Bare essentials or essentials bared?

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Teotonio R. de Souza
This column is inspired by a theme brought up recently for discussion in an academic internet
forum of multidisciplinary nature. It was Lilliana Ramos-Collado of the University of Puerto
Rico at Rio Piedras that challenged the forum participants to share their views about the
dichotomy naked and nude.
Despite a clinical anatomical start, a specialist in anatomy and occupational medicine at the
New University of Lisbon did not rule out an artistic way of looking at the splendour of
nudity. More inputs and viewpoints surged rapidly and from different perspectives, marked
by different professional and cultural backgrounds. All together they are very enlightening, but
also far from consensus.
Any person using words must be careful to define precisely by context the meanings that one
wishes to convey. Poetry can attain a density of meaning and suggestion that we seldom
encounter in prose, but we cannot forget that at all times a word has more than one meaning,
or connotations. Let us not forget that words express concepts, derived from the Latin
concipere (=conceive, capture, seize), implying grasping something by force.
As Carl G. Jung tells us, this characterizes the western attitude towards the world. The
European has a science of nature and knows phantastically little about the nature in himself.
Jung praises the India yoga tradition representing a methodology of merging the body and the
spirit into a unity which enables the surge of feelings and intuitions which transcend the level
of consciousness. The Indian thought is a widening of vision and not an assault to capture
what remains untapped in nature. Most dychotomies, including that of naked and nude are
the product of the western culture.
St. John, the Gospel writer proceeds to declare the supreme creative power of the Word,
which was God himself, who created heavens and the earth. The biblical story of creation, at
least in its English translations, God found that Adam and Eve had covered themselves after
eating the forbidden fruit because they felt they were naked (or nude?). If we have to believe
that languages are relatively recent development in human evolution, the dychotomy of naked
/ nude can be better understood at the level of feelings, desires and repulsion, not words.
What would a Goan speaking and thinking in Konkani feel about nagddo and pozddo?
We know of the traditional listing of arts as including architecture, sculpture, painting, music,
poetry, dance, performing. In 1911 the Italian Ricciota Canudo added cinema as the 7th art.
There is no reason why more could not be added to the list, even though the number seven
has become symbolic of perfection as represented by the seven days of creation, which
included a day to rest to appreciate the creation! The Masonic adoption of the symbolism in
its winding staircase of seven steps has enhanced the metaphor!
I was thinking of the art of haute couture as yet another 7th art. If the objective of art, such as
painting or sculpture, representing the nude human body is generally viewed as appreciation
of nature freed from socio-cultural drapings, does the designers high couture promote

intentional provocation of sexual instinct by dressing the naked body just enough to arouse
the instinctive urge for discovery, or undressing the rest. An art of covering the bare
essentials, perfecting thereby the primitive art of low couture of sewing the fig leaves.
That is what Salman Rushdie suggested in the very first chapter of his book The Last Sigh of the
Moor (1994) that was released in Lisbon to commemorate the Portuguese Disoveries, hoping
perhaps that in the wake of the Satanic verses, it could provoke the Portuguese. To paraphrase
Rushdie: Pepper it was that brougth Vasco da Gamas tall ships across the ocean, from
Lisbons Tower of Belem to the Malabar Coast . That in the period called Discovery-of-India.
How could we be discovered when we were not covered before? What the world wanted
from bloody mother India was daylight-clear. They came for the hot stuff, just like any man
calling on a tart.
While the Satanic Verses earned for Rushdie an Iranian fatwa, luckily for him, the Portuguese,
little given to reading, ignored Rushdies taunts by their sound of silence. I presume that
neither the Goans took notice of his rude and mischievous handling of the Goan painter from
Loutolim, whom he calls Vasco Miranda, who fills his book from the beginning till end with
nasty epithets and insinuations. Why so? Possibly some illustrious occupant of the Mario
Miranda chair of the Goa University could find an explanation.
At one stage Vasco Miranda is described as plunged in one of his black-dog depressions,
following the Indian occupation of Goa and crying dismissively Down with Mother India, Viva
Mother Portugoose. In his enigmatic torrent of ridicule poured on Vasco Miranda, Rusdhie
tells us that in every picture Vasco painted () he never failed to include a small immaculate
image of a cross-legged woman with one exposed breast, sitting on a lizard with arms cradling
nothing, unless of course they were cradling the invisible Vasco.