.� As we turned to start for his car Ricardo said, "When I was climbing in Peru, we used to say that a climb was like a particular beautiful woman."� Then he said, "I don't know what kind of women you like."� I told him that I'd be happy to point out a few, but for the sake of convenience we settled on Jennifer Lopez, with her off verticall extreme d�colletage at the 2000 Grammy Awards.��� |
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| Since about the time that our short, hairy, and barely verbal ancestors cruised the highways and the byways of this Paleolithic planet, we humans have demonized, deified, and anthropomorphized geographic features.� This all began with our ability to create and recognize symbols, and that was the seminal change that separated us from the creatures that we clubbed or speared for dinner.� As time has past our intellectual capacity has enabled us to expand symbolism to a degree of depth, refinement, and even elegance that has never before existed; in fact, time it self is as much a symbolic as it is physical construct. |
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| Just for fun, lets compress the millennia of human development into a ludicrously short time frame so we can examine a significant use of symbolism by humans.� Turn back the clock to those newly bipedal and swarthy forefathers who roamed the steppes and savannahs; it was from around their campfires that two critical human constructs evolved, spirituality and a common language.� Spirituality grew from the recognition of forces not physically sensed but felt.� Language grew from our capacity to create shared visual and auditory symbols to describe those things that could be sensed and felt.� Inevitably language, who's premise was to describe the tangible, was applied to explain the un-seeable and the un-touchable and voila we had religion; the down side there was that the resulting dissonance has kept our various and sundry tribes in disagreeable conflict ever since and made humans the riff raff of the planet- but I digress. |
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| Long before we discovered language and religion early humans had discovered their genitals.� Since one discovery typically leads to another, it couldn't have taken too great a leap of reasoning to identify the correlation between genitals and fertility, and further from fertility to survival.� Being a people deeply in tune with the rhythms of nature, they must have discerned that their own fecundity was closely linked to that of their environment and would want to know how to preserve that relationship.� Well, even with language they must have been speechless.� Because even with the most astute observational skills they lacked the science, a much latter invention, to describe the brass tacks of the relationship. |
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| Without the where with all to describe the mechanics of fertility the whole thing would have been relegated into the realm of the spiritual.� For better or for worse the explanation of the spiritual fell to a seemingly erudite few who, even if they didn't have a clue about it all must have at least been able to put on a pretty good show.� Early societies must have been more than content to allow these individuals, who in a latter and less enlightened time would come to be known as the Second Estate, or clergy, to assume responsibility for spiritually overseeing the fecundity of the clan.� After all, what with stalking food and farming they had more important things to occupy their time, better to leave it to the cognoscenti. |
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| So, if fertility is tied to survival and survival is somewhat akin to job security, then these members of the early clergy, because they were doing their arcane spiritual thing full time, and were dependent on the community to eat, had little recourse but to ritualize and ceremonialise fertility.� Well since genitalia, and any other part of the voluptuous female form were symbolic of fertility, it wasn?t long before man began spending his spare time worshiping genitals, under the direction of the clergy of course.� Pretty soon we were seeking representations of genitalia, and they were being found in every nook and cranny as it were; but if we weren't seeing them we were erecting them or drawing them on a cave walls. |
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| Now lets leap ahead to contemporary man who, even though he no longer worships genitals at least in a mainstream sort of way, has been tethered to his genitals by his neuroanatomy through out our evolution from knuckle dragger to ass dragger.� Why?� Because of our primitive brain, what the neurologists call the dienencephalon, or what I call the lizard brain.� This is the spot at the very base of the brain where all of our basic survival drives originate, hunger, aggression, escape, and, tada, sex.� Evolutionarily, if you have the testes to accept this theory, the dienencephalon is the foundation upon which the telencephalon, the reasoning, abstracting and intellectual centers, developed.� Now we have two complicit reasons for man to be so... well, distracted by sex.� They say a house is only as good as it's foundation.� Did someone say sex? |
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| So what does any of this have to do with climbing?� Everything!� I've always said that the entirety of the human condition can be explored and understood by doing two things, climbing and watching Star Trek reruns.� For example my friend Ricardo embraces the sensuality of climbing and the sensuousness of the rock.�� Is that because he's horney?� Perhaps, were guys, it doesn't take much!� Or, perhaps it's because when the Latin cultures emerged from the dark ages, with it's abject repression of human nature, the Renaissance offered an opportunity to air out their collective diencephalons and drag their sexuality kicking and screaming into the enlightenment of the higher brain functions.� The vulgar drive to procreate metamorphosed into a celebration of the entirety of masculinity and femininity, which in turn became the archetype against which all things of beauty are compared.� On the other hand Jennifer Lopez does have a nice butt.� Well that's it in a nutshell. |
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| September, 2002 |
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