The sense of impish fun, suggested by the naughty grin and the carelessly cocked head, realized in the trespassing of taboos by revealing just a wee bit of shaved pubic flesh, is what strikes me in this picture. It evokes the sense of self exposure suggested in the story by the harmony of selves between the male narrator and Angela.

The lady in the picture, like all the contributors to Wicked Weasel’s competitions, are not posing as models but as ordinary users of Wicked Weasel’s women’s wear who send in their pictures to share their delight in the products and to participate in the firm’s competitions.

The pictures are, therefore, often taken by people intimate to the ladies who are photographed, often their boyfriends or husbands. This picture suggests the sharing of an intimate moment with a boyfriend- a moment transmitted to the world through the public presentation of the image on the Wicked Weasel site.

The bikini is allowed to slip only so far as to reveal the shaved pubis but to conceal the slit that is the entrance to the vagina. The image could thus be said to escape from pornography into simply being erotic.

Moving from the image to the science fiction text presented here, is the kind of unity of selves depicted in the story possible? Whether it is or not, it would seem to be the ideal people often look for in intimate relationships with those they are romantically engaged-a unity where their individuality remains distinct.

This image suggests an ease with one’s self and of the ease of the person whose gaze records the moment, with that self. Such ease between selves is likely to be the basis of intimacy of any depth. The story, however, also evokes, along with such intimacy, the paradox of the contradictions between intimacy, whether physical or psychological, or both, and the tensions between people who share that intimacy.

Truth is the "night of power"
Hidden among other nights,
In order to try the spirit of every night.
Not every night is that of power,O youth,
Nor is every night quite devoid of power.

Jalaluddin Rumi,"Mo'Avia and Iblis",The Mathnawi,trans.E.H.Whinfield.

This image suggests the counterpart in human biology of the architectonic grandeur that galvanises Lessard’s reflections on the interaction in her mind between architectural form and individual and family history.

The cave like shape constituted by the curves of the hips as they frame the prominent vaginal lips take the mind back to evocations of relationships between caves, as early dwelling places of the human race, from which we emerged to construct our own shelters, and the vagina as a biological cave, from where we emerge to begin the journey of this life, as well as with correlations between these images and the earth as cave of absorption, where the body enters into death, and, to look at it optimistically, perhaps leaving the spirit to ascend to other spheres or even to return to the world through the creative depths of the vagina.

In the cave of the womb we are nurtured, through the cave of the space between the legs are we conceived, and through that same uterine darkness, charged with energies, do we enter the world.

Watch over us,
you of the double caves!