I can't say that it was a more innocent time because I don't know that it was. I can't say that it wasn't frowned upon because I don't know that it wasn't. I can't say that I remember it, because my memories come from pictorial evidence, at which I'm always, I confess, a little shocked, not at them being taken, but at my innocence and comfortableness in all my surroundings. I can't even say that I remember that sensation of comfortableness because I don't and have long felt distinctly ill at ease with the naked body, my own, revealed in all its entirety, and sometimes another's if it's paraded in front of me.
I don't dislike the body. I admire what artists – the sketchers, the painters, the sculptors - see in it and take from it; I admire how poets and writers speak on the subject of flesh, describe form, but I don't admire or desire the flesh itself. The body to me is a tool, a fine piece of machinery, which due to its many parts needs to be looked after. The attractiveness of it is therefore neither here or there. But if I really thought that then I guess I still wouldn't care. I would still be frolicking nude.
So, what changes that relationship? Awareness. Mental development, and way before the physical occurs. When the emotions engage and the comparisons to others begin to be made. When the shadow you were once fascinated by and played with becomes your shadow, just as the mirror image turned out to be you and not somebody behind it.
Such naked abandon was only a stage, a stage pre school, before the serious stuff of life commenced. It came, it went.
Though womanhood has never done much for my sense of self. What I have is mine and I wouldn't alter it, but...there will always be that but. (But then there will always be a but in everything else as well.) Because how you look is important, if not to you, then to who you might meet, and so it's for them you think. Although I can't say I make much effort there either, not now. I have passed beyond, now, that stage. But there was a time when... (a fatal beginning to a sentence if ever there was one). No; why rehash all that? I was never a woman of fashion, and I don't intend in my forties to start. I do not need to prove 'I've still got it!' because I don't think I ever really had it.
Some people are just decorative, some people have brains and beauty. I'm not sure what god provided me with, but the body was at least, if treated well, functional. Though you could argue I haven't put it to good use, not what a god of biblical or possibly even Darwinian times would have intended. I've never felt the inclination to marry or rear a family of my own. And I've not had the natural energy to carve out a career, a career to be proud of and fulfilled by, for myself. It would have been better if I had been purely decorative, for as the world has moved on it has shoved me aside to a shelf where the functions of its objects are unknown.
How does one go forward if that's where one finds myself? I do not know. All I've done is gather dust since I realised my new station. Oh, I've tried, in the past and still on occasion now, to get on, but I've never really felt myself equal to anything or anyone, which is not to say I feel superior but inferior. And of my work persons there's none that I've liked, on reflection. Each had in them a forced quality, which became harder to maintain. Cracks, after a time, are not so easy to disguise. Cracks tell.
I do not have cracks now, only the fine lines of age and wear, and a peculiar nature which shrinks from offers made, much, if not more, as it did before.
Picture credit: Porcelain Figures on a Stone Shelf, 1930, Konstantin Somov.
Written April 2020, in lockdown.
