The Art of Lying Down (10 page)

The Oriental influence on furniture design first became apparent in France. In the eighteenth century, the first upholstered chairs were produced. Soon bed-chair hybrids like those we still use entered the scene, making it possible to lie down without going to bed. “Couch,” “chaise longue,” “canapé,” “divan,” “recamier,” “ottomane,” “méridienne,” and “duchesse” were labels applied to very similar pieces of furniture. But no matter what the name, they all had very little in common with their Oriental models. They were pseudo-Turkish or pseudo-Persian, because of not only how they looked but how they were used. The art historian Lydia Marinelli points to a fundamental misunderstanding between the two cultures: “While the Orient understands the cushion
as an amorphous surface on which the user actively seeks a comfortable position of his own choosing, the West attempts to tailor furniture to the body in order to support its functioning.” Relaxation in the East comes from lying down or sitting with crossed legs on the floor or a cushion—no armrest or backrest required. Europe’s supposed Oriental furniture followed a different principle. “The languorous chaise longue encouraged an easy intimacy, not to mention lovemaking,” writes the architect and writer Witold Rybczynski. “Sofas were broad not to provide for many sitters, but to allow space for the grand gesture, the leg drawn up, the arm thrown out over the back, and for the capacious clothing of that time.”

The original: divan in Topkapi Palace

A Turkish divan is a spot for sitting or reclining; it consists of a mat on the floor or a flat ledge that can run along an entire wall. In a French boudoir, on the other hand, a
divan
means an upholstered bench, often decorated with tassels and fringe, in the middle of the room. The term can even be used for a row of
chairs grouped around a raised platform. In any case, divans demanded a position consisting of equal parts sitting and lying down, one enjoyed primarily by that traditionally idle class the aristocracy.

Before long this furniture developed a reputation for encouraging laziness, slackness, and “Oriental” behavior, all thoroughly at odds with the bourgeois work ethic. Sofas were also associated with drug use. All this aimless yet unbridled sprawling about was a thorn in the side of champions of propriety, who considered a military-style upright posture a prerequisite for moral integrity. Marinelli describes the sofa as a “risky location” that “leads to indecently hiked hems and unexpected touches.” At the turn of the century, the German etiquette expert Konstanze von Franken was still emphatically forbidding hosts from receiving guests “lying on the chaise longue” in her perennial bestseller
Handbook of Good Form and Fine Manners
. To head off questionable situations, she recommended allowing only older ladies to sit on the sofa at all. Any man brazen enough to take a seat on the couch was summarily dismissed as being “inappropriate” and “tasteless.” For von Franken, taking a more or less horizontal position was a prerogative reserved for dandies.

Beds have to accommodate not only human biomechanics but also the ways people in a certain time and culture lie down. In his 1924 carpentry dictionary, Carl Wilkens writes: “As a piece of furniture that serves the purpose of complete rest—in other words, sleep—the bed must be designed to afford the human body the state of relaxation only achievable when it lies at length, and meet all requirements of health and comfort.” Rarely has the function of the bed been so clearly stated. Several decades later the philosopher Otto Friedrich Bollnow described the bed as “the place from which we rise in the morning and go to our daily work, and to which we return in the evening when our work is done. The course of every day (in the normal state of affairs) begins in bed and also ends in bed. And it is the same with human life: it begins in bed, and it also ends (again, assuming normal circumstances) in bed. So it is in the bed that the circle closes, the circles of the day as well as that of life. Here, in the deepest sense, we find rest.” The bed is the primary or innermost home within the home, a place that allows and encourages a retreat to
the unconscious form of our being. Yet the bed also has a flip side: it is a site of suffering and distress. The travel writer Bill Bryson has captured the paradoxical nature of beds and the rooms that house them:

During the last centuries, sleep was turned into a private matter and forced backstage, and a sense that the intimate activities occurring in bed were shameful or embarrassing became more acute. Beds ceased to be used for representational purposes, and by the twentieth century the only publicly visible bedrooms were those for sale in furniture stores. There, as Bollnow wrote in the 1960s, they are “placed shamelessly on display.” At home, the right to enter bedrooms remained limited to the immediate family.

In his book about German homes written at
about the same time, the sociologist Alphons Silbermann demonstrates that people even maintained a mental distance from their own bedrooms. Attempts to squelch awareness of the bed went so far that people referred to it as a trap or a nest. But a few years later, when barriers around private and intimate realms lowered in Western societies, it was just a matter of time until attitudes toward the bed would undergo a fundamental shift.

The bedroom was no longer a more or less hidden annex to the home, but a location one could proudly show to guests. Since that time an explosion in bed design has taken place. Beds were expected to express something about the personalities of those who slept in them, a way to create distinctions and even garner respect. Stylish lounges and beds lent their owners an avant-garde flair. Both the “secrecy” and the “inconspicuousness of this silent piece of furniture”—Bollnow’s explanation as to why so few writers took up the bed as a subject or “to what a small extent the bed seems until now to have stimulated human thought”—were of the past. In an age like our own, in which boundaries seem to oscillate almost randomly between prim reticence and compulsive disclosure, embarrassing and potentially painful situations are practically guaranteed.

Just how new are the thousands of lounges and beds unveiled year after year at international
furniture shows? Do they really represent innovations, or are they just endless variations of the same thing? Can the art of lying down keep up with all these advances in design? Not everything on the market follows the well-known dictum “Form follows function.” Sofas that their owners can turn into “seating landscapes” in just a few simple steps or that feature laptop stands for use in a (half-)reclining position are in demand. Forty years ago wall beds were sold as the ne plus ultra in sleeping equipment. Muscling them into their horizontal position was no easy feat. But their time has passed, and they’re hard to find these days. Their disappearance is not necessarily something to be sorry about.

Beds range from fussy, plush Laura Ashley models to the sleek Jailhouse Fuck, made of prison bars of dark steel and accessorized with a pair of Smith & Wesson handcuffs. The manufacturer proudly claims that it’s the world’s most exciting bed. We can only hope that the amatory feats of its owners live up to the promise of this backdrop. Other beds can cost as much as a car. The Rolls-Royce of beds is a model from the Swedish brand Hästens manufactured by hand from horsehair, linen, and wood over the course of many hours. The price: $99,000.

Designer lounges and beds are coveted collectibles, of course, but artworks about nothing other than beds—and not even particularly attractive ones,
we could add—can fetch a good price, too. One such piece is the installation
My Bed
by the English artist Tracey Emin, a large, rumpled, messy bed with cigarette packs and butts, used condoms, and underwear as evidence of intense use. The sight immediately calls up the image of a nicotine-addicted figure lying in its midst.
A Cama Valium
, a more original work by the Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos, is a bed frame covered with pill packaging that criticizes the widespread obsession with tranquilizers. Surrounded by so many tablets, who would ever wake up again?

Only a tiny fraction of humankind will ever enjoy the perfect ergonomics of the beds featured in glossy design magazines. But no anthropologist has studied the average bed, the one most typical for an inhabitant of the earth today. If we compared beds in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Manhattan, and any randomly selected city in India, how would they overlap? A common denominator bed would certainly not be particularly luxurious and, lacking a frame and legs, would probably rest directly on the floor. Most likely it would consist of a mattress filled with straw or foam set on a mat. Imagining such a bed can remind members of more prosperous societies of how enormously spoiled they are, even if they constantly complain that their mattresses are too hard or too soft. Let us hope that the average bed provides a pleasant—ideally, a better than average—refuge for the average person who uses it.

We can’t always enjoy optimal conditions for lying down, but having to compromise can have a positive effect. After all, we can only really appreciate luxuries if we learn to live without them. By occasionally experiencing lying down in simple conditions,
we enable ourselves to fully soak in the pleasure a comfortable bed or a well-designed sofa offers.

An ideal bed isn’t too long and narrow, but it’s also not so wide that you feel lost in it. You sink into it—but not too much. The sheets are crisp and give off a fresh scent. It stands in a small room, tidy enough to prevent the urge to clean up from keeping you awake. The best bed is the one that is there when you need it.

After serving as the traditional bed in Japan for two millennia, the futon suddenly appeared in bedrooms everywhere in the 1980s. Nowadays, however, the popularity of these cotton-filled mats has waned. They were uncomfortable, despite their manufacturers’ claims that they were good for your back. The trendiness that fueled their popularity eventually faded as word of their disadvantages spread. The futons Westerners can purchase today better accommodate our ways of reclining: they are thicker than their Asian counterparts and come with low frames. As a result, they are sometimes called Asian-style beds instead of futons, and they may contain latex cores and other atypical filling materials, such as coconut fiber. In Japan, futons (actually shikibutons) are placed directly on the floor mats, which are admittedly much softer than Western floors.

Hard but fair: Japanese futon

It’s not easy to fight our way through the complex web of feng shui and the often esoteric ideas and recommendations for interior design that the West has derived from it. Unfortunately, most of us can’t read the rules in the original language. Is it really possible to apply these practices developed in China more than three thousand years ago—and, at Mao Zedong’s order, forbidden there now for over half a century—to the arrangement of elements in a bedroom of a modern prefabricated house? A book by Sarah Shurety respectfully dedicated to the masters of feng shui “who died in the cultural revolution” and promising “positive energy and harmony in the home”—as long as the reader pays sufficient attention to “the position of rooms within the house, which colours to use for decorating, the choice of furnishings, and many other factors”—looks understandable enough to the average reader. According to Shurety, the bedroom, which should be at the back of the house and face southwest, represents the “real you.” The bed should ideally be placed “diagonally opposite the bedroom door” with the head against a wall. This placement within the room is more important than whether the bed is aligned with a particular direction of the compass. “If you have the headboard against
a window it will damage your liver,” she warns. Furthermore, “If you have the headboard positioned so that half of the bed is against a window and half against the wall you will not only damage your liver but you will also become more insecure and feel less supported by one of your parents.” A bed with the foot facing the door is said to be in the coffin position and “drains away your energy slowly but surely (especially if the door enters into an en suite bathroom).” Shurety also recommends buying a new bed before the start of each new cycle of life, which occurs about every seven years, because beds “absorb more energy than most items of furniture.” If buying a new bed every seven years is not possible, she suggests that you burn cones of incense around the bed and then place a dish filled with chalk under the bed for twenty-seven days. She notes that you are ill advised “to sleep with a new partner in a bed you previously shared with someone in a relationship that failed” because “it is more likely that your relationship will follow the pattern of the first.” A “picture of a happy, smiling couple” provides just the right decorative touch. Do adherents of feng shui really follow all these rules?