tactile dysfunction

I was on safari in Botswana this summer, and the same thing that always happens, happened: I fantasized about jumping on top of the animals. It's bordering on delusional, I know, to think you can dive out of your open-air safari vehicle and land on the back of a lioness, wrap your arms and legs around her, caress her golden coat, nuzzle into the scruff of her neck, dream she'll just let you snuggle in and have a long cuddle that ends in an afternoon snooze bathed in the gilt of the setting African savannah sun....

I'm prone to this kind of fantastical daydreaming while on holiday, and the themes are always tactile: jumping on wild animals that will surely kill me, and swaddling myself in reams of fabric. I had the same restrained pouncing impulse when I walked into Vlisco in Kinshasa, DRC. Vlisco produces haute couture pagnes--batik-printed lengths of fabric with which African women wrap themselves up. Their designs stopped my heart when I saw them. There were two billboards I saw whenever I arrived back in Kinshasa from my base in the interior of the country. The first was on the road coming from the airport; the second at an intersection of the road leading to the Grand Hotel and the tony ambassadors' residences district, and they beckoned to me. When I finally got to the store on one of my stopovers before going off on holiday, the range of designs produced in dozens of colour combinations and the haute couture dresses created from them sparked the desire to pull every pagne off the shelf and roll around on the floor, wrapping myself up in them. But the threat of a beating from the security guard and the unbelievable embarrassment once I resurfaced kept me restrained. Instead I bought a pagne in my favourite design and the colour combination that best suited me, and took a brochure home for pornographic viewing later.

I can't wander past locally-produced fabric without stroking it and feeling its texture, imagining what form it will take, and then purchasing reams of it. My favourite thing to do on my travels is to locate the textiles markets and wander around. I buy fabric like sculptors buy blocks of wood or stone: I wait for my creation to reveal itself from within the body of the material. And so, since I wouldn't survive to tell the tale if I decided to just go for it and jump on wild animals, I buy stacks of fabric in remote villages and await inspiration. It's not as good as rolling around wrapped in all of them, but at least I get to keep the material, and my dignity.

I patriotically have my animal-molestation fantasies about polar bears too. God, how I love polar bears. I love them so much. I love their white fluffy wintry coats, their cute-as-a-button button noses, their adorably plaintive save-our-icecaps stare, their long talon claws that could rip you open in a flash like that creepy scene with Giancarlo Gianni in Hannibal. When visiting the Toronto Zoo in my teens, all I could think when I viewed the largest land carnivore was how much I'd love to dive in that pool, jump on its back, and ride around having chicken fights like you do when you're drunk at a pool party and think it's not dangerous. Only the heartbreaking realization that I'll be eaten alive keeps me from doing it. I saw that new Nissan commercial for the LEAF electric car on Canadian TV while back on holiday, and I became weepy with despair.

The problem with these tactile obsessions is that they do cause a certain level of anxiety. (Am I really brave enough to jump out of this safari truck? Do I have the luggage allowance for all these fabrics?) I had to be talked down once while in the fabrics market in Seoul, South Korea. I walked into several floors of several hundred stalls of several thousand types of fabrics, and I started hyperventilating in reaction to the overwhelming choices available to me, and I practically needed to huff into a paper bag to get over it. I bought a mere half-dozen few-metre lengths of various fabrics as tranquillizer, and then stared at the neat stack of them, waiting for the ideas to bubble.

While discussing the idea for this essay with writer-ly friends, they both said the same thing about the jumping on wild animals part: "You need to explore that a little more. You need to go deeper into that. That means something." In other words: What are you really talking about?

I had a boyfriend who used to describe getting out of bed as an extrication--from me. I clung to him like a limpet, he said, and he had to climb out from under my arms and legs against my whimpering protestations and slip away quietly just to go pee. But I loved him, and I loved clinging to him as I fell asleep. He was so much more comfortable than so many other boyfriends I'd had, and he was warm and the nights were cool, and I loved being that close to him. It just felt good. I always eventually moved away to my own space anyway as the night wore on. It was just the first few moments of sleep that made it so necessary to be near him. I loved being wrapped up by him, just as I adore being wrapped up in pagnes, and the idea of wrapping myself around a fluffy animal. I love the feeling of feeling, and this way I could indulge myself without fear of being maimed or arrested. Sure we can talk about my heart getting ripped out and the pain I felt when the inevitable breakup occurred, but just like my animal fantasies, I ignore that part too.

This is all to say, I suppose, that keeping your passions at bay can, in some cases, save your life. You shouldn't jump on a wild animal. It will kill you. You shouldn't grab a bunch of fabrics and drag them to the floor and roll around wrapped up in them. You will be manhandled by security guards. But to resist wrapping yourself up in someone you love, someone whose body you adore and want to enjoy intimately as much as you can--controlling that passion, controlling that desire, to me, it seems, would lessen the experience. Self-preservation doesn’t apply when you're in love. You're either all in or you're not. You'll wrap yourself up in someone and it could break your heart, but at least you won't get eaten by a lioness or arrested at your favourite boutique.