Catch a Falling Star

He was born in 1819, to Quaker parents in the Long Island part of the State of New York. He was not just any man. He was a common man. He was every man. This is the thing he taught us in his masterwork, the poem he took a lifetime to write, his Leaves of Grass.

In 1978 I took a college course in American Literature that included Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Transcendentalists, Henry David Thoreau, and the premiere poet of the movement, Walt Whitman. He then spoke to me through his poetry in Leaves of Grass and taught me the fundamentals of everything.

Yes, Transcendentalism is the beginning point of my personal philosophical journey in life. Transcendental philosophy grew out of the Unitarian religion where all people are basically good, a point that appealed to my heart directly. Not that there are no bad or evil people, but these come about by the corruption thrust upon them by institutions and organizations controlled by those previously corrupted. People in their self-reliant, natural form represent the goodness inherent in creation.

In many ways, Walt Whitman, in his innovative free verse, becomes the voice of the transcendent experience. If you look seriously at his poems like “Song of Myself”, “I Sing the Body Electric”, and his elegy for President Lincoln, “O, Captain, My Captain!” you see that he was a strong advocate of self-reliance, a celebrator of sensuality and the physical pleasures of life, and he reveals a deep love of the goodness evident in human beings like Lincoln who illustrate the heights of goodness we can reach.

So, what is Walt Whitman doing in the middle of an essay basically about being a nudist or naturist?

One factor he has in common with the naturists and nudists whose activities are generally illegal outside of private places is in the reception he gets from the culture in general and the institutions that prop it up.

Walt discussed enjoying life and sexuality in ways that were labeled by screaming critics and keepers of the public standards of what “You better by God well believe!” as scandalous, pornographic, and evil. Of course, he was either a homosexual or a bisexual man in a time when those things were considered highly illegal and punishable by law. He probably, just as Henry David Thoreau did at Walden Pond, bathed naked in lakes, ponds, and rivers outdoors. This was not an uncommon thing in a time before indoor plumbing was common. But the morally upright and accusation-ready multitudes would’ve much preferred that this man exhibited more piety and far less naked skin in his life. And his poetry was so… so… sensual and exhilarating to read about in a time when morals were more likely bound up in tons of religious restrictions and practices preferred by clergy because they made you more pure… and less… that!

And what matters most about the poetry of Walt Whitman is what you find there about the transcendental experience.

Ralph Waldo Emerson called the experience, “Spots in time.” That moment in which you stand centered amidst the natural world, finding in it what is transcendent, what connects your soul to the soul of the universe. In those moments, whether you experience that spot in time while naked or not, you begin to understand that everything is one thing. It is all connected. You can find God when the butterfly lands on the back of your hand… or when the cardinal sings at you from a high branch in the elm tree. There is no way to explain it better than that. You will not truly understand until you transcend reality for yourself. I get there by naked meditation. Your path may well be different. But you have to go there, at least once.

More than that, when you return to a book-lined world of libraries and thoughts of men whose lives are long since complete you should read Leaves of Grass. And Walden, Henry David Thoreau’s book about living the simple life living in the natural world. And while you’re reading, don’t forget the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Charles Lamb. You do not have to invent the world for yourself. There are others whose thoughts and words proceed you. But do not take my word for it. Or their words either. Think and choose what you read for yourself. No one has the right to do the thinking for you.

The climate crisis and Texas super-heatwave have me sitting in my favorite writing spot naked but still sweating like a hog being chased by a Tyger. No matter how the high heat slows me and torments me in spite of my window-unit air conditioner going full blast with my fan sitting on the other side to push the cool air back across my spotty old nudist hide, I intend to keep on writing stories and committing acts of highly suspicious bookery. (Bookery- noun- a crime of tomfoolery committed in manuscript form with the evil intent of publication and corrupting readers of all ages.)

This naked bookery that I am confessing to goes back years to a time when all of my novels were still in the form of handwritten notes, cartoons, illustrations, and plot summaries. I can point to those twin girls who may have been real nudists, or possibly only lying teenagers who liked to watch their goofy young English teacher turn shades of maroon and chartreuse with embarrassment as they described nude beaches in detail, discussed their personal enjoyment of being naked in their journal entries, and speculated to their girlfriends about what Mickey looked like naked, though only making sure that he overheard their “private” conversations, never saying anything openly enough to get sent to the office for psychologically torturing their teacher.

The first novel to get the naked bookery treatment was the story that would become Superchicken. It was originally the story of a boy and a dog he found after a car wreck involving elderly dog owners. To get a measure of revenge on the nudist twins, Mickey put Sherry and Shelly Cobble into the story. They would invite Edward-Andrew, the boy nicknamed Superchicken, to go camping with them. They gave his parents pamphlets about the nudist campground called the Sunshine Club, but Edward’s father never opened the envelope to look at it… until he was already several days into the nude camping adventure. I turned the story into a comedy about growing up as a boy and learning about girls.

Well, I didn’t get it published for a few years after I finished it. It began as an idea in 1977. I added the twins in 1986. I finally published it after I published Catch a Falling Star, Snow Babies, and Stardusters and Space Lizards. That would be the year 2016

And, of course, nobody in the world was reading my books… or even knew that they existed. So, I decided to amuse myself by writing another Cobble-Sisters story using plot threads drawn from Superchicken involving the old German lady, Grandma Gretel Stein. She was a Holocaust survivor based on the sweet old Holocaust survivor that lived in our town in Iowa in the 60s and 70s. This book was intimately connected to the stories told in the following book, The Baby Werewolf, which happens at the same time as Recipes for Gingerbread Children.

Sherry Cobble was a main character, the third narrator, in the story of Torrie Brownfield, the boy with hypertrichosis pictured on the cover. Todd Niland, the first narrator, starts out that storytelling about how he found and befriended Torrie who was hidden away because he looked like a werewolf. I had fun with this horror-story comedy. Fun was the main reason for writing it.

But while I was publishing the werewolf story, real nudists and naturists found the Recipes book and fell in love with it, led by Ted Bun, an author of nudist stories who regularly promotes all kinds of books, but especially books that have nudists in them. Suddenly I began to have readers.

And I would then write one more Hometown Novel that featured the Cobble Sisters again. Sherry was again featured in this epistolary novel where Sherry contributes journal pages to the various letters, detective notes, school writing projects, and letters to cousins that make up this book. It is the story of Icarus Jones, a young boy cursed with immortality while stuck in a preteen body. And it is also the story of the ancient undead Chinese Dragon that seeks to kill him by stealing his immortality. Sherry is still a nudist in this book and again tries to get all her friends to be nudists too.

And as it seemed that nudism was gradually taking over all of my storytelling in novels, I decided to write one mainly about nudists and nudism.

Before I began the writing of this book, A Field Guide to Fauns, I determined to take up Radasha’s challenge. Ra, you may remember, although you probably won’t, is my imaginary faun friend who talks to me constantly about my love life and my ability to connect to the world completely.

“You tell,’em, Sharpie. I challenged you to do one thing you were terrified of before you died. One that scared you so bad you couldn’t imagine yourself doing it.”

“But I had done that already, Ra. That’s why I got married in 1995.”

“Yes, but I challenged you again in 2017. Don’t you remember?”

“You mean the thing about assassinating Donald Trump?”

“No! You could never do something like that. I mean the nudist thing.”

“Yes, you challenged me to become a real nudist and be naked in places where other naked people would see me.”

“And how did you do that, Sharpie?”

“Well, I signed up to write an article for a nudist website about my first time at a nudist park. And then I went for a day visit to Bluebonnet Nudist Park in Alvord, Texas. I then bought a membership in the AANR (American Association for Nude Recreation, Southwest Region.) I intended to go to Bluebonnet enough to become a member, but the Covid pandemic got in the way. I went back there for a second time on Memorial-Day-Weekend Saturday. I really enjoyed that day visit.”

“That was mostly well done, Sharpie. You are sorta an official nudist.”

“Thanks for pushing me into it, Ra.”

“You have to thank those twins you once taught too. They had a lot to do with the nudist thing, didn’t they?”

“Yes, I guess they did. Do I really want to thank them, though?”

“YES, YOU DO!”

“Okay. Thank you, ladies. My act of committing naked bookery is all your fault.”