public nudity

Speaking of birds and books.

Sitting in Annie’s reading Kerouac’s Big Sur; a terrible, sad, fleabound book that all of the trickery has fallen out of. A friend had loaned the book to me a week before with a post-noon giggling high, barely able to contain his glee he told me chapter 23 was wicked good; that I could read the whole book in an afternoon. I disregarded his advice and read it in vagrant pieces, over bits of omelet and rice. I read it faux-bohemian curled up on my bean bag, surrounded by the contents of the room; heaping mounds of laundry neatly in the hamper, closet jammed with jackets, shirts, cleaning supplies, then the crown atop it all; an expanse of paper stuck to the north wall. I write my idiocy up there and then; take a sentence up like the hem of a shirt and hope that I’ll be able to mend it fit for wearing. Sometimes I pause my reading to write something on the wall; look around and return to my page flipping slumber.

I found Big Sur a revelation when it was not being suicidal yet it was often being suicidal; it feels like the last book Kerouac wanted to write, last book he’d get to write. After I finished reading it I did some research and found out it was. I will always find it funny how autobiographical Kerouac’s catalog is, renaming himself for each story, renaming his friends. From a distance it feels pitiful but when you’re deep in it there’s a great depth of intimacy in this weary upstarts writing. When friends asked what I am reading I would tell them that Kerouac is fighting his alcoholism and losing.

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Everyone’s looking at the nude woman and I’m not. I’m looking at Big Sur but if everyone else is I may as well also look at the nude woman so I take a break from my book to write about the big splotched birthmark on the models backside. On her break I ask what modeling is like. With a compliment to my sweater she responds; it’s freeing, it’s poetic. I tell her that she certainly makes it look that way and she tells me I should try it and maybe I will though not on this seaboard, or maybe on this seaboard with the distance of five years because a year is as much distance as a thousand miles.

I’m worried I am scaring the model with my sneezes as she sits beside me on her break. A whole lot of chafing sweat underneath my arms as my nose drips the contents of a snow clearing sickness from the parking spot denial not taken for granted the night before. A great mound of the stuff, hip height, entrenched, denying me my parking spot. I dug it out in the cold with only a children’s shovel, took an hour to clear it away enough that my car could slosh into the spot. My limbs were warm from the work but my face was chapped and chap stick don’t stick anywhere other than lips. When I slipped my way back to my dorm my frozen mouth could only move in mutters. Discreet mutters scorning facilities, administration, parking services. Now I am sniveling my wet nose and scrunching my face as if that’ll make the mucus back where it came from, the model ends her breaks, returns to her form. The charcoal scratching starts up again.

An arm of tattoos that ends in folded wrist, folded out of convenience as joints do as they must. Beneath the arm, behind a little ways, about the span of the shoulder sits a breast half obscured by the arm. Above the breast, below the head you can see the chest. A large tattoo, some sigil or glyph sits on the chest between collarbone and breasts. The back curves forward and sits atop a behind that itself sits atop one curved foot. The eyes are furtive at times, glancing, the only part truly allowed to move with any intention. The chest moves with the rise and fall of breath. The arm, tattooed, rests atop a knee that stretches forward into a soft calf and planched foot.

A space heater warms this nudity and a room clothes it; clinical white walls offset by easels with their charcoal strokes. Grades. Anxieties. Uncombed hair, dyed, ringlets and locks. Cropped and contained to the head though one can see no other places for hair to appear in anywhere finer than the hair on ones arms that stands cattle stiff when the room hits a sudden chill as these rooms do, the movement within so slight that a shiver runs through. Great hopping marks are made with devotional intent then unmade by righteous erasers, heads sooted with chalk.

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Modeling feels Grecian, because sculpture seems Grecian, modeling itself being a fleshy sculpture.¹ The eye is accustomed to what it has already seen and I have seen the West in museums and novels and movies and so the world itself seemed West in my infancy. Many feel this way and then travel West of Steinbeck’s Eden and find themselves hopelessly virginal in this foreign world that exists parallel only if you see things as one or the other, they pick up their bags and set them down in another continent and bow their head down and say all is sweet in this hemisphere simply because they grew sour in the one prior. There’s a great misery in not being able to appreciate both. Both and more for if the world is split to East and West then why not split again, halved again to North and South; slice the whole world into quarters and eighths if you like it, the noreast or the souwest. The world all sectioned up like a Passover platter. Some spend all their time trying to find what is where so that the box they appreciate is the box they approve of. Dullards doldrums. Boring through mountains instead of seeing what the next summit holds, rationing out infinity.

Another break and slight shawled hands reach for a phone; a tattoo on the wrist like a rising sun. Or a setting one. There’s no motion to tell the difference. Class ends and her hand shakes mine and the sun rises and then sets again in admirable waves. Chitters of laughter swell in great cesarian sections, disconnected from the source of the humor a smile-giggle runs across me with tilting rapid footsteps that are gracious in their amusement. She poses for another class after this one so she sits next to me and pulls out a journal, dates the top of the page and begins to write.

When I used to keep a daily journal I found that it kept me closer to the treacherous than the rational. I’d make increasingly dangerous divulgements, attempting each time to top the passage before, a habit that threatened to have me put a period on the life rather than the page. Realizing this made me leave the journal rotting somewhere, only opening it when I needed to remember what my social security number was. Misery abounds when you write it down. Misery doubles when you deny its feelings and proceed with logic.

I’m aware of the fact that I want to impress her, my mind arcs towards juvenile feats when impressed though her impression on me was a compliment to my sweater the enviable wardrobe she’s in. She tells me the modeling is freeing and I admire her candor. I envy her candor. I have a hard time being nude and I’m not talking naked. I write a whole lot and hope that someone falls in love with those words but when people tell me they do, that they do love it I shrug and think they’ve poor taste. It’s a fact that’s as miserable as the journal was. As miserable as my faucet-dripping nose. As miserable as Big Sur’s final chapters were for Kerouac. Misery in the corner meerkat stanced, like a grouse hopping around and pecking at whatever’s thrown its way and I’m left wondering why I throw it anything at all. All of miseries chirping sounds like I’ll need to get more used to the nude. All of miseries chirping sounds like it’ll need to be pheasant for dinner.

1. Or perhaps sculpture is a solid modeling