XIV
This is the tomb of Konallis; Korinthos was her city and Kleobulina bore her,
Having lain in sweet love with Sesocrates, the son of Menophiles.
I lived three and twenty years, and then sudden sickness bore me to Dis
So they laid me here with my silver armlets, my gold comb, my chain and with little painted figures.
In my life I was happy, knowing many sorts of love and none evil.
If you are a lover, scatter dust, and call me “dear one” and speak one last “Hail.”
Telos.
Nudity and the Ideal
Will Levington Comfort
One of the young men here loved the sunlight on his shoulders so well—had such a natural love for the feel of light and air upon his bare flesh—that he almost attained that high charm of forgetting himself half-dressed.... The country people occasionally come down to the water on the Sabbath or to sell (from their homes back on the automobile routes and the interurban lines) and for what they do not get of the natural beauty of shore and bluff, I have a fine respect. However they didn’t miss the Temporary Mr. Pan.
They complained that he was exposing himself, even that he was shameless.
Now, I am no worshiper of nudity. I’d like to be, but it disappoints in most cases. There is always a strain about an object that is conscious of itself—and that nudity which is unconscious of itself is either shameless, an inevitable point of its imperfection anatomically for the trained eye; or else it is touched with divinity and does not frequent these shores.
The human body has suffered the fate of all flesh and plant-fiber that is denied light. A certain vision must direct all growth—and vision requires light. The covered things are white-lidded and abortive, scrawny from struggle or bulbous from the feeding dream into which they are prone to sink.
It will require centuries for the human race to outgrow the shames which have come to adhere to our character-structure from recent generations. We have brutalized our bodies with these thoughts. We associate women with veils and secrecy, but the trouble is not with them, has not come from women, but from the male-ordering of women’s affairs to satisfy his own ideas of possession and conservation. The whole cycle of human production is a man-arrangement according to present standards, and every process is destructively bungled. However, that’s a life-work, that subject.
The thoughts of our ancestors have debased our bodies in color and texture and contour organically and to be seen. Nudity is not beautiful, and does not play sweetly upon our minds because of this heritage. The human body is associated with darkness, and the place of this association in our minds is of corresponding darkness.
The young man and I talked it over. We decided that it would be a thankless task for him to spend the summers in ardent endeavor to educate the Countryside by browning his back in public. That did not appeal to us as a fitting life task; moreover, his project would be frequently interrupted by the town-marshal. As a matter of truth, one may draw most of the values of the actinic rays of the sun through thin white clothing; and if one has not crushed his feet into a revolting mess in pursuit of the tradesmen, he may go barefooted a little while each day on his own grassplot without shocking the natives or losing his credit at the bank. The real reason for opening this subject is to express, without hatred, certain facts in the case of the Countryside which complained.
They are villagers and farm-people who live with Mother Nature without knowing her. They look into the body of Nature, but never see her face to face. The play of light and the drive of intelligence in her eyes is above the level of their gaze or too bright. Potentially they have all the living lights—the flame immortal, but it is turned low. It does not glorify them as men or parents or workmen. It does not inspire them to questing—man’s real and most significant business. They do not know that which is good and evil in food, in music, in color, fabric, books, in houses, lands or faith. They live in a low lazy rhythm and attract unto themselves inevitably objects of corresponding vibration. One observes this in their children, in their schools, and most pathetically in their churches. They abide dimly in the midst of their imperfections, but with tragic peace. When their children revolt, they meet on every hand the hideous weight of matter, the pressure of low vibrations, and only the more splendid of them have the integrity of spirit to rise above the resistance.
As for the clothing they wear, they would do better if left suddenly naked as a people and without preconceptions were commanded to find some covering for themselves. As herds, they have fallen into a descending arc of usage, under the inevitable down-pull of trade. Where the vibrations of matter are low, its responsive movement is gregarian, rather than individual. The year around, these people wear clothing, woolen pants and skirts, which if touched with an iron, touched with sunlight, rain or any medium that arouses the slumbering quantities, the adjacent nostril is offended.
They are heavy eaters of meat the year round. They slay their pets with as little concern as they gather strawberries. Their ideas of virtue and legitimacy have to do with an ecclesiastical form, as ancient as Nineveh and as effaced in meaning. They accept their children, as one pays a price for pleasure; and those children which come from their stolen pleasures are either murdered or marked with shame. Their idea of love is indefinite with desire, and their love of children has to do with the sense of possession.
They are not significant men in their own fields; rarely a good mason, a good carpenter, a good farmer; the many have not even found the secret of order and unfolding from the simplest task. The primary meaning of the day’s task in its relation to life and blessedness is not to be conceived by them. They are taught from childhood that first of all work is for bread; that bread perishes; therefore one must pile up as he may the wherewith to purchase the passing bread; that bread is bread and the rest a gamble.... They answer to the slow loop waves which enfold the many in amusement and opinion, in suspicion and cruelty and half-truth. To all above, they are as if they were not; mediocre men, static in spiritual affairs, a little pilot-burner of vision flickering from childhood, but never igniting their true being, nor opening to them the one true way which each man must go alone, before he begins to be erect in other than bone and sinew.
They cover their bodies—but they do not cover their faces nor their minds nor their souls; and this is the marvel, they are not ashamed! They reveal the emptiness of their faces and the darkness of their minds without complaining to each other or the police.
From any standpoint of reality, the points of view of the many need only to be expressed to reveal their abandonment.... You see, I have left the Countryside and am lost in the crowd now, any crowd, the world-crowd, whose gods today are trade, patriotism and a certain limp-legged tumbler.
... Yet we are told by every authoritative voice out of the past, and we know it from the urge of our own souls, that we must love the many before we can serve them. It is fatuous to love blindly, therefore we must understand what we are about. I have touched here some small things of the crowd, which are well enough to know; otherwise we are apt to stand apart from the many crying: “How noble are the simple-minded! How sweet the people of the Countryside! How inevitable and unerring is the voice of the people!” As a matter of truth, unless directed by some strong man’s vision, the voice of the people has never yet given utterance to constructive truth; and the same may be said of those who cater to the public taste in politics or the so-called arts. The man who undertakes to give the people what the people want is not an artist or a true leader of any dimension. He is a tradesman and finds his place in his generation.
The brave workman who dares be himself and go hungry for the honor finds sooner or later a brilliant little fact rising in his consciousness—one that comes to stay, and which future thinking must be built around: that while the people are all that is low and bad in their change and rush of personality, they are also the soil of the future, a splendid potential mass that contains every heroism and masterpiece to be; that all great things must come from the people, because great leaders of the people turn their passionate impregnation of idealism upon them; that first the dreamer dreams—and then the people make it action....
That which we see that hurts us so as workmen, is but the unfinished picture, the back of the tapestry.
To be worth his spiritual salt, the artist, any artist, must turn every force of his conceiving into that great restless Abstraction, the many; he must plunge whole-heartedly in the doing, but cut himself loose from the thing done; at least, he must realize that what he is willing to give could not be bought.... When he is quite ready, there shall rise for him, out of the Abstraction, something finished; something as absolutely his own as the other half of his circle.