Naked and Nude
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Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display.
The nude is condemned to never being naked.
Nudity is a form of dress.John Berger (Ways of Seeing)
I’ve always been fascinated by the light. Vermeer. Delft. It’s naked mystery. Reflecting out off of the rim of things. That Delft Blue. A golden earing. Den Haag. Rembrandt. Paintings grounded with the ghosts still inside. Wrinkles alive in strokes and pigments. Colours consummating with tones. I went to Delft to remember.
Something called me there. Something about the Dutch and how they saw the light. To be witness. I’ve been blessed to have visited Florence. I’ve seen David and have stood at the bones of Michelangelo. I’ve been to the Ufizzi and the Pitti Palace where the symbolic mystery of da Vinci sings loud. I have been lost in the galleries of London and New York. I have been awed to my knees in wonder. Yet there is something about the way the Dutch reclaimed the light in the flat loom of the walled off ocean. Tenebrism. Something seen beyond a scene. Something unseen. Unseen in the weight of the shadows. Revealing.
The old paintings, a form of concealing, and at the same time a slow revealing. A painting interprets the world. Translating into its own language. Undressing into the naked of mystery. The painting is a creation from the memory of the painter. There are layers underneath the layers. Colour on colour. Colour beneath colour. Lines. Presence built out of absence. The very hand of the painter vibrates out from the canvass in a palpable energy one can feel. These paintings are timeless.
Maybe the light chooses? Maybe the light speaks to what is naked and what is nude? Or is it the shadows?
Photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this - as in other ways - they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.
John Berger
What of photography? Photos are made from time and light. Time frozen in a moment of light? Some of my most precious memories are depicted in those moments of light infused stopped time. The photographer bearing witness to something that they saw and chose to share. To reveal.
With phones as cameras we are all in some sense photographers now.
There are so many photos in my life that I don’t even seem to see them anymore. They’re not in the picture albums of my youth hidden behind yellowed plastic film with curled corners. I knew every picture by heart. If I close my eyes I can still see them. I love to feel their edges with my fingers. I am a ghost inside of them. When does a photo become a picture?
All of my photos now are digital and I just put them somewhere online to live in some cloud - to forget. Maybe just a stamp to remember I was there. Was I here? The photos even “time” stamped. I can’t touch them. I read them like some language of an event as opposed to the ineffable visual translation of an experience. I am a ghost just moving through them.
What is naked? What is nude?
When I follow the light, I feel it in my feet. I experience this while watching a painting. Grounded. I find it harder to follow the light in a digital photo and at times I can’t find my feet. The light is what is naked to my eye. There is something reflecting deeper than my eye. Maybe we can’t connect to that energy the same in a flattened un-layered digital photo. Yet, if I hold the photo in my hands, it is more alive. Those old dark room photographs created and touched by the hands of professional photographers certainly carried something more. They were layered. To me they became pictures. Naked. I became a ghost inside of them. I could feel the light.
The naked light cries to me I don’t know. Look closer. I remember. The nude says I know too much. Look through. I look through it. It looks through me. There’s no lasting impression. The nude I forget. The naked I remember.
Berger says the camera relieves us of memory, “To be naked is to be oneself.
To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude. The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object. Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display.”
What then of a selfie? It seems to be a selfie culture. In some strange way, “a selfie”, is a way of seeing. Faces, puckered lips, shaved chests, feet. Is the selfie for me to look inside at or is it for me to be seen from the outside? Is a selfie a mirror for reflection? Is there something deeper in the looking glass of these screens? Am I looking at myself or am I looking for myself? Does a selfie remember or does it forget? Is a selfie naked or is it nude? I live into these questions.
What about words? Are words naked or nude?
Has the pornography of the screen weakened my own imagination?
As I write I still try to make love with mystery beyond any script. I still try to follow my own tongue into the wet consciousnesses of creativity. I live into these questions every day. Pen in hand I wake to meet the world. As I invite the words to meet me in the dark before dawn, I meet myself. I move slow so both of us can find and follow the shadows of light.
Brilliant Romanian poet Nichita Stănescu wrote, “Gutenberg flattened words out, but words exist in space. Words are spatialized. They are not dead, like a book. They are alive, between me and you, me and you, me and you. They live; they are spoken, spatialized, and received". To me that echoes that spoken words are alive. Naked in mystery. Ready to be undressed. Yet when they hit the flattened page do they become nude? I resonate to this for digital words. I do love to feel a book in my hands and to connect with original handwriting. That feels more naked yet I ask can a written word stay naked?
A poem is where silence and language meet. A poet searches for language the same way a painter searches for light. To undress the shadows. To undress the shadows of words. To undress language into something naked. Not objectify it into a nude.
Possessed by a life of emails, and documents I ask myself if I can even see the words anymore? Can I taste their hard edges? Can I find the spaces between them? Can they still find me? I want to slow down long enough to explore them all. To visit with them naked. Do I write to remember or do I write to forget?
What is seen? What is unseen?
Identity. Even these letters after my name. Are they naked or nude? Identity. Is it just an image? Am I naked? Am I nude?
Maybe I am parts of both as I look through the lens of life and the shutter
looks back at me. Can the light read the wrinkles? Can the words see my face?
Does it matter if I am being undressed or if I undress myself?
What remembers?
What forgets?
Naked and Nude Wrinkles of light gather on the rims of things. I can see the dust swimming undressed flickering in the sunlight. Swallowing the air hungry for lungs. A soaking wet painting. Alive. Beckoning. Naked in memory, bone and vein. I can trace the strokes. I can taste the pigments in the colours. I can smell the must of time. Does the camera help me to forget? The nude that stares back from the screen. Looking through me as I look through it. Forgetting who is the subject, who is the lens. Becoming an object. No luster to ground the weight of shadows. Most pictures now moving too fast to allow me to get lost. To be still. To watch. What cannot be seen. So many things have passed before my eyes there was always more than what I saw. Can I see myself in the puckered lips and sucked cheeks of words? What reflects back at me in the shaved chests of sentences spread out wide across a page? Are the words alive? Are they flattened out and scripted or consummating a mystery with imagination? Is flesh naked or nude? What cannot be seen? Is the very act of trying to capture a moment the exact same way - to lose one? Am I missing out on what was looking back out - at me? Watching me - while I watched myself looking in the mirror trying to remember. © Jamie Millard
Thank You for Being - Here!
May you be naked. May you be nude.
As long as you were the one to choose.
May you follow the light and follow the shadows.
May you dance somewhere in between.
I seem to have one foot in both worlds.
Naked and Nude. Remembering and forgetting.
After all we are, flesh and soul.
Happy Poetry Month in Canada!
Remember we are the poem.
Let’s write our own.
Stay Well.
Lots of Love,
Jamie
Jamie, I love how your beautiful, soulful reflections and poem pulse with life, like light weaving through leaves, ever shifting yet endlessly profound. The way you explore nakedness and nudity feels like peeling back layers of the Self - not to expose, but to reveal the Truth that lies beneath. There's so many great lines and I would have to quote your entire post yet these really stood out for me. "Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display.” Oh, the truth of it! The truth of it!
Being married to a photographer, who’s also a body therapist of thirty years (she’s retiring this year), I’ve often reflected on the interplay of mind, body, spirit and soul. When we first met, I said something like, “Well, that’s mind and body taken care of; together we’ll work on spirit and soul.” Poets eh?! It feels fitting to mention this here, as your words resonate deeply with that search for connection and meaning. Naturally, "Ways of Seeing" sleeps and dreams on our book shelves.
Thank you so much for inviting us to see the beauty of being - to dance in the tension between what we hide and share, what we know and seek to understand. There’s exquisite grace in how you paint the soul’s canvas, each brushstroke alive with vulnerability, memory and connection, gently unfolding with raw honesty that calls us to stand still with the wonder of it all. It’s truly a privilege to witness your soul in motion. I shall return to read again and again and again! ❤️🙏
Wow Jamie, what a masterpiece. I can trace the brushstrokes of thought and feeling between the lines. I hear you. Somehow the digital picture is not only instant gratification, it also can be modified, filtered and deleted. I remember the times when we had to wait in sweet anticipation for the film to become a picture. When I left Germany, I took pictures from friends and family with my little (new aged) "polaroid", and flipping through it sure feels different than skipping through the digital album. Everything is energy, polaroids contain crystals, books are printed on paper made of trees, they speak to more than just one sense. A picture online can be only experienced through the eyes. A printed picture carries energy, can be smelled, touched and be seen. With the internet we are often using just one sense. In former times we didn't need mindfulness, as we used a variety of our senses. Now we only use the sight which takes us away from believing first, then seeing. I hear you, I find it hard to read online! Sounds like it is time to let your words become another book! I would be delighted to hold it in my hands and experience your writing with all my senses! Thank you for sharing your wor(l)d with us!