by Forest, Will
Alex Garret
***
This is my journal entry about plastic surgery. As you know, I work at Ricky’s. Maybe you don’t know that I work there because I can earn a lot of money and support my family that way. And, hey, carpe diem, and all that. You’re only young once. I’ve always been very confident with my body, but after working at Ricky’s for a few months I started to feel pressure to get liposuction done. First I heard from co-workers and then one of them showed me a film about the procedure, and I almost chickened out, because it’s gross. It’s nasty the way the doctors or technicians or whatever they are move the suction tubes around inside your body. I’m talking vigorous, like imagine brushing your teeth really hard or scrubbing the heck out of something, that kind of vigorous. And there’s so much blood! You can see the fat come through the tubes—it’s all yellow and oily. But a lot of blood comes too. It really wipes you out. You have to rest for a few days and probably not dance again for a week or two. In spite of all that, and how expensive it is, I decided I wanted to do it. It cost me a couple weeks’ income, but I looked at it as an investment that would yield a large return. That was November of the year before last.
They said my operation was routine, but I don’t know how they can say that because I lost too much blood and they had to quit early. When the anesthetic wore off, they offered me another session but at that moment I felt horrible and so I told ‘em to forget it. I was knocked out for days and didn’t feel the time pass at all. At least I had scheduled it over Thanksgiving week, which I think was really smart because I didn’t miss class, plus I was too weak to pig out on turkey. When I went back to Ricky’s the Tuesday after Thanksgiving I felt a little feeble still, but I recovered quick, and I could see and feel the difference in my abdomen and thighs. I was only twenty at the time—that was just a little over a year ago. I think my body can still recover quickly.
In fact, even though I decided not to go through with another liposuction session, I did decide to get a buttock augmentation or “ass job,” not as common as a “boob job” but still pretty common. I already have plenty on top and wanted more on the bottom to balance me out. That operation was a little more costly because of the implants, but less stressful and I definitely recovered faster, except I couldn’t sit down for a few days! They said I could, but I didn’t want to. I wanted to protect everything I had paid for. You probably don’t remember but I still came to Philosophy 101 class. I had to stand up in the back.
It’s not like I can really measure the monetary success of my “investments.” But I do very well at work. It feels funny to write this: I’m the most requested lap dancer, and I think it certainly has to do with what I added back there. And, this is pretty graphic but it’s a technical part of my job: even though I might be wiggling myself around right up close to a customer’s face, he can’t see the scar because (1) it’s pretty dark inside the club and (2) the technology has advanced and they can hide the scar—just one scar, not one for each cheek—make it really small, etc., when they operate.
Well, so that’s why I did it. It was a lot of money and time in recovery but it was worth it. Learning about aesthetics in this class has made me more aware of why I did it, but also more aware that there can be different ways of thinking about our bodies without subscribing blindly to fashion or magazine images.
Heather Redcloud
***
The Kalendar Prince
Dive.
Dip skinny.
Swim hard.
Surface in the interstices of the floating blocks of days.
Pull yourself out, naked and dripping minutes,
without letting Tuesday tip you over
or you won’t be late for the baptism on tomorrow morning in the fog.
Scan the days from on top-
pink Fridays to the left, green Mondays behind and to the right.
Get on your knees to peel open the clock face,
excavate and enjoy the dark chocolate
of this black Wednesday’s daily advent;
shaped like a block of time it will melt
in your mind, not on your hands,
while the seconds on your skin evaporate,
exposed to sunset on the sea of pages.
You are the Kalendar Prince, and you have no clothes
to betray the distortions of the seasons.
The months are indiscriminate, the years are yours
and the farther you stay, the longer you go.
The constellations spell other horoscopes,
lose track of space and calculate age for another time.
A cuckoo springs out of nowhen
to remind you to set the shadow back one hour
and you laugh, because you know
you remembered to make sure it said PM,
to be unaware of ostensible anachronisms.
You jump - a red Saturday.
Every leap is Leap Year.
Every night is New Year’s All Hallow's Eve.
In the second December on the block
you feel a warp, a wink, a wrinkle. . .
a tidal wave sweeps the wet weeks
and you tumble over solstice and equinox as the
calendar falls
off
the
wall
Gregorio González
***
I don’t know if you remember Professor Ross but I told you last year that when I was in high school I participated in an exchange program my junior year in Rio de Janeiro. It was the best year of my life. I love my host family and friends, Rio is beautiful, getting to learn Portuguese which is such a sexy, joyful language, the beaches there are terrific, I even went to a nude beach near Rio. But where I’m going with this is that the other day in class you mentioned candomblé and I want to tell you about what I learned about Afro-Brazilian culture. And to tell you about how Terrence and I are researching our topic which is nudism in Brazil. By the way while I was living in Rio I got to visit Bahia with my host family. Bahia is like the center of Afro-Brazilian culture although it’s really prevalent in Rio too. I visited a few terreiros, which are houses where candomblé ceremonies take place. At first I thought it was all just about remembering Africa, like preserving the culture of the slaves who were brought to Brazil in the thousands, mostly from West Africa. And of course it does have to do with that. But then I realized how strong the spiritual sense of candomblé is for the people who believe, and so since those people (black as well as other races) live in Brazil then it’s not just about Africa it’s about Brazil too. So I’m trying to stay on topic here… In the candomblé ceremonies nudity is not really normal, but it can happen, for different reasons. It’s because the body of a believer can become possessed by an orixá (and I know you know orixás are gods and goddesses). Sometimes, but not often, the possessed person (who is usually chanting and maybe dancing as well) might casually undress, or rip off clothes violently, and sometimes the other participants may remove some or all of their clothes too. When this happens there is a special intensity to the possession I think, because the orixás have to possess people in order to be understood, they have to embody people, and it can be a celebration of body acceptance. This is or was probably especially important for slaves or descendants of slaves who suffered abuses and needed some self-affirmation. It makes the body a divine place of movement and communication! Sometimes the orixás are represented nude in iconic images, especially Iemanjá (the goddess of the sea), Exú (a trickster and messenger god), Ossain (an herbal healer god), and Oxum, the goddess of beauty and vanity. There are some nudist resorts and beaches in Bahia, and of course in or near Rio, and Terrence and I are starting to gather information about these places. I don’t know if we’ll be able to make a connection to candomblé, but like I said you mentioned it in class and so I wanted to write about it. Of course, some of the Brazilian Indian tribes had a tradition of nudity too. In some cases they still live nude today.
Renee B. Minette
<
br /> ***
My mother’s body has the shape of a barrel. Seriously. Other than her head, her roly-poly arms and her tree trunk legs, everything else is one round, stout mass, and nothing projects out any further than anything else. No butt to speak of, no boobs either. She looks like those old-fashioned cartoons of somebody who’s lost everything, wearing only a barrel with suspenders. Except in her case she IS the barrel.
I am SO incredibly thankful that I got my dad’s genes and actually have a somewhat proportional body. My relatives all say I have his cheeks, nose and mouth, and obviously something of his slimmer build. But I have my mom’s eyes and hair. My mom could have beautiful hair but she doesn’t take care of it, or any other part of her body for that matter. She just gives herself a ‘bowl’ cut and is done with it. I take, I don’t know, probably at least half an hour and sometimes more like an hour to do my hair EVERY DAY. Shampoo, conditioner, dryer, curler, comb and brush, highlights… I’m at the other extreme, and somewhere between my mother and me there’s a happy medium.
I think in my mom’s case, having a body like that has really affected her idea of who she is. Because she doesn’t care about herself at all. She smokes almost every waking moment, eats absolute junk all the time in industrial quantities, drinks coffee, coke or beer morning, noon and night, doesn’t even know what the word ‘exercise’ means unless it’s math homework, seldom sleeps and when she does she snores like a bear, and if she goes to the doctor at all it’s because I beg her to from time to time.
And her mother died of cardiac arrest at age 48! I never met my grandma, and there’s only one photo of her. She’s wearing black and hiding behind her children. My mom will frequently say of her, ‘my mother was an enormous woman who required a very large chair.’ You’d think my mom would learn from her own mom, and I know on some level she understands she’s hurting herself by not taking care of herself, but I think I’ve finally realized it’s like she WANTS to hurt herself. Simply put: she doesn’t like her body and wants to get out.
So I’m writing this because I want to read my own thoughts about body image. And you get to read them too. And I know you know my uncle Tucker. He has tried so hard to get mom to go with him to La Rioja. He tells her, you can keep your clothes on, it’ll be just half an hour, etc. but she resists. She used to get mad if he’d even mention the place or start talking about nudism. Now she just ignores him. And I understand her. I think it’s easy to talk about losing your inhibitions and feeling no shame if you’re young and healthy, or older but at least still fit. In her case, I can only imagine the shame or discomfort she would feel if she were naked around other people.
Of course, clothes are another way for her to hide from the reality of her body. Usually she just wears what my Italian friend calls the ‘typical American uniform’ (that’s so cruel!), which is a sweatsuit with sneakers. She only has a few, let’s see, there’s a salmon pink one that looks stultifyingly horrid on her, then there’s a dark blue one—that’s probably the best since it helps her look a little less full—and a green one. But she wears the pink one most, of course, because it’s her favorite! She has no clue about anything along the lines of fashion, or what colors look good on her, nothing. One time, I saw her in a dress. When I graduated from high school. And she was visibly uncomfortable. She looked like she was going to just spontaneously combust inside the dress, which was basically a flower-print tablecloth with holes for her head and arms. I was very embarrassed.
I’ve never written about this before, I’m realizing as I go along. So this is good. But I don’t want to give the impression that I don’t love my mother. I care for her very much, in every sense of the word care. And besides, she’s smart. She knew how embarrassed I was at the commencement party and made up some excuse to leave early.
Have I ever seen my mother nude? Not that I recall. I imagine I did as a girl and don’t remember now. I know that she does take a shower a couple times a week. But she sees me naked all the time. It doesn’t bother either one of us. She lets me go to La Rioja if I’m with my uncle or someone else she trusts. But that night when I was pulled over by that creepy cop, and then he, well, you know what happened. And then he escorted me home. He waited in his car until I got inside the front door. My mom was waiting for me and I told her everything that had happened. She was so mad she grabbed a jar of mayonnaise from the counter and ran outside to throw it after the patrol car, long gone. She was mad because she knew I had been taken advantage of, that the cop was a jerk, that it could have ended up much worse. And she was mad at me for speeding. But thinking about it now, I realize that she was mad too because she understands how fragile the support is for social nudity, or for whatever she may care to call what her brother and her daughter and many other people she knows, including you and Dr. Saucedo, participate in at La Rioja. I truly think, now that I’m writing this, that she wasn’t upset just about me, but about the greater cause as well. And that makes me proud of her.
But the best news is that something finally clicked a few months ago. She’s trying to eat healthy and quit smoking. I’m helping her, but I don’t want to push her too hard, because she’ll go back to resisting. Funny, sounds like I’m the mother, doesn’t it? Well, thanks again for helping, and I’m really enjoying the course.
Jennifer Prichard
***
Being a newly minted naturist, or shall I say a freshly disrobed one, I have plenty of questions about naturism. But here are some questions for all those folks who say, “I don’t like having all my secrets laid bare in the sun’s bright glare,” who worry about nothing being left to the imagination: Why wouldn’t ‘imagination’ be just as free to picture what you could look like clothed? Besides, “nothing left to the imagination” sounds like the reading of a last will and testament, in which poor ‘imagination’ is bequeathed zilch. Who died? Who did the bequeathing? If taking off your clothes is like passing away—‘oh, I’d just die if so-and-so saw me naked’—then why are we born nude? Who said the following: If God had wanted us to run around without any clothes on, we would have been born naked? What, or how much, does a burka leave to the imagination? Or do we let it kill off imagination outright? Nothing ventured, nothing gained. What, or how much, does a bikini bequeath? Whose imagination inherits more, the bikini-beholder’s or the burka-beholder’s, and how can we ever really know? When a burka crosses the Caucasus, does it make a habit? A nun’s “habit” comes from the same word root as “give” and “exhibit”: is what is given to the imagination the same as what is exhibited? Do we have to assume that imagination can only interpret the mystery or the secret? Some people think that baring bodies bares souls and emotions and, most dreadfully, the baser instincts. Shall we hide them inside Plato’s cave forever then? Or shall we venture forth and bravely retake the Garden of Eden? Is ignorance really bliss? Is innocence really lost? Shall imagination receive deliverance, or just a paltry inheritance?
Paul Hocker
***
Immensely pleased, Christopher read through the rest of the journals. In one of them, a student had typed “nuderstand” instead of “understand.” A typo? A Freudian slip? Or more serendipitous coining of new CRM lingo—new language for new attitudes? If I understand you I stand under you, so if I “nuderstand” you I stand nude for/by/with you? I support you, I stand by you, naked of course, implicitly “nuderstood.”
Christopher put down his students’ journals because now he was thinking about Angela. He knew he had fallen in love with her. There was none of the doubting, the wondering if what he felt was really love, none of the playing at affection like his previous relationships. He was aware that this love depended on their mutual attraction to the nude education mission, but he knew it was dependent in a good, organic way, the way a tulip depends on its stem or a spider on its web. And the mission had outgrown both of them, to become bigger than Gulf State University, and with an urgency that keened their passion and honed their cooperation. Not only had Angela decided to m
ake her education seminar a nude course, but also she had convinced Maggie Liang to designate the life-modeling course as clothing-optional, a move that almost all of Dr. Liang’s students welcomed. In fact, the art department ended up endorsing the designation because, after the first two weeks of class, the need to pay life models was eliminated by students taking turns drawing each other. The students even posed for a photographic remake of the classic art school ad with the nude artists and clothed model. Christopher closed his eyes as he knew—as he realized with the unshakeable yet tender pulsing probe of what it means to discover that one knows by heart—that Angela loved him just as mightily.