I don’t know if you have seen the news about the unauthorized portrait statue of The Great Orange Face and the excitement it generated. The statue is totally naked. And, as you can see, people reacted by taking pictures of the statue, taking pictures of themselves with the statue, and taking for themselves a good, long look-see. This person naked is somehow inherently more interesting than he is with all his clothes on, and his big red tie too. And I am mystified by that. I mean, we don’t have to actually see him naked to know what he looks like naked. And it is not a pretty sight.
And you know full well that the orangutan we elected did not pose for this statue. It could only come into being because the artist knows enough about anatomy to create it just from what he already knows about the man. The man is naked enough in his daily life that we all know almost everything about his naked character, even though he never seems to be without his business suit. He’s a naked racist. He’s a naked misogynist. He has a naked affection for his eldest daughter and thinly concealed dissatisfaction with his other kids. We see far more of him than we really want to see.
If you are, perhaps, wondering where I am going with this, what today’s theme is, then here it is. All people are naked all the time. (Well, maybe not Iron Man in his suit or soldiers in bullet-proof combat armor, but we are talking metaphorical here, not literal.)
The girl who posed for this portrait, whose name I will not reveal, doesn’t really quite look like this. It is titled Her #2 because it was actually drawn in pen and ink while looking at the original pencil sketch. And she was actually another man’s girlfriend and became another man’s wife. She posed for me out of respect for my art skills and from the urging of others rather than anything I ever said or did. As an artist you never really capture the nakedness of your subject. You can really only capture what is in your own head, your response to the subject, and so, the nakedness becomes your own. This picture shows the awkwardness I felt since I really haven’t drawn a nude model more than a handful of times in my entire life. I made her look younger, thinner, and more child-like than she actually was. She liked the result, at least the version I gave to her, which was different as well. But the nakedness here is really mine.
The girl in the second nude portrait I am sharing is done from more than one photograph, and the red panda was even a picture from a magazine. So again, the picture tells you nothing about the model herself. It tells you about me. The happiness and warmth the picture conveys comes from the colors and the composition. A certain freeness of spirit and joy of life. It probably also helps you interpret this to know that my wife is from the Philippines, and hence, is the actual island girl who inspired this particular piece even though she did not pose for it herself. The nakedness in the picture is not about sex or desire. Rather, it is about innocence and happiness and love, warm sunshine on your naked body while at the nude beach (an experience I have only actually witnessed myself, never taken part in.)
So I am claiming in this essay that everybody is naked when you look at them with eyes of understanding. People reveal their own naked selves by their every action, word, and deed. As a blogger, I am probably more naked than most. I have written a bit about literally everything that touches my life and experience. I am a novelist too, which makes me more naked still. But as I show you my most recent nude self-portrait and contemplate me in my utter nakedness I hope you will agree that I am not a pornographer, and I am not as ugly on the inside as I am on the outside. Be prepared for a slight shock;
Surely you are not surprised that the picture is in cartoon form, and not the picture of a naked sixty-year-old fat man. It is my naked, shy self. On the inside Mickey has always been twelve years old. And keep this in mind. According to my silly art-philosophy bull-puckie, you are naked too.
The Be-Bop Beat of Mickey’s Brain
Truthfully, when I look back at the string of posts in the picket fence of this daily blog, I fail to see the overall map of it in any semblance of pattern or order. Honestly, I did not set out to be purposefully wacky.
I did, however, set out to be purposefully surreal. I mean it, I consciously put bizarrely dissimilar things together in an attempt to find parallels and connections in unlike things because, not only is it funny and surprising, but is a comic act that serves to keep the mind nimble and never numb. I do think quite a lot. And I try to see connections between things where others wouldn’t. For instance, the Coppertone girl with her bare butt and Bullwinkle with his unicycle are both being threatened in a way that is both comic, and taking advantage of their inherent image of innocence. Neither will lose anything by it. The girl stands to brown her pale white behind in the sun, while Bullwinkle will probably land on his head and it will make a decent cushion to preserve him because of it’s empty and rubbery qualities.
I must also admit to a bit of the old telling of stretchers, the misrepresentation of the truth, the loquacious layer-onner of lies. Not Trumpian lies that land on you like elephants dropped like bombs out of B-52’s. Instead, fictions that entertain and elucidate. It is the most likely reason I keep saying connecting words and phrases like “truthfully” and “honestly” and “I mean it”. Those are words that liars love.
Yes fiction writers like me tell little white lies.
I have now published my novel Recipes for Gingerbread Children. It is a novel based on real people I have known and loved and listened to. It is about an old German woman, a survivor of WWII concentration camps, who loves to tell stories to children and bake gingerbread cookies, especially gingerbread men. It features a pair of teenage nudist girls who believe in going completely naked whenever you are indoors, even if you are in someone else’s house. It features Nazis, both in flashback and ghostly forms. It also features fairies from the Hidden Kingdom of Tellosia, a fairy kingdom filled with little three-inch tall magical people living under our very noses. And it has a werewolf in it, though admittedly a very young one. It is a comedy with its requisite sad parts, and it is definitely an example of surrealism. It is also full of lies… err, I mean fiction.
But the real purpose of this supposedly be-bop brain fart in blog-post form is not so much to explain my blog (because how do you explain a blog that goes from Flashbacks and Foobah to telling about Madman Trump to Another novel part… #37 to Centaurs to a book and movie review, to this eccentric and eclectic thing, which probably exists more to make alliteration jokes than anything else in the most musical beat I can bang out?) but to prove that I do often think about thinking and how things fit together and what it all means… and how to write a run-on sentence that adds to the effect rather than simply annoys. And, yeah, I’m doing that. And it feels like a good thing to do.
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Filed under blog posting, commentary, foolishness, humor, imagination, metaphor, Paffooney, self portrait, strange and wonderful ideas about life, surrealism
Tagged as goofiness, humor, justification for blogging, Metacognition