The nude world

Facts which at first seem improbable will, even on scant explanation, drop the cloak which has hidden them and stand forth in naked and simple beauty."

~ Galileo Galilei, Italian physicist, mathematician, engineer, astronomer, philosopher, founder of the science of mechanics.

Galilei played a major role in the scientific revolution during the Renaissance. He was condemned by, the Roman Inquisition for heresy.

With a history that dissolves in the curdling nakedness of her beauty; with a body that is marked by the use of time, but without that posture of female awkwardness; with a motion that rotates her and her bodily fluids to shivering splinters of silver; she rises from the bosom of darkness to the quivering silver of light.

Her body is rounded, yet she is herself - whatever self she may be. Profiled against the darkness, she draws to herself what light in the surroundings lingers. Condensed in its whiteness, and face lifted towards the sky, her gaze remains upwards: fixed on the sky above, and beyond towards the light of stars in which her darker side is revealed. Viewed through the lattice of dusk, her whiteness glimmers naked; and though, through the spruced nights, her heaved and cleaved mountains and darkened depths, will revel in all her outgoings and incomings of the moment; she will neither be, sequential, nor absolute; and admits of no definition, for she transcends all other sequential moments by which definition is possible. For, she is she - feminine by gender though she may be - but by no means a woman: No. She is not just any woman. She is the only one known to Mankind; and hence, priceless. For she is, mother earth, this planet; mother to all life born of her, of her womb of time.

The description above is random words I picked from a Robert Penn Warren poem, put together by me with words that I plucked out of the description of earth: The World Outside My Window by an astronaut, as he viewed it from the international space station.

The International Space Station orbits Earth at a speed of eight kilometers per second, 384 kilometers above our planet's surface.

If anyone was expecting a treatise on nudity in the world, well I am sorry to disappoint because, only when the tide goes out do we discover who has been swimming naked; and the tide is still very much in. Hence, instead, this is going to be a dissertation on our world as she has always been - nude. After all, to see nakedness is to recall the Earth. Thus, if one is so inclined, in this period of plentiful and abundant availability of materials, one could watch the nude earth in all her dignity and glory.

She carries and glows in a nakedness in which auroras glitter, dance, and produce stunning light trails; clouds ebb and flow; and lightning flash over her surface: seen in incredible time-lapse video of the planet taken from aboard the International Space Station.

Unique perspective

One could also see unique perspective of time-lapses of stars, oceans, weather, and surrounding spacecraft and celestial objects, all from the perspective of the space station's windows.

Also known as, humanities home in orbit; the International Space Station is not just a space station; but is a habitable artificial satellite, in low Earth orbit. Abbreviated as ISS, it serves as a microgravity and space environment research laboratory in which crew members conduct experiments in biology, human biology, physics, astronomy, meteorology, and other fields.

The station has the longest continuous human presence in space. The station, serviced by a variety of visiting spacecrafts, has been visited by, astronauts and cosmonauts from 15 different nations. The ISS programme is a joint project among five participating space agencies from USA, Russia, Japan, European Union, and Canada.

She, the naked world, royal and majestic, is an unmatched marvel. She can grow warm with spring, with green grass and bursting trees; or burn with, in summer, when blood will ring through the veins of men and force them into the bedroom with flaming sword.

She sheds her nakedness further, in autumn when under the lukewarm roses of the bed, even the dead men moan, awaiting their return. She cools down in winter to become warm again in spring and to lean to the sun's kiss and quiver in the sunny breeze.

To see her naked is to understand the desire of rain that looks for the delicate waist, or the fever of the broad-faced sea that cannot find the light of its cheek. Her womb is a struggle of roots.

Her lips are a dawn without contour. When one sees her naked, one will know the hiding places of the violet, the purple, the crimson; the heart of hearts; and the fire that is the flame of humanity, left alive inside all hearts.

By the way, have you ever wondered about the difference between nude and naked? Nude, by-and-large, is used only to refer to the absence of clothing or any covering in general such as nude beaches, nude model. Naked, on the other hand, has far wider connotations than nude: naked eye, naked truth, naked to one's enemies.

It is also worth noting that naked is a rather technical word in life sciences, which is not the case with nude. Here is a poem: The Naked and the Nude by Robert Graves, the English poet, novelist, critic, and classicist; that plays on the naked and the nude:

For me, the naked and the nude / (By lexicographers construed / As synonyms that should express /

The same deficiency of dress / Or shelter) stand as wide apart / As love from lies, or truth from art.

Lovers without reproach will gaze / On bodies naked and ablaze; / The Hippocratic eye will see / In nakedness, anatomy; / And naked shines the Goddess when / She mounts her lion among men.

The nude are bold, the nude are sly / To hold each treasonable eye. / While draping by a showman's trick / Their dishabille in rhetoric, / They grin a mock-religious grin / Of scorn at those of naked skin.

The naked, therefore, who compete / Against the nude may know defeat; / Yet when they both together tread / The briary pastures of the dead, / By Gorgons with long whips pursued, / How naked go the sometime nude!

Did you notice how the poem starts with an introduction of a person thinking and seeing in the world? That is a good indicator that we are going to be paying lots of attention to how he sees things, or put another way: how things appear to him. In the line: "Lovers without reproach will gaze"; the poet is not alone in all his looking. Many lovers do like to look at their partner's body. Remember the cliché: "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder"; well, our speaker is concentrating on the act of beholding. Thus, nakedness is just nakedness. It is the eye of the beholder, which gives it meaning.

Completely different

If one were a doctor, he or she is, trained to see the body as a set of symptoms. This means that, to them, the body appears to be something completely different from its surfaces. It also means, life is all about how you view life. All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream; and most times, the more we see, and the more we speak, the less we know for sure. Hence, sit silently and watch the world around us. This will take a lifetime to learn.

It seems only the old are able to sit next to one another, and not say anything and still feel content. The young, brash and impatient, always break the silence. It is a waste, for silence is pure. Silence is holy. It draws people together because only those who are comfortable with each other can sit without speaking. This is the great lesson in life.

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