The Authoress Undressed

I walked through the blue and green walled space of the college. In the
dim and quiet, I wondered if there was anybody there, if somehow I'd
made a mistake, and if I shouldn't just come back the next week. But
then I saw a room busy with light and students. I felt invisible as I
crept behind the group, while they propped canvases and chose their
brushes. I tried not to think about the big platform of softly layered
cloth or the sunny portrait lights. I listened to George, whom I'd met a
few weeks earlier, explain the rules of proportion to the class. Then
George came over and pointed me to a screened corner that was my
dressing room. My pulse bolted. What are you afraid of?, I asked myself,
as I kicked off my shoes and peeled off my socks.

My shirt. My pants. My underwear. I felt like an onion, I felt odd — I was
literally naked at school, although I'd never had that nightmare. I could
hear George explaining the virtues of the contra posto figure through
art history, and I knew he was killing time for me. He knew I'd never
done this before. I stepped out.

My then-friend now-lover once called me the least naked person he
knew. This was due to a lack of conscious physicality to be naked in. I
have long had an unusual relationship with my corporal being, of
irreverance, denial, or fondness at best. Barely feeling as though my
body exists, I have cared about it to the extent that it kept my mind
going, for my mind is the basis of my identity. We are what we do, says
Kierkegaard, and my work is cerebral. My mind was the writer, and my
body incidental to its existence. I wandered around in the mindset of
the invisible man, until finally I decided to be the most naked person
in a room full of people, in order to prove to myself that I actually
exist. That night was to be a personal revolution: I would be naked for
the first time.

But the invisible man cannot be naked. When I emerged from behind the
screen, everything was fine. My heart settled down just as it does on
the first day of any new job. In fact, I felt completely comfortable;
the only strange sensation was the acute absence of anxiety. I walked
around without any clothes on. I still didn't feel naked. I discussed
the position with George: weight on my right leg, left foot as if
stepping slightly forward, left hand on my hip, eyes looking to the
top-left corner of the room. I tried to relax into the contrived
position naturally. On the platform, my skin was warm and washed with
light. The students' eyes were all over me as they mixed the shades and
colours of my body onto their palettes My usual stream of consciousness
buzzed on unphazed. And I thought, How curious; I'm still not naked.

Why had I never experienced the self-awareness so bound to nudity in our
culture? We are, after all, an obsessively body-conscious society, for
which being naked in public is the stuff of nightmares. To be exposed
physically is to be exposed absolutely, and most people dread the
thought of their bodies, of which they are highly critical, being naked
in public. This is especially true for women, but increasingly for men
also, as our cultural obsession with the phantasmical, beautiful,
perfectly managed self transcends gender. Unless you meet the standards
of fantasy, your naked body is an object of shame, a flaw that must be
kept private, and must be punished in private as well — eating
disorders are on the increase for both sexes in a culture where
ninety-five percent of women overestimate their body size, and little
girls often begin diets at nine years old. This skin-deep fanaticism is often
accompanied by the degradation of concern for both larger and smaller
spheres of existence. It erodes understanding of basic human
interdependence, of the way each of us exists as part of society. It eats
away at consciousness of the value and responsibility of our social selves,
to the point where a walk down Robson Street feels like a walk through
a disjoined gathering of empty human skins. It is clear to me that most
people in our society are body-conscious, but in a horrifying way that
makes me glad that I do not think that way about myself.

For me, everything is upstairs; I have science-fiction fantasies about
existence as pure thought, based on neo-Buddhist philosophies that our
waken lives are molded solely from the clay of ideas. I have always
defined the most physically-grounded attributes of identity — my
gender and my sexuality, for example — in purely intellectual terms. I
interperet others in the same way, and find myself relating to people as
collections of ideas, as expressions of thought, as lambent minds
glimmering within the grey tomb of the human form, as aesthetically
disregardable to me as any prison. One of my personal favourite pastimes
is lake-diving at night in the iceless winters of South Western British
Columbia. I leap straight off the dock fully clothed, and once I
resurface, I move as little as possible, and tread just enough to keep
my nose breathing air. My clothes become heavy, and my breath drifts
away in clouds. The weedy-smelling, frigid lake gradually creeps into my
toe bones and finger joints, then my calves and my arms, then my
shoulders and knees, until the delicious, liberating moment when I
cannot feel my body at all. When I am just a mind full of thoughts
floating up in the stars, then I am free.

I was comfortable, although alienated at times, with this surreal
concept of my body, and with being abnormal in a society where normalcy
amounts to critical obsession with the appearance of your physical form.
I cared for my body adequately; each day I bathed and bound my hair and
then got on with the industry of thought, quite happily. But for every
zone of mainstream culture there is a zone of subcultural resistance,
and there have been social uprisings — of feminists, primarily — in
which empowering the naked body is the ultimate form of political
revolution. Ironically, it was these alternative models of body
consciousness that first caused me to question the health of my identity a
few years ago. Feminist Abra Chernik wrote critically of her reaction to
puberty: "I resolved to eradicate the physical symptoms of my impending
womanhood." She developed eating disorders, and recovered only after
realising the "illusion of anorexic power". For feminists, this
illusion is symptomatic of the many ways in which women are pressured to
be smaller, both literally and figuratively, in our society. "I grasped
the absurdity of a nation of adult women dying to grow small," wrote
Abra, "feminism has taught me to honor the fullness of my womanhood and
the solidness of the body that hosts my life."

Feminism, which I had associated with since perhaps the age of six, sent
a trojan horse of mutinous ideas into my welcoming cerebral state. I may
not have been anorexic in regards to food, said feminism, but I was
sexually anorexic. In love with minds and not bodies? A sick state of
illusion, due to the patriarchal oppression of desire. For the first
time, I was pathologised by and excluded from alternative thought. I
panicked at first, under full siege within my community of the
alienated. I wrote my way through it, and, as always, undeniable truths
glimmered for me in the embers of the attack: I wish to be thought and
experience. That is enough to explain the rift in my being. If I were
not a woman but a Buddha instead, this rift would be the round edge of
an empty bowl. I drifted away from feminism, but in retrospect, I must
credit it for acting as a catalyst of personal revolution. Revolution
scares us; it explodes us from the inside, and scatters us out like
stars beyond the limitations of our previous existence. We come to know
ourselves best through personal challenge and change, and perhaps I even
brought an ounce of the feminist spirit with me to the art college that
night, where I attempted to expose myself, physical ghost that I am, if
not as a woman's body, then at least as a personal, political statement.

Other revolutory experiences beyond feminism helped to transform my body
consciousness as well. Despite leading a predominately cerebral
existence, I have still faced physical challenges, which have earned my
body my own respect and compassion. This clumsy vessel has proven to be
strong through voyages — on the arduous west coast it pushed its way
through the shifting sand and sandy wind and muck and grind and
salt-water-on-the-peeled-raw-heels of an advanced eighty-kilometre hike,
though I still mostly credited the power of my mind. Then a longer trek,
from Shanghai to London — by vehicles, granted, but significantly, my
body was the only constant and known place. My body was my home.
Everything in my possession was on my back, and my feet took me
everywhere. And my body took everywhere into me — I ate my way through
twenty-two countries — and my body's health was an expression of the
health of most of the world's people, who were eating the same
poverty-sodden street food as I was for much of the way.

My damaged body pulled me back to Canada. I was ill for twelve long
months. It was like living that nightmare where you want to run away
from danger, but your body won't move. Terrifyingly, I have no memory of
my life through the worst of it. I know that I would come home after
school, stumble just inside the door, stand there a moment —
and wake up curled fetally on the spot, several hours later. My
digestion wasn't working: eating anything hurt. I slept sixteen hours a
day for weeks, and still felt exhausted, though my mind was desperate to
get moving again. I was in despair. Doctors ran lengthy batteries of tests,
but they couldn't figure out what was wrong with me. They blamed
it on an invisible bug, and pumped me full of antibiotics — the
nasty stuff normally reserved for the depleted immune systems of those
with AIDS or cancer. It left nothing alive inside my body but me, and
barely. Rather than the invisible man, I felt then like the visible woman:
a clear plastic tomb of numerous complicated organs to be studied
and prodded. My body, pushed to its limits and paying the price, was so
vulnerable, so real, and most importantly, so restricted in its ability
to create art, as to elicit my genuine concern.

Physical illness made me admit that my body was both real and necessary.
It made me slow down, take care, and even stop writing for a while. When
it imposed restrictions on the ability of my mind to create, it threatened my
cerebral identity as an artist. Or exploded, or evolved, I guess,
because it was only then that I fully realised that my body is integral to
my identity as an artist. I took the time to tend to my sickness, to my
nutrition, and to my body in general. I went to a Boddhisattva-mad
acupuncturist who brought the chi to my belly again; she
unprescribed the antibiotics and had me eat burnt cardamom and drink
oregano oil until I felt like a walking pizza. But I slowly began to
move again. One day I went for a walk. On another, a swim. I
stretched. It may all sound obvious, but caring about my body was
actually an epiphanic experience for me. My mind had been dangerously
like that of Phaethon, the proud and fevered child of the gods, who
took the chariot of the sun on a joyride across the sky. His ambition
and heedlessness for the earth below would have burnt it out completely
— as my unruly mind would have burnt out my body — if Apollo hadn't
struck him from the sky.

This experience transformed my conception of writing, as well. I
understood the cooperative relationship between bodily perception and
mental abstraction more deeply, now that I consciously embodied it. Of
course, I had always known intellectually that ideas come to us
physically, through the senses — and that my artist's task of bringing
colours, sights, smells, sounds and textures to the mind of the reader
is really an appeal to the mind bank of their own physical experience.
And of course I had k
nown just as well that all of the images that I
create are reflections of my own tactile existence. It's just that my
primary fascination had always been with the mystical way that language
gets the job done — the way that an imperfect series of scratches on
paper, when translated through the gentle physical act of reading, can
give birth to entire perfect universes in the mind.

I have concluded that my estrangement was primarily artistic, and from
art I have found company in exile. I agree with the feminists that the
concept we hold of our bodies can be symbollic of our place in the world
— we are what we do, after all — and I find real joy in celebrating
human sensuousness. But above all I believe that human beings, in our
uniquely complex awareness of that sensuousness, can transcend temporal
confines — the fears and fig leaves of culture — in order to
transcribe universals of human experience. Human beings that do so are
artists, and they come to inhabit artists' bodies. Of course this has
different meanings to different people, but I am not the first writer to
have found herself alienated by my place in the world, and thus my
bodily existence and experience. John Keats wrote, "A poet is the most
unpoetical of any thing in existence... The sun, the moon, the sea
and men and women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have
about them an unchangeable attribute — the poet has none; no
identity." Or as I see it, the poet is the contents of an alms bowl, a
non-identity, an empty shell just full of mirrors, reflecting no visible
image or object. I believe that it is this very experience of forgetting
oneself for the artistic vision that has alienated me from society —
or is it the other way around? We can never know — and from my body
itself.

But I still believe in personal revolution. I never want to be sure of
myself to the point where I cannot grow; there is always something to
gain from adventure, as my experiences have shown; and in the end my
experience at the art college was no exception to this. The artists
spent an hour and a half painting me; I spent an hour and a half
listening to them paint and thinking about paint and writing in my head.
I felt the folds of cloth beneath my feet, but as usual I was not really
there. I was a mind full of thoughts floating up in the top left corner
of the room. I felt pretty good up there; the room smelt of art. When
George called a five minutes warning, my right leg was a hot iron
pillar, my sight was completely burnt out by the track lights, and the
innocent crease in my left wrist had caused the circulation in my hand
to sputter out. But I thought of myself as that idea a writer has,
perhaps when they're walking down the street, that causes them to
scramble for a pen and a scrap of paper to just get it down
before it's too late. I stayed put, for art's sake. When George said the
time was up, the students breathed out in release of their
concentration. It took longer for my right hip and knee to agree to
release theirs, but I shook them like a handkerchief until the stiffness
dropped out, and I hobbled back to my change room. I sat there in a
chair for a long time.

Underwear. Pants. Shirt. Socks. Shoes. I emerged from behind the screen
again, but this time I was dressed and the room was empty, except for
the static congregation of easels and the full smell of paint drying in
the room. I was not very interested in the many blurry canvasses of
content and colour; they so much belonged to the room I had thought
through to the last drip of the last draught of my interest. I was drunk
on experience; I was a bowl full of that room. I stood there a while to
reflect on it all. I guess I'm good for this job, I thought
mostly because I don't feel like I'm doing it. This satisfied me
— and I might just have made the mistake of being sure of myself —
but as I turned to leave the room I caught a glimpse of George's easel.
And suddenly I was naked.

This piece won in the long non-fiction Rant! competition at UBC. They illustrated it with a photograph of cutsie-pie-seductive bra and panties. They missed the point, eh?