JOHN RANSOM PHILLIPS BED AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Wendy Doniger Wendy Doniger is a noted author of nearly 30 books, including The Hindus: An Alternative History...
Zahi Hawass Zahi Hawass is the Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities and Director of Excavations...
Alan Trachtenberg Alan Trachtenberg is the Neil Gray, Jr. Professor Emeritus of English and American Studies at Yale University, is the author of Reading...

Bed As Autobiography: A Visual Exploration of John Ransom Phillips with contributions by Wendy Doniger and Ariel O. Jordan

University of Chicago Press, 2004

We take to our beds to be born and to grow, to hide and to dream, to lie alone and cling together, to come of age and make love, to create and procreate, to ail and to heal, to rest and to die. Bed as Autobiography takes the subject of one’s bed as a realm where extraordinary things take place.

This book traces our journey from our first bed—the embryonic sac—to our final bed, the casket, through more than 100 of John Ransom Phillips's vibrant paintings. Exploring the beds we know to the ones we can only imagine, historic beds from prior lives and future beds in strangers' bodies through reincarnation, Phillips eloquently captures the essential sensuality of one's relationship to his or her bed. His paintings provide interpretive depictions of different kinds of beds, from the makeshift bed of a car seat to the glistening slope of a bathtub. Accompanying these arresting full-color reproductions are an introductory essay by Wendy Doniger and an insightful interview with Phillips himself conducted by Ariel Orr Jordan.
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Bed As Autobiography: A Visual Exploration of John Ransom Phillips
With contributions by Wendy Doniger and Ariel O. Jordan
HARDCOVER
9-1/2x13-1/2”
174 pages / 190 illustrations
ISBN: 9780974663104

Bed As Autobiography
All of us are subject to what the Hindus call vasanas, "perfumes," scents that are the impressions of anything remaining unconsciously in the mind, the present consciousness of past perceptions, a force that accounts for our sense of deja vu, among other things. These are karmic memory traces, bits of experience that cling to our transmigrating souls even in new bodies, loose threads trailing not merely from a "former life" within this lifespan but from a previous life, a previous incarnation. To Phillips, vasanas are very powerful indeed, and he captures these elusive traces, butterfly gossamer, in the net of his paintings.
—Wendy Doniger