Nudity

Does nudity feel strange to you? Ever? I don’t mean taking a bath or a shower; that’s routine. I mean doing something that doesn’t require nudity, vacuuming, or painting the ceiling. If you answer yes, it does feel a little funny, a little odd, there it is: the magnificence of being nude.

Which is also a little weird. Why does nudity feel weird? I don’t know, but it does. It feels strange. Especially when I'm in the public. The world is lucky. I don’t go into the world naked very often.

There’s something flagrant about nudity. That’s what’s strange. Why should nudity be flagrant? Or outrageous or shameless? We’re animals, after all. Wind the clock back 800,000 years and what do we look like? Short, muscular, and tough. Hairy. Did we wear anything? Can’t say. All the artist’s depictions have us covered in animal fur. I’m guessing that’s probably right. I’m also guessing that thoughts on nudity were non-existent. We were more animal than human at that point. Civilization obscured the mammal in us. Descartes removed us further from the honest physicality of our mammalian bodies into the realm of the abstract. Archaic humans, I would imagine, did not have a sense of being that radically different than the creatures they hunted, the creatures they feared, the creatures they depicted on the walls of caves. Perhaps they sensed a difference occurring inside them, and felt so weird about it they felt they had to go deep underground to give that perception representation and shape. It might also have been something utterly practical, like keeping their artwork out of the rain. The possibilities are as fascinating as they are abundant.

But that’s the problem with guessing. It’s not the same as knowing. Knowing is conscientious. Guessing is fun. Guessing can take you anywhere. It’s all speculation, conjecture, supposition, shot in the dark.  And it’s fast. Your conclusions don’t require proof. They’re just a guess. Nobody is depending on the accuracy of that answer. The judgment is open to further revision. The way is open. The choices are broad.

True. But (in the realm of the nude there is always a ‘but’) guessing is unsatisfying in the long run. The mind begins hungering for more reliable information and guessing only provides air. Volatility and ice.

What was life like 800,000 years ago? Was it cold? Was it warm? Was the night full of stars and animals? When did language begin? How did that get started? Who was the first person to point at the sun and make a sound come out of their mouths that a small group of hominids would all agree from now on would refer to that big yellow thing in the sky that makes us feel hot on certain days and on other days just wanders through the sky making light come out of it but not much heat? Did everyone mutually agree, yeah, wow, you know that sound sounds just like that that big shiny yellow thing up there. Good job. Thank you.

Here is what we know: 800,000 years ago, when the first humans began to appear, earth was a lot colder, rained a lot less, and England was still connected to the continent. Continental ice sheets extended down from the arctic to North America and Europe. Wooly mammoths, mastodons, moonrats, giant ground sloths and flightless birds such as ostriches, rheas and moas roamed the forests and plains. Boreal forests of spruce and pine towered above an underbrush of salmonberry and devil’s club. Nine-foot bears weighing nearly a ton lumbered hungrily through stands of oak and cypress. Life was brutish and simple. It killed you, or you killed it.

Also, there were no grocery stores. Or car mechanics or badminton.

But I can’t really be sure about badminton.

I’m fairly certain there was no opera, rock concerts, parking lots or canned soup. Or spring mattresses or shower curtains or hot and cold running water. There was probably a lot of nudity, though. Nudity at home, nudity in the wild. Absolutely no need whatever to carry around a wallet or a purse or a set of keys. All you had to do was stomp around with a stick or a basket and collect nuts and fruit. I’m guessing the diet for most hominids was elemental: not much in the way of trout almondine. Just trout.

I feel more attached to the earth when I’m nude. I feel the air around my body. I feel enveloped, and the envelopment acts a membrane, connecting me to the world. Clothes add identity and separation.

Nudity provides a finer understanding of life. Clothing prevents contact. Look how armored the police have become. This is the contrary to nudity: not just the body, but the whole being is entombed in a sinister casing: insect-like. An exoskeleton.

The less an idea is clothed in words the more convincing and powerful it becomes.

Why has there always been more magazines of naked women than naked men? Why does this fascination with women’s bodies persist?

When men display their bodies there is a natural tendency to flex their muscles. Muscles are a sign of power, of dominance and autonomy. Women seem mostly grossed out by these spectacles. Women are also much more at ease with sensuality. They seem at home there. Men seem inconvenienced.

The Journal of Happiness Studies claims that people are happier when they’re naked. Taking your clothes off around strangers is good for you.

Nudity and the absence of clothes are two separate things. Nudity confers, infers, and invites openness. It is the essence of openness, of candor. It’s not just a matter of revealing our skin and muscle. It’s a gestalt: raw sensory experience wholly accessible and dehiscent.

Peeled, unfurled, unobstructed.

You see yourself. You can be yourself. There is no self. The self is skin and blood. Subject and object distinctions disappear. There is a new grammar, the syntax of knees, the predications of cartilage.

Nudity is all about touching. It’s like walking around with your eyes in your hands.

Why would a dream about being locked out of a room while naked in a hotel and having to go down to the lobby to get a key to one’s room have a nightmarish aspect?

The nose is its own tale of nudity. The face hides its nudity in smiles and frowns. The eyes become I’s because identity is a vitreous bath in a ball of jelly and nerve. It’s soft to be a cat but hard to be a human. I get dressed in the windshields of a past cracked by detour and gravel. The brain is clothed in mood, a blue velvet of electrochemical sparks. I pick up an agate that the beach and know that somewhere inside, it’s nude.