Epinoia (On Nakedness)

The Secret Book (of John) suggests that the story of Eve’s birth from Adam’s side speaks of the awakening of ... spiritual capacity. Instead of simply telling about the origin of woman, this story, symbolically read, shows how the “blessed one above, the Father” (or, in some versions of the text, the “Mother-Father”), feeling compassion for Adam, sent him

... a “helper” -- luminous epinoia (“creative” or “inventive” consciousness) which comes out of him, who is called life {Eve}: and she “helps the whole creation by working with him, and by restoring him to his full being, and by teaching him about the descent of his kind, and by showing the way to ascend, the way he came down. (Apocrypha of John 20:15-25, NHL 110)

Thus Eve symbolizes the gift of spiritual understanding which enables us to reflect -- however imperfectly -- upon divine reality. Another book discovered at Nag Hammadi, On The Origin of The World, says that when the first man and woman recognized their nakedness, “they saw that they were naked of spiritual understanding {gnosis}.” But then the luminous epinoia “appeared to them shining with light, and awakened their consciousness.” (On The Origin of the World 108-118, NHL 167-174)

-- Eileen Pagels, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas



EVE

April 25

On the eve of my first waking
She appeared, off the half-shell
Of the kegger’s profane din,
Smiling absently, not quite awake,

Not really there next to me
Though we talked a long time there.
She stared straight out as she
Drove us to my place, more of the night

Than all the words we said:
And when it was time, she
Slithered from her clothes
Like a snake or the moon up

From the sea, offering her nakedness
Like the first book I truly read,
The knowledge of her breasts
And thighs something inside of me,

Which, awakened now, burned,
The bulb by which my pages turn.





NAKEDNESS

April 25

Road of beaches where seals
And sirens sing, you alway
Surpise me in your frank assault
Upon my eyes and then my heart.

Still after so many years
Something wakens to see you nude--
Birth, first days of love, perhaps,
Creation of blue worlds:

So fresh and new the air
Sings sharp with wild perfume,
Sweet and acrid with the ions
Of a shore’s hard-crashing sea.

O the things I need to shout
When I see you once again--
The colors and shapes of heart
In the pale gauze of first light --

Ten thousand shells to say
And you just take my breath away.






THE CONTAINER FOR THE
THING CONTAINED

Jack Gilbert

What is the man searching for inside her blouse?
He has been with her body for seven years
and still is surprised by the arches of her
slender feet. He still traces her spine
with careful attention, feeling for the bones
of her pelvic girdle when he arrives there.
Her flesh is bright in sunlight and then not
as he leans forward and back. Picasso in his later
prints shows himself as a grotesque painter
watching closely a young Spanish woman on the bed
with her legs open and the old duenna in black
to the side. He had known nakedness every day
for sixty years. What could there be in it still
to find? But he was happy even then to get
close to the distant, distant intermittency.
Like a piano playing faintly on a second floor
in a back room. The music seems familiar, but is not.




BODY OF A WOMAN

Pablo Neruda
Trans. Robert Bly


Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs,
when you surrender, you stretch out like the world.
My body, savage and peasant, undermines you
and makes a son leap in the bottom of the earth.

I was lonely as a tunnel. Birds flew from me.
And night invaded me with her powerful army.
To survive I forged you like a weapon,
like an arrow for my bow, or a stone for my sling.

But now the hour of revenge falls, and I love you.
Body of skin, of moss, of firm and thirsty milk!
And the cups of your breasts! And your eyes full of absence!
And the roses of your mound! And your voice slow and sad!

Body of my woman, I will live on through your marvelousness.
My thirst, my desire without end, m wavering road!
Dark river beds down which the eternal thirst is flowing,
and the fatigue is flowing, and the grief without shore.



O Best of All Nights,
Return and Return Again

James Laughlin

How she let her long hair down over her shoulders, making a love
cave around her face. Return and return again.
How when the lamplight was lowered she pressed against him, twin-
ing her fingers in his. Return and return again.
How their legs swam together like dolphins and their toes played like
little tunnies. Return and return again.
How she sat beside him cross-legged, telling him stories of her child-
hood. Return and return again.
How she closed her eyes when his were open, how they breathed to-
gether, breathing each other. Return and return again.
How they fell into slumber, their bodies curled together like two
spoons. Return and return again.
How they went together to Otherwhere, the fairest land they had
ever seen. Return and return again.
O best of all nights, return and return again.

-- After the Pervigilium Veneris and Propertius’s “Nox mihi candida.”




RAPTURE

Galway Kinnell

I can feel she has got out of bed.
That means it is seven A.M.
I have been lying with eyes shut,
thinking, or possibly dreaming,
of how she might look if, at breakfast,
I spoke about the hidden place in her
which, to me, is like a soprano’s tremolo,
and right then, over toast and bramble jelly,
if such things are possible, she came.
I imagine she would show it while trying to conceal it.
I imagine her hair would fall about her face
and she would become apparently downcast,
as she does at a concert when she is moved.
The hypnopompic play passes, and I open my eyes
and there she is, next to the bed,
bending to a low drawer, picking over
various small smooth black, white,
and pink items of underwear. She bends
so low her back runs parallel to the earth,
but there is no sway in it, there is little burden, the day has hardly
begun.
The two mounds of muscles for walking, leaping, lovemaking,
lift toward the east—what can I say?
Simile is useless; there is nothing like them on earth.
Her breasts fall full; the nipples
are deep pink in the glare shining up through the iron bars
of the gate under the earth where those who could not love
press, wanting to be born again.
I reach out and take her wrist
and she falls back into bed and at once starts unbuttoning my pajamas.
Later, when I open my eyes, there she is again,
rummaging in the same low drawer.
The clock shows eight. Hmmm.
With huge, silent effort of great,
mounded muscles the earth has been turning.
She takes a piece of silken cloth
from the drawer and stands up. Under the falls
of hair her face has become quiet and downcast,
as if she will be, all day among strangers,
looking down inside herself at our rapture.





WATER SERPENTS

David St. John

Beneath the lit silk of your naked body

When you move your bones move like nervous water snakes
A complicated Medusan nest of rippling eels

Currents in the dawn river

My own body littered by broken limbs of almond sunlight
As your breath uncoils its music & anxious histories of sexual pride

Echo from the hotel room next door

As our own pasts rise through the water like sacred filaments
& in our dead lovers’ eyes we can recall

Woman upon woman upon man swirling in a pool of memorylessness

& upon the shore the day arrives entwined in its sisterly mass of red hair
Those brash & roiling fields of ruby kelp where

The dark sailor's body is found





THE BATH

Gary Snyder


Washing Kai in the sauna,
The kerosene lantern set on a box
outside the ground-level window,
Lights up the edge of the iron stove and the
washtub down on the slab
Steaming air and crackle of waterdrops
brushed by on the pile of rocks on top
He stands in warm water
Soap all over the smooth of his thigh and stomach
“Gary don’t soap my hair!”
— his eye-sting fear —
the soapy hand feeling
through and around the gloves and curves of his body
up in the crotch,
And washing-tickling out the scrotum, little anus,
his penis curving up and getting hard
as I pull back skin and try to wash it
Laughing and jumping, flinging arms around,
I squat all naked too,

is this our body?

Sweating and panting in the stove-steam hot-stone
cedar-planking wooden bucket water-splashing
kerosene lantern-flicker wind-in-the-pines-out
sierra forest ridges night —
Masa comes in, letting fresh cool air
sweep down from the door
a deep sweet breath
And she tips him over gripping neatly, one knee down
her hair falling hiding one whole side of
shoulder, breast, and belly
Washes deftly Kai’s head-hear
as he gets mad and yells —
The body of my lady, the winding valley spine,
the space between the thighs I reach through,
cup her curving vulva arch and hold it from behind,
a soapy tickle a hand of grail
The gates of Awe
That open back a turning double-mirror world of
wombs in wombs, in rings,
that start in music,
is this our body?

The hidden place of seed
The veins net flow across the ribs, that gathers
milk and peaks up in a nipple — fits
our mouth —
The sucking milk from this our body sends through
jolts of light; the son, the father,
sharing mother’s joy
That brings a softness to the flower of the awesome
open curling lotus gate I cup and kiss
As Kai laughs at his mother’s breast he now is weaned
from, we
wash each other,
this is our body

Kai’s little scrotum up close to his groin,
the seed still tucked away, that moved from us to him
In flows that lifted with the same joys forces
as his nursing Masa later,
playing with her breast,
Or me within her,
Or him emerging,
this is our body:

Clean, and rinsed, and sweating more, we stretch
out on the redwood benches hearts all beating
Quiet to the simmer of the stove,
the scent of cedar
And then turn over,
murmuring gossip of the grasses,
talking firewood,
Wondering how Gen’s napping, how to bring him in
soon wash him too —
These boys who love their mother
who loves men, who passes on
her sons to other women;

The cloud across the sky. The windy pines.
The trickle gurgle in the swampy meadow

this is our body.

Fire inside and boiling water on the stove
We sigh and slide ourselves down from the benches
wrap the babies, step outside,

black night & all the stars.

Pour cold water on the back and thighs
Go in the house — stand steaming by the center fire
Kai scampers on the sheepskin
Gen standing hanging on and shouting,

“Bao! bao! bao! bao! bao!”

This is our body. Drawn up crosslegged by the flames
drinking icy water
hugging babies, kissing bellies,

Laughing on the Great Earth

Come out from the bath.



THE NAKED TRUTH

Sept. 2004

Marcus, a student of the gnostic
Velentinus (c. 150), relates that
a vision “descended upon him ..
in the form of a woman ... and
expounded to him alone its own
nature, and the origin of things, which
it had never revealed to anyone,
divine or human.”

-- Eileen Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels

She appeared at the upper bar
out of nowhere, fanning through
the smoke and blaring rock
as if stepping from that wave
ordained to drown me with
every blue fury in the lap
and chest of Love. We talked
a while nursing beers in
the wild din, her voice and
mine forming a bower
in which some goddess awoke,
aroused, and laid hands
on us, ushering us into woods
to sacred for a name.
And left us there, in
reverence for a secret
only we could reveal
and revel when all
our clothes fell like
angels to the floor.
Much later that night --
in fact well into the
next morning’s too-
bright hot summer light --
She smiled unbuttoning
her tropic blue blouse,
and unhooked her bra with
that hidden gesture,
freeing her full, pink-
nippled breasts, startling
me more awake than
I had ever been: And with
eyes locked on mine
came close, to softly
weave her chest against
mine, whispering O
make love to me. O
indeed: And so I did,
a half dozen times or
more that too-late-night
which had crashed
so dreamily on the next
day’s shore, licking her
to sweet moans once
then twice, getting sucked
off, fucking slow and
long in rhythmus
to a secret beat
which was new even
to God. We could not
stop entering and
collapsing in each
other, leaving selves
and hours far behind;
thus we drifted
so far offshore as to
never quite return.
Ever. But as a
mortal pair we fared
quite poorly, and in
weeks she jilted
the needy, greedy,
angst-ridden boy
I had become, walking
back into the night
for good. After all
these years, I mark
this day -- Sept. 15 --
as the tolling of
her wavelike recede
from the ecstasy of
my life, my feet forever
thence half in a surf
which once proclaimed
our naked name. Fare
thee well, lost lover.
The child you said you
begged of my seed
our second night
would now be 23,
and perhaps he
or she is here,
cuculattus of that
high blue wave
which crests in every
“Yes!” God gives
me truth to shout.
Whenever I hear those
old Journey songs
from 1982, I go back
to that first unveiling
hour, in thrall
and surrender to
the whole fantasy
of love and lust,
believing it more
than Truth itself. That
fictive beach where she
and I came hard
calling each other’s name
remains here, built
up with the ground
bones of every other
love I’ve sung,
sustained now by
the long, perhaps
my life’s remaining
duration with the woman
I call my wife by
day and blue welling
deep down the
pike of night.
Our hearts are
more naked now
than our bodies
may be allowed to
go: Mere angels
can’t fly this naked reach
which is part dream,
part ocean beach,
part clear blue sky
inside you and I.