Category Archives: Gratuitous Nudity

Morality? It interests you does it? All right – it seems to us that one ought not to search for morality in virtue, which is to say in reason, in discipline, in good behavior, in respectability – but in just the opposite, I would say: in sin, in abandoning oneself to danger, to whatever can harm us, destroy us. It seems to us that it is more moral to lose oneself and let oneself be ruined than to save oneself. The great moralists have never been especially virtuous, but rather adventurers in evil, in vice, great sinners who teach us as Christians how to stoop to misery. You must find that all very repugnant. ~ Thomas Mann, ‘The Magic Mountain’

The wicked dance in which you are caught up will last many a little sinful year yet, and we would not wager much that you will come out whole. To be honest, we are not really bothered about leaving the question open. Adventures in the flesh and spirit, which enhanced and heightened your ordinariness, allowed you to survive in the spirit what you probably will not survive in the flesh. There were moments when, as you “played king,” you saw the intimation of a dream of love rising out of death and this carnal body. And out of this worldwide festival of death, this ugly rutting fever that inflames the rainy evening sky all around – will love someday rise up out of this, too? ~ Thomas Mann, ‘The Magic Mountain’

“The body in the mirror forces me to turn and face it. And I look at my body, which is under sentence of death. It is lean, hard, and cold, the incarnation of a mystery. And I do not know what moves in this body, what this body is searching. It is trapped in my mirror as it is trapped in time and it hurries toward revelation….” ~ James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“I long to make this prophecy come true. I long to crack that mirror and be free. I look at my sex, my troubling sex, and wonder how it can be redeemed, how I can save it from the knife. The journey to the grave is already begun, the journey to corruption is, always, already, half over. Yet, the key to my salvation, which cannot save my body, is hidden in my flesh.” ~ James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“Then the door is before him. There is darkness all around him, there is silence in him. Then the door opens and he stands alone, the whole world falling away from him. And the brief corner of the sky seems to be shrieking, though he does not hear a sound. Then the earth tilts, he is thrown forward on his face in darkness, and his journey begins.” ~ James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“I move at last from the mirror and begin to cover that nakedness which I must hold sacred, though it be ever so vile, which must be scoured perpetually with the salt of my life. I must believe, I must believe, that the heavy grace of God, which has brought me to this place, is all that can carry me out of it.” ~ James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

One of the reasons mapping the body is more popular than mapping the mind is that our fast-paced and reductionist world does not really take kindly to paradoxical people, who are inevitably demanding, after all, of our attention… Paradox is difficult… Paradox also engenders mystery and enigma. Confronted, however, with so many contradictory qualities and characteristics, most of us tend to assume that only some are real, that others are assumed, and at once fixate on which are which. And we make the further assumption, because we all know only too well how much quicker we all are to claim our virtues than their darker opposites, that it is the brighter of the contradictions that is phony, and that the person’s darker traits disclose the real person underneath. ~ Douglass Shand-Tucci