World Wide Web 14/01/12
First 10 results, Google.it, “sedere”

1. Swede shows us seat
2. Super Seat
3. Injection to the seat
4. Super girl who moves her seat to the tempo of the music ...
5. Cheeks - Wikipedia
6. Shave your seat by yourself
7. Is our seat hygienic?
8. seat –Italian-English dictionary
9. the sexy reporter wants her seat autographed
10. Conjugation verb “sedere” (to sit)

 

Summarising in a somewhat vulgar fashion, for those who do not appreciate grammatical analysis, we could say it like this: we sit with our “seat”: which is to say that it is not possible to speak of a sitting without considering our backsides. When we sit, the chair and backrest are like the front and rear of a sheet of paper. The erect position, one of the great stages of human evolution, does not have a specific part of the body thus identified, nor any dedicated equipment. On the other hand, the sitting position does not enjoy the same fame and respect, and frequently, this posture often assumes connotations of laziness and immobility. A “culo di pietra” (seat of stone) is a journalist who never leaves the desk and does not move his/her cheeks, being still, already sitting.

 

 

All two-legged creatures possess particularly developed buttocks, but only man has developed this particular contradiction between being equipped with a particularly rounded seat and the invention of a tool like the chair, whose seat is flat by definition. The first erotic scene of the famous Histoire de l’oeil by Bataille (1928) begins with a play on words. “Les assiettes, c’est fait pour s’assoir. Je m’assois dans l’assiette.” sentences Simone before laying his seat on a plate of milk for the cat. In English, we might translate it thusly, “If it’s flat, it was made for sitting upon”, demonstrating the contradiction between the elastic curves of the backside and the rigid support of the seat is in reality noted as an established convention.

 

 

Sit your seat down, sitting with your seat, sitting on your seat which sits on the chair. The sitting position on a piece of dedicated equipment is at base a very western posture, in addition to being rather accidental. To the visitors of the Knossos Palace on Crete a strange artefact is shown from a window, which the local guides claim is the first complex flush WC toilet in history, dating back to 4000 years ago. Compared to the so-called “Turkish” toilet... could we suggest to the very serious Professor Huntington that it was right here, entre les fesses, that we see the origin of the Clash of Civilizations between Orient and Occident?

Just as the millennium-old tradition of yoga has demonstrated and codified in its asana, there exist tens of thousands of postures between laying and erect, between shavasana, the position of the cadaver, that lays like the horizon, a tadasana, the mountain, an antenna between the earth and sky. We Western Earthlings are lost, sitting in front of our electronic windows, contemplating and inter-acting with the world prevalently sub specie digitalis…

 

Mustafa hosts Paolo RR Rossi e Silvia Silverio