We’re all naked.

At any given moment, we are communicating in scores of languages. The fact that we no longer acknowledge them – consider it impolite to do so, and evil even to notice (akin to witchcraft) – doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Our postures, gestures, myriad little movements, dilations, tone, cadence, pauses, breaths, pulse at the side of the neck, pallors, pheromones, and more that can be observed or experienced through the various senses of others. From goosebumps to bodily oils, people are speaking enormous volumes in mere moments. Even our pretenses reveal what we want others to believe. “You don’t know me! You don’t know anything about me! Not unless I tell you!” Ever heard that? I’ve heard it a lot – it’s what you get when you respond to the other channels the person is broadcasting on – the social fiction is that we’re only communicating didactically – it’s only word-concepts that are coming across. Ever since the Enlightenment, and before it with the Protestant Reformation, we’ve dismissed as unreal those things that are not presented in word-concept format. No incense, no robes, candles, or stain glass windows – just an auditorium, an audience, a pulpit, and words. Words in a lab report. Words we carry around in thick, black, leather books and read to our minds. Concepts, like the vocabulary words at the back of a textbook that are 9/10 of college education. Or the tautologies that make up most of our ideologies, from religion to politics: this is that, what she said is racist, what he did isn’t democratic, what you’re doing isn’t “biblical”. The culture is basically Protestant you see, even if you’re an atheist. You nice lab boys who pride yourselves on being rational are practicing the same religion – you’re just using different vocabulary. But go back before all of that, and we understood the reasons for bells and smells – it’s because communication, broadcasting, occurs on many, many, yes many channels. Iconography – my own people argued (and held sway in the West until 1014)  that the supreme mode of communication was non-verbal and the deepest prayer is without concepts. We cannot hide, except from those who cannot see, and each reaction against this knowledge reveals still more. We are nude, down to the soul which, despite all our philosophies to the contrary, is still integral to the body. The moment that we stop collaborating in the pretense that we are each covered up, clothed, protected, safe, we can begin to realize what it means to live in community with others. Each of us desires, irrefutably, to be known, and needs, deeply, an interaction with others that exceeds the limitations of intellect. To have these, we must allow the social walls that occupy even our most intimate relationships to crumble. We must look for the friend who will, on his own initiative, break down the first one in spite of us, and without welcome. We must keep watch on these walls, since they are walls of the thinnest sort, with the obvious singular purpose of being breached. Each barrier is a confession of our desire to be penetrated, entered, overcome, known, connected, vulnerable, revealed, woven together with others. The emperor has no clothes. The Edenic attempt to snatch a fig leaf and cover ourselves is futile. The bawdlerization of genitalia on the statue of David or the walls of the Sistine Chapel, like the ‘book burning’ of the iconoclasts and those who whitewash icon-clad temples into mere auditoriums,  is an attempt to reduce communication to a single dimension, to fix the radio on one channel and break off the knob. When you look and see, when you allow for the possibility that the airwaves are rife with content, that a person is communicating on all channels – all the time, you who claim you have no religion – you who bow down at the altar of the culture – then you realize you are no longer safe, and can finally rejoice. Ender says that it is impossible to truly know someone and fail to love them. That’s my experience, too. Finally, then, we can stop guarding that secret desire — to be wanted. Which all we big, strong, grown men hide, like timid little boys, slapping each other on the shoulders because we’re desperately afraid that the other channels will bleed over. It’s not even afraid that it’ll make us gay, or women – no, gay people and women are afraid too – it’s that we’re just afraid, period. Just scared little boys hiding under the covers from what we are, people who speak so many languages (and can’t help it), that we are not safe in out skins and skulls, but are vulnerable to the world, to everyone, or at least to anyone who is looking at you. It’s interesting to watch big, tough guys turn away, run away with their eyes, when you look at them, really look, and they can almost hear all of their own broadcasts in your eyes. Women, on the other hand, either show deathly terror (that’s most of the time), or abject wanting (which means you’ve got to be careful, or you end up in bed all the time, naked in every way.)

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