change in, or did you just jump into the water without thinking?
This moment doesn’t stop echoing in me, my written words splashing into living water. I have no skin left on my body from all the showers I’ve been taking the past few days; just don’t let go of my hand, let us continue to dive deeper and deeper together. Let us be in that place in which we will both be filled with the strong excitement of nakedness—because the water makes our clothes stick to our skin, so the shape of our bodies is revealed, your full, round breasts suddenly pop under a wet white shirt—and both our faces are washed and cleaned of all the fatigue and strangeness and indifference, and the denial of the essence of faith. All the adult epidermis that has scabbed over us throughout life. And I who could read what you were trying to make flesh, when you danced the sirtaki in your living room—you were telling me that you wouldn’t be rushing to dress me over at Mt. Carmel, that if you had seen the beauty I saw, you also perhaps would have joined me and danced in the same way. But I know! From the moment I saw you I felt the strength of that will in you; and don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking about the nakedness of passion right now—but about a completely different kind of nakedness, one you can hardly stand in front of without shock and a quick escape into clothes. The nakedness of peeled skin, this is what I’m looking for now; it is becoming clearer to me from letter to letter (nakedness—like one of the words you wrote on the back of the bottle photo).
And you couldn’t even know this, but since I was a teenager, for years the thought of running naked in the streets has driven me crazy. To expose yourself—not to shock people, no, just the opposite. To be the first to
do it for everybody else—imagine it, to take off all your clothes and jump in between people, bare (I, who am ashamed to take off my clothes on the beach, who can’t stand it when people see me putting a letter in a mailbox on the street—something terribly intimate is revealed in a person who sends his own letters, don’t you think?). That same I would die to be, even for a moment, a flicker of one soul in the fog of others’ indifference and strangeness, to yell one clear wordless yell to them, only my body gaping.
And perhaps, after three or four such appearances all over town, maybe another person would join me all of a sudden—would you imagine this with me? Someone who will somehow have to ground my excitement into his own body. I can imagine the first one to catch it will be a madman, but after that, there will be others, I’m sure. And the first of them will be a woman, she will suddenly tear off her clothes and smile with relief and joy; people will point at her and laugh. She will suddenly begin to remove her armor of delicate fabric, and they will go silent at the sight of her body, and understand something. A long silence will pass. And suddenly, at once, that built-up electric tension, the exertion of hiding and covering and disguising, will discharge in a great explosion over their heads and a great storm will roll in. A woman, and another woman, and another man, and children, a lightning storm of naked bodies (I always like to imagine that moment). And immediately, the Modesty Squads will show up, special police officers with solderer’s glasses will speed through these centers of obscenity, equipped with thick tarps and asbestos gloves—because catching a naked person with bare hands is repulsive (I always think, a naked person will cut through dressed people like a knife; the clothed will shrink back as if from an infectious disease or an open wound). Think of it—people without clothes, there’s no point in pretending anymore, you can’t really hate a naked person (go fight a naked soldier). And you wrote that one word, “compassion.” That’s what makes my heart stretch out to you, that you can suddenly, during the simplest
This moment doesn’t stop echoing in me, my written words splashing into living water. I have no skin left on my body from all the showers I’ve been taking the past few days; just don’t let go of my hand, let us continue to dive deeper and deeper together. Let us be in that place in which we will both be filled with the strong excitement of nakedness—because the water makes our clothes stick to our skin, so the shape of our bodies is revealed, your full, round breasts suddenly pop under a wet white shirt—and both our faces are washed and cleaned of all the fatigue and strangeness and indifference, and the denial of the essence of faith. All the adult epidermis that has scabbed over us throughout life. And I who could read what you were trying to make flesh, when you danced the sirtaki in your living room—you were telling me that you wouldn’t be rushing to dress me over at Mt. Carmel, that if you had seen the beauty I saw, you also perhaps would have joined me and danced in the same way. But I know! From the moment I saw you I felt the strength of that will in you; and don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking about the nakedness of passion right now—but about a completely different kind of nakedness, one you can hardly stand in front of without shock and a quick escape into clothes. The nakedness of peeled skin, this is what I’m looking for now; it is becoming clearer to me from letter to letter (nakedness—like one of the words you wrote on the back of the bottle photo).
And you couldn’t even know this, but since I was a teenager, for years the thought of running naked in the streets has driven me crazy. To expose yourself—not to shock people, no, just the opposite. To be the first to
do it for everybody else—imagine it, to take off all your clothes and jump in between people, bare (I, who am ashamed to take off my clothes on the beach, who can’t stand it when people see me putting a letter in a mailbox on the street—something terribly intimate is revealed in a person who sends his own letters, don’t you think?). That same I would die to be, even for a moment, a flicker of one soul in the fog of others’ indifference and strangeness, to yell one clear wordless yell to them, only my body gaping.
And perhaps, after three or four such appearances all over town, maybe another person would join me all of a sudden—would you imagine this with me? Someone who will somehow have to ground my excitement into his own body. I can imagine the first one to catch it will be a madman, but after that, there will be others, I’m sure. And the first of them will be a woman, she will suddenly tear off her clothes and smile with relief and joy; people will point at her and laugh. She will suddenly begin to remove her armor of delicate fabric, and they will go silent at the sight of her body, and understand something. A long silence will pass. And suddenly, at once, that built-up electric tension, the exertion of hiding and covering and disguising, will discharge in a great explosion over their heads and a great storm will roll in. A woman, and another woman, and another man, and children, a lightning storm of naked bodies (I always like to imagine that moment). And immediately, the Modesty Squads will show up, special police officers with solderer’s glasses will speed through these centers of obscenity, equipped with thick tarps and asbestos gloves—because catching a naked person with bare hands is repulsive (I always think, a naked person will cut through dressed people like a knife; the clothed will shrink back as if from an infectious disease or an open wound). Think of it—people without clothes, there’s no point in pretending anymore, you can’t really hate a naked person (go fight a naked soldier). And you wrote that one word, “compassion.” That’s what makes my heart stretch out to you, that you can suddenly, during the simplest
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