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.
“Rooming”