I sit here in solitude with Nature - open, voiceless, mystic, far removed yet palpable, eloquent Nature. I merge myself in the scene, in the perfect day. Hovering over the clear brook water, i am soothed by its soft gurgle in one place, and the hoarser murmurs of its three foot fall in another. Come, ye disconsolate, in whom any latent eligibility is left - come get the sure virtues of creek shore, and wood and field...
This is Whitman writing of his summer days in New England in an entry called A Sun Bath - Nakedness. He continues:
Two months (July and August, '77) have i absorbed them, and they begin to make a new man of me. Every day, seclusion - every day at least two or three hours of freedom, bathing, no talk, no bonds, no dress, no books, no manners... Never before did i get so close to Nature; never before did she come so close to me... Nature was naked, and I was also... Sweet, sane, still Nakedness in Nature! ah poor sick, prurient humanity in cities might really know you once more! it is your thought, your sophistication, your fear, your respectability, that is indecent. There come moods when these clothes of ours are not only too irksome to wear, but are themselves indecent.
All of man's problems began, writes the Scottish apostle for simple living, Dugald Semple, when man began putting on clothes.
Clothes which clothe our nakedness.
Nakedness as being original. As originating our own movement, our own thinking, through Nature.
As Philip Carr-Gomm writes in A Brief History of Nakedness:
To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become nude.
Increasingly, in a society that hides behind masks and spectacles, where surface is king, where the glitter and glamour distract and divert us (perverting Nature), the naked is nowhere to be seen. By that i am not talking simply of an unclothed body, but of a transparency of Being... where one's actions and one's words are aligned in a natural symmetry, where hypocrisy and double standards are things of the past, where people are not distracted by the hollow promises of riches from the outside.
In a society where transparency might as well be a four letter word, the masks and the coverings are ubiquitous. 'Status anxiety' proliferates a society that has been weighed down with surfaces and spectacles. People define their selves (and are themselves defined by others) in terms of 'stuff' they possess: kids, cars, cages... by stuff they wear: jewellery, clothes, hair... but it's all nonsense. It's all just another silly capitalist game to sell you stuff that you clearly do not need, to cover you up and manufacture another 'self', one that is more vacuous, more opaque, more heavy-handed and thick-headed, and more eager to buy this stuff.
Man is short for mannequin, after all, is it not? Or maniac? Or maybe both.
Human, on the other hand, like all his uncaged animal brethren, is a graceful entity connected to the soil, to the humus. To space and solitude, to the geo- not to the ego.
I am not my things. They say nothing about who I really am. They might decorate my home and identify a construct that has been carefully engineered by an economic system that has little of the eco- within it, but they are only things. They say nothing about the real I.
My artefacts, on the other hand, perhaps, can give some indication as to who this I is: feathers, rocks, skulls, a transformation mask I cobbled together from driftwood and sea shells... They say more about existence than any commercial object or piece of machine-made clothing could ever do - Birth, death, life, struggle, maybe a little flight...
There's a rawness (without being crude) to this collection of artefacts, an elemental energy contained within that might ignite something within your self. These artefacts re-mind us of the 'Essential'. The complete anti-thesis of what commercial products and goods are: extraneous and superfluous for the most part. And unnecessary.
Commodities brand, artefacts cleanse.
We are, in the west, by and large, being ferried about like caged cattle, unaware of our own existential imprisonment. It's appalling how blind people are to the excess, to the mind-boggling greed and power-mongering that goes on amongst them.
Real power however is the ability to see. And it is only when we become naked, when we divest the manufactured self of all its pomp and ceremony, its scars and brands, that we can begin to really see.
The Kilpatrick Braes with its small patch of ancient woodland clinging to a hillside, is the most sacred place I think I have come across since visiting the primeval forest of Bialowieza in eastern Poland some ten years ago. The former is tiny in comparison, but do not confuse bigness for greatness. The sacred emerges from its unmanaged aspect - from its being left alone to its own devices - its naturalness - and from the resultant 'death' that covers this place. It's the death (or as my Polish companion told me, 'not death, reorganization'), that brings the woodland to life. And it's also a great place to get naked, physically and existentially, with great views over the valley, or as Whitman liked to say: vast draughts of space!
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