When the victim of abuse is beaten to the ground like the amazon in The Battle of Greeks and Amazons the angle of the torso and leg, the supporting arm and the ground toward which the figure is falling make a triangle that can be seen as congruent with many other abusive scenes and figures, such as the crawling woman in Picasso's Guernica, the Assyrian Wounded Lioness and the raised lid of a grand piano.

A lot of these fallen or supine figures form The Body Pile, a mass of flattened, sprawling or half sitting nudes. An example is the pile of naked boys killed by Herod's soldiers in Giotto's Massacre of the Innocents. As a metaphor for themes of the abusive home with its lack of boundaries and personal identity, unconsciousness, sexual vulnerability and bottoming out this kind of grouping occurs a good deal in the works of artists from the cave men on.

One example is Ingres' The Turkish Bath in which a group of women sit, lie and stand in a confined area meant to represent a women's bath in a muslim country, Turkey. Already in the world of abuse and physical suppression the scene is congruent or analogous not only to the pile of children's corpses but to those characteristics of the abusive home described above.

Within the "text" of this painting we can find a series of hypertexts, not so noticeable at first but becoming clearer as we look closely at the scene. Like the pile of boys the boundaries between the separate nude females is not always very clear. It is hard to see exactly where one body starts and another ends. In this confusion one hypertext is the arm which reaches out to squeeze a woman's breast. In a less chaotic arrangement this arm might be shown to be the woman's own, but because of the enforced intimacy it looks like the arm of the next woman or of who knows? taking advantage of the chaotic situation to invade her private space.

Another figure can be discovered asleep or perhaps passed out to the lower right, with her hand to her head like with a headache or a hangover. Several figures wear hats with veils which look like overflowing liquid which then streams down their head. This liquid image is reinforced by the the torso-like water urn in the background, like an armless and headless trunk. One woman drops grapes or some pill-like shapes into her mouth in the background. Others smoke, and since it is the Middle East, probably hashish. The musical instrument in the hands of the woman whose bare behind is turned toward us looks like a stick and hidden in her turban is a scarred and ugly face.

Like the fractal in which all the parts repeat the theme or shape of the whole these hypertexts are all abusive or involve the suggestion or possibility of abuse. The very nature of the prison-like harem with its control of movement and sexual segregation and the nakedness of its "bathers" (although the pool is only a minor part of the scene, to the left center) is part of the metaphor of the whole. Its similarly abusive parts are the stick and the naked behind, unconsciousness, invasion of privacy, the "wet brain", drug or tobacco use and the psychologically hidden abuser (the face in the turban).

Even the musical instrument is turned into its fractions, in which the neck looks like a stick. As an art form music often or maybe always is a sublimation or refinement of the sounds of suffering, tension and even physical attack, so, in a way, here is a positive and healing note. Too bad it just looks like a a stick, like the one that holds up the lid of the concert or "baby" grand.

As observed by the voyeuristic victim/abuser The entire scene takes place within a circular eye shape, distancing the abuser-viewer from moral responsibility and the victim-viewer from danger--like the camera lens view of the body piles at Auschwitz or the video taped sex orgy.

Illustrations:

The Massacre of the Innocents, Giotto.

The Turkish Bath, Ingres.

The Turkish Bath, details.

The Sacred Naked Nature Girls, Traffic Report.

The Divers, Fernand Leger.