Co-ed Naked Philosophy

by Forest, Will

“Maybe, in this case, the children’s exposure to nudism helps them internalize it easier, and more naturally, than adults can.”

  Angela smiled. “Yes, that’s definitely an aspect that came up in my research. In fact attendance at concerts and plays was low during the school’s first months, because the parents took some time to feel comfortable with the idea.”

  “Even though they had willingly filled out applications for their children to attend the school.”

  “Even so.”

  “This is just fascinating to me. What pioneers! We have to do something like that, Angela!”

  Sipping her chai, she watched him over the rim of her mug. “Please, call me Angie. Angela is so formal.”

  “Sure, Angie…It’s one thing to carry out this research and report on it, which you are doing. But what can we actually do to encourage nude body acceptance at a practical, everyday level? What can we do to recover nudity as a default condition? To make ‘being naked’ naked of spurious connotation?”

  “We are teachers. We start with our students.”

  “But they’re too old, right? It’ll be a lot tougher with college students than with elementary students.”

  “We have to start somewhere.”

  Christopher thought of Renee at the beach, and Alex organizing the streak. “You’re right. The students at La Rioja, they’re all open to the idea of social nudity.”

  “There you go! And the streakers, what would they think about having class in the nude, Chris?”

  Christopher raised an eyebrow.

  “I’m sorry…can I call you Chris? You know, shed some clothes, drop some syllables…”

  “Uh…I really prefer Christopher.”

  “Why?”

  He averted his eyes. “Did you spike this chai? Because I really feel like opening up to you.”

  Angela laughed. “It’s the nude effect, like I’m telling you. You expose your body, you expose your thoughts.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Well, no, I guess not. Not always.” Her foot found Christopher’s. “Maybe it’s just the warm water.”

  “Whatever it is, I feel very comfortable with you. You’re so open. Last night…was magic. You bewitched me on Halloween!”

  “How sweet! So now, my pretty, I’m putting you under a spell, see? A-N-G-I-E is a slightly quicker one than A-N-G-E-L-A, and C-H-R-I-S is much easier than…”

  “Right, I know.” He took a deep breath of cool night air. “Let me explain. What’s your full name?”

  “Angela María Saucedo Ramírez, why?”

  “Do you like it?”

  “Yeah, I like it. I prefer the way it’s pronounced in Spanish, with the open As. But even in the nasal English I’d say that it has successfully become a part of who I am.”

  “I think it’s a beautiful name. But me, I grew up always being hassled about mine. My middle name is Percival.”

  “Percival?”

  “My dad was into British history and Arthurian legend and all that.”

  “It sounds like ‘pierce the veil.’ Is that what it means?”

  “You got it.”

  “I like it! How apropos for talking about nudity.”

  Christopher smiled. “I guess you’re right. But, so as if that weren’t bad enough, my name can be written ‘Chris P. Ross’ or ‘Ross, Chris P.’—it sounds too much like a burnt dinner or a soggy breakfast! Especially here in the Deep South where lots of times ‘rice’ gets pronounced just like ‘Ross’! You can probably guess that ‘crispy’ isn’t one of my favorite adjectives. It’s just a silly thing, very arbitrary as all names are, but I got used to the full form of my first name, kind of as an alternative.” Christopher took a long sip from his mug. “But also, I guess, as a defense.”

  Angela felt relieved by what she perceived as the superficiality of this explanation that he had wanted to get off his chest—his bare, wet, lean-but-defined chest. “A likely story. I’ve heard that men who use long names…” Angela’s foot began to slide up Christopher’s thigh, “…are trying to make up for something short.”

  Christopher’s guffaw forced itself through the liquid in his mouth. The chai dribbled down his chin before spraying from his lips.

  Angela smiled, waiting for him to finish coughing.

  He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I love the way you surprise me. Do you have a degree in flirting?”

  “I didn’t have to study it. I was born that way.”

  He moved along the hot tub seat and put his arm around her shoulder. “Okay, you can call me Chris. But only you. How’s that for being on intimate terms?”

  After such a well-balanced and heartfelt incantation, Christopher and Angela conjured a magic kiss.

  At Home with My Body

  The conference was clearly an escape. Name tags, business cards, hotel card-keys, plane tickets, travel reimbursement documentation—a threateningly numerous paraphernalia for some, but Christopher was familiar with these temporary inconveniences, with the logistical precision necessary to achieve a greater goal: his escape. The palm trees, the birds-of-paradise, the California sky did not disappoint. But his willingness, even eagerness, to package and send himself to these conferences would always be undermined by the dismissive remarks of boorish colleagues, tepid applause seeping through cardboard walls, and those readers—READERS not PRESENTERS—so insensitive to the blood coursing through the veins of the bodies in front of them.

  While sitting in one of the generic hotel meeting rooms, he would invariably begin to feel an unyielding desire to stretch his legs and back. His respiration would become agitated. He would want to stand up, rip off his shirt and yell “You’re READING!! You’re NOT presenting!! For the love of humanity, look at me! Make eye contact! Speak up! ENGAGE ME!!” Usually he would control himself and leave at the earliest opportunity. But once, involuntarily, he opened his mouth at the moment of greatest anguish and emitted something in between a loud sigh and a muted groan. He blushed, stood up, and walked out of the meeting room through the door in the folding wall. He needed those palms again, that sky.

  Manny Ramos and three more friends made the highlight of his trip over dinner. As they were finishing dessert at a trend-setting San Francisco eatery, Manny intoned unexpectedly and with exaggerated formality, “Dr. Ross, as you know, I consider myself a citizen of the world. I have traveled on every continent for business and for pleasure, endeavoring always to familiarize myself with local custom and idiom. Thus I wish to know more of this newly published tome of yours, this academic exercise, the title of which I believe to be The Divine Aesthetic.”

  “Truly, it is the unfettered interest of such veteran travelers as yourself that inspires my humble volume.” Christopher choked back a laugh and changed tone. “Alright, if you must know, it’s a comparative study of ancient beliefs about art and beauty as gifts from the gods. Many cultures have regarded music, painting, dance and other art forms as divine truths. Usually they believed that a god or hero had acted as intermediary, either bringing the arts as gifts to earth, or inventing the arts for the benefit of the people. So I explore the cases of four of them, from Greece, Egypt, India, and Mexico.”

  “If memory serves me correctly,” Manny offered, “in Greek mythology it was Prometheus who robbed fire from the gods and gave it to humans.”

  “A theft for which he suffered dearly. You’re right, and I do treat the subject of Prometheus, bringer of fire and knowledge, but less so than that of another Greek manifestation of this divine gift-bearer: Orpheus, god of music and poetry.”

  “He’s the one who turned around and saw his wife turn into a pillar of salt, right?” asked Manny’s partner Quique.

  Christopher washed down some wine as he thought about the question. “A welcome confusion. You have intriguingly mixed two stories that both have to do with looking back. That was Lot’s wife, in the Old Testament, who turned around and beheld the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, disregarding or unable to obey Jehovah’s
order to those fleeing the destruction not to look at it. She was turned into a pillar of salt for her disobedience. In Orpheus’s case, he had just used his music to rescue his wife, Eurydice, from the land of the dead, and he had to trust that she was following him out of the underworld. Hades told him not to look behind him until they had passed out of his realm. But of course Orpheus couldn’t resist, and he looked back, only to lose her forever. So both episodes, now that you’ve made me think about it, have to do with punishment as a result of disobeying, or distrusting, a divine being by looking back, or, figuratively, by indulging one’s curiosity.”

  “How do you know all this stuff?” wondered Quique. “Don’t philosophers study Plato and Nietzsche?”

  “Philosophy is really the original subject, the original sets of ways of thinking about anything. So religion and mythology, which have to do with our understanding of the universe and our purpose in it, are natural allies to philosophy.”

  “Tell us about the animal heads,” requested Linda, a friend from grad school familiar with some of Christopher’s research. “I’d like to hear you talk about that part.”

  “You would be referring to Thoth and Ganesha, inventors of writing in the Egyptian and Hindu traditions, respectively. Thoth was originally—get this—the tongue of the creator god, Pta. Pta’s voice, or sound, which was shaped by Thoth the tongue, gave form to the universe. Then Thoth became an independent god and invented hieroglyphics.”

  “Kind of like Adam naming plants and animals in the Garden of Eden,” said Linda’s boyfriend Rich.

  “Yes, although God could speak to Adam, but Pta had to speak through Thoth. I suppose the difference is in degree.”

  “The animal heads,” Linda reminded him.

  “Oh yes. Thoth was most often represented graphically with the head of an ibis, a kind of a water bird with a long, curved bill. I suspect this is because of the bill’s similarity in shape to the stylus used to make hieroglyphics. He was also represented as a baboon with a dog’s head.”

  “And the elephant head?” prompted Linda.

  “Oh, I know. That’s Ganesha, a Hindu god,” said Rich.

  “Ganesha, Lord of Beginnings, Initiator of Events, Eliminator of Obstacles. There are different versions of how the elephant’s head on a human body came about, but much more agreement on the fact that the right tusk is broken, because with that tusk Ganesha invented writing, specifically the Devanagari script of Sanskrit.”

  “I studied Hindi once,” said Rich. “I always thought the beginning letter, ह, of the Hindi word for elephant, hathi, looks like an elephant’s head in profile, with its trunk hanging down.”

  “See, I love talking with you guys!” said Christopher. “What an interesting observation! I had no idea you studied Hindi, Rich.”

  “I wish I remembered how to speak it.”

  “Well, I speak Spanish,” said Quique, “and I’m waiting for the Mexican part.”

  “Have you heard of Quetzalcoatl?” asked Christopher.

  “Of course. He was the Plumed Serpent god,” said Quique. “The one who left and promised to come back, and they say that the Aztecs mistook Cortés’s arrival for Quetzalcoatl’s return.”

  “Bravo!” said Christopher. “And they were going to pay dearly if Quetzalcoatl had returned, because they had all but abandoned his worship for that of Huitzilopochtli, the war god. The god of learning and craftsmanship held little appeal for a bellicose theocracy, even though the Aztecs claimed to be the spiritual heirs of the Toltecs, initiators of the Quetzalcoatl cult.”

  “I’m remembering something about his leaving in disgrace,” said Quique. “Quetzalcoatl, I mean, when he left Mexico promising to return.”

  “Another god got him drunk and fooled him into sleeping with his sister. Then the god who tricked him, Tezcatlipoca, showed him his image in a smoky mirror, which is what Tezcatlipoca means: smoky mirror. Quetzalcoatl fled because he saw reflected his own mortal weaknesses.”

  “So it’s another case of seeing something forbidden or something secret, but in this case instead of looking back, he looked into a mirror.”

  “Quique, you are exactly right,” said Christopher. “And very perceptive.”

  “What are you working on now?” asked Linda.

  “A wonderful woman colleague in the education school.”

  “No, not ‘who,’ ‘what,” Linda emphasized, “but, speaking of women, where are the goddesses in your research?’”

  “Okay, okay. In the research for the first book I was struck by the way that Orpheus stands out from the other gods in the group, because he’s the only one not associated with an animal or represented with animal attributes. In fact he’s very human. So I’ve begun research on the human form, on the idea that the natural human form, specifically the nude, is godlike enough without having to be embellished by animal parts, furs, masks and the like. And this has led me to new research on the religions of Africa and the African diaspora, such as Brazil. In Afro-Brazilian candomblé, for example, worshippers who become possessed by divine spirits are called the ‘horses’ that the gods or goddesses mount. The divine essence, in their tradition, must literally be embodied for any communication to take place. I’m also researching how and why societies censor the nude body—female, male, or both—and whether it’s related to our perceptions of divinity.”

  Manny let out a harrumph. “I knew you were going to try to justify that trip you made to the nude beach.”

  “Well, if you were hoping to scandalize our present companions, I inform you that Linda and Rich already know about that visit I made.”

  “In fact we encouraged him to go,” said Linda. “Rich and I frequent Black’s Beach here in California.”

  “Oh,” muttered Manny.

  “No te hagas, Manolito,” Quique said. “You’ve been to Black’s Beach a time or two yourself.”

  “Alright, I admit I just wanted to see Christopher squirm.”

  “Squirming,” mused Christopher, “is something that I did indeed do there, on the sand. At first I was very uncomfortable being naked at the beach around other people. But after a few minutes I felt fine, and then really fine, and then it just kept getting better. I felt so free, literally and almost incredibly, free! Until, of course, I was arrested. But you’ve all heard that story already.”

  “But so, uh, back to this wonderful woman colleague,” began Linda. “Did you meet her at the beach?”

  “No, but I met her at a streak! And she’s a regular at that beach, it turns out.”

  “So she’s very much at home with her body. That’s good.”

  Christopher thought for a moment. “Dear Linda, fellow former graduate student in philosophy, here comes a philosopher’s question: what do you mean when you say she’s ‘at home with her body’? Aren’t you? Isn’t everybody? Does anybody have a different home?”

  “I could use a good summer homebody, lots of amenities…” began Quique.

  “Yes, Christopher,” Linda interrupted, “I’m at home with my body too, for the most part, I think, but I know there are all kinds of reasons why other people wouldn’t feel that way.”

  “Okay, c’mon, you all know me. I’m in ‘philosopher mode,’ asking the obvious. Do you think many people can’t find a home in their own bodies because they feel trapped in their clothes, or trapped by the need to wear them?”

  “I disagree,” said Rich, “because there are a lot of times, in fact most of the time, when I feel better clothed than naked. I certainly would not feel comfortable sitting here in this restaurant in the nude right now!”

  “But what if everyone else were nude as well? All of us at this table, all the other diners, the waitstaff, the kitchen staff…”

  “The kitchen staff?! That could be very hazardous,” laughed Quique.

  “Okay, the kitchen staff should be wearing aprons and hot mitts,” Christopher amended, “whatever is necessary…”

  “And sanitary,” Manny added. “No pubes in the salad,
please.”

  Predictable laughs and sneers followed. Christopher laughed too, wondering just how human bodies got to be so foreign. “Not only that, but what if everybody were perfectly accustomed to seeing people going about everyday life in various stages of dress, or undress, such that here in the restaurant there might be fully dressed people, completely undressed people, and people at every stage in between?”

  “You mean, somebody wearing only a bra?” Linda’s voice registered somewhere between alarm and amusement. “And somebody else wearing a shirt, tie, and jacket but no underwear, pants, socks, or shoes?”

  “Sure, any conceivable combination. Full range of textile expression and accommodation,” said Christopher. “And I’m so glad you said ‘somebody’ instead of ‘someone,’ because it focuses on the fact that we are all exactly that: some body.”

  “De verdad que es curioso. Now that I think of it, there isn’t any word quite like ‘somebody’ in Spanish, not with its emphasis on the body like that,” said Quique.

  “Do you mean to imply that we are all merely bodies, and nothing else?” asked Manny.

  “Of course not. Not ‘merely’ bodies but essentially bodies, gloriously bodies, and yes, spirits too,” said Christopher. “But our spirits couldn’t function without our bodies to give them expression. Even just to say or write something, in a text that can exist outside our bodies, we need our vocal cords, our hands, our brains of course. This is ultimately what the myths of gods like Orpheus or Quetzalcoatl teach us: how to express ourselves through our bodies and through what we can use in the world around us.”

  Quique winked at Christopher and started unbuttoning Manny’s shirt.

  Manny slapped Quique’s hand. “Don’t get any ideas.”

  “But Orpheus doubted and looked back,” said Rich. “And Quetzalcoatl sinned and looked in the mirror. If the stories of their divine gifts were to show us how to express ourselves, why did they have to succumb to their failings?”

  Christopher loosened his belt and kicked off his shoes under the table. “In giving, they left us the ball. But in failing, they left us the court. We can better perceive our own potential when we can clearly see what’s out of bounds.”