Jonas is a member of the nudist colony. One can tell from looking at Jonas that he has, that he has had, that he will have, a difficult, almost impossible, life. Jonas’ body emanates this fact, although no clue is given as to how this is achieved. It is perhaps his posture, which always implies that there is something wrong, something that cannot be fixed; that there is some irresolvable tension between the form of a person and the form of the ground on which this person sits or lies. One has the sense, observing Jonas, that however much truth there is in the human body, it is not enough, and if it was, it would be the wrong sort of truth, although of course these convictions make his presence in the nudist colony all the more impressive. He could be sitting, wearing all sorts of clothes — coats, boots — in a tiny cupboard somewhere, but here he is, undeniably, in sustained protest against the sadness and misfortune of his life. A further difficulty is that Jonas finds himself subject to the generosity of others; his sadness is not the kind that people worry they might, in approaching him, add to or multiply. It seems rather to be a social sadness; it seems as though Jonas is aware that the various horrors of his life, inestimable though they are, are not unique to him, but at the same time they are sufficiently forceful to preclude his taking any real satisfaction in their abstract communicability. I like having Jonas around, certainly, but at the same time, I can’t say I have much hope for him. Sometimes I look away from him, quite deliberately, but the sound of him eating — he eats the loudest things, carrots, cucumbers — is a reminder that, in general, if you look away from something it won’t cease to exist, it will just start existing differently, albeit in a lower and thereby more invasive frequency.
Tobay, pronounced with a long a, is the most recent new member of the nudist colony, the only member to arrive during my observations. Tobay is unique among the nudists in that sometimes he puts a t-shirt on. Every thirty minutes or so he puts it on for about a minute and then takes it off. It is difficult not to conclude that this has something to do with his childhood, this need to protect himself from what he imagines to be the ‘fatal thirty-first minute’ of his nudity. He brings a different t-shirt each time, and carries the t-shirt in a brown paper bag, the kind used to carry beer on buses or trains. One might worry that he designs all the t-shirts himself (the designs are crude but expressive), and that, rather than fearing a ‘fatal thirty-first minute’ of nudity Tobay’s real neurosis is that he cannot stand to expose himself to his own creative ideas for more than a minute at a time. Despite these potential flaws, Tobay evidently has other qualities; one can tell from his calf muscles that he is a useful person to have around, that he could lift things up and down, if that was necessary, or move things from one place to another. It may be that by indulging in this one very specific neurosis, this t-shirt neurosis, he protects himself from all others. He is still a young man, but I anticipate that he would be a good, caring father, a solid family man, attentive to his emotional obligations but also careful to keep on top of things socio-economically, able to happily navigate these two responsibilities, perhaps even going so far as to perceive them as two sides of the same ‘coin,’ so long as no one steals or insults one of his t-shirts.
Josef is another member of the nudist colony. His body is emphatically marked by regular attendance at a premium gym. One senses, somehow, that he paid his membership a year in advance, and that if it was possible, he would pay his membership fees hundreds of years in advance, feeling the forward-looking contentment that historically accompanied purchasing a well-situated family grave. And yet one senses that Josef will have absolutely zero children — that he has chosen the gym as the limit of his futural investment. He is subject to what I think is a particularly contemporary delusion: the idea that, since you’re giving birth to yourself, in a way, through constant ‘transformation,’ there’s no reason to involve yourself with anyone else. Somehow this irritates me: I cannot help imagining a child, his child, appearing out of the night and knocking on his door. He would immediately — he also, no doubt, attends equally executive mindfulness classes — know who it was. The thick wooden knock would find a particular resonance in each of the worked tendons, each compartment of the refined structure of Josef, like isolate, discreet heartbeats, and blow it all to pieces.
Tiff is another member of the nudist colony. Of all the members of the colony, I feel least competent to describe Tiff. The problem, essentially, is that I almost as soon as I joined I became obsessed with her elbows; she has the sort of elbows that seem totally sufficient, as if there were no reason to check out her knees, or chin, because everything seems so perfectly implied by her elbows. What is an elbow, then? It is the most mechanical seeming part of the body, but also the most tender; our elbows seem to point away from us, like ungainly arrows we cannot help but wield, constantly reminding everyone that it is our destiny to live far outside of ourselves, on some other shore. I have the feeling that, if she wished, Tiff could control me entirely through simple elbow voodoo; just a loose jet-lagged tilt and I would fall to the floor, start foaming at the mouth. I would have to be airlifted out of the nudist colony, which would cause serious disruption. An airlift is every nudist’s worst nightmare; the sight of a helicopter, to anyone without clothes, is peculiarly painful, almost unbearable, as is the noise, which you feel rake your skin like a Zen garden, but without any of the intention, the peace. Sometimes, I feel an immense gratitude to Tiff for restraining herself from causing such a catastrophe to happen; at other times, I feel an immense gratitude, also to Tiff, that it simply cannot happen, that we nudists ease each other, eventually, of our obsessions, by the most simple action, by carefully putting a crisp that fell into wet grass back into the tube.
Emily Alabaster is another member of the nudist colony, the only one unable to shrug off the weight of her surname. A correlative characteristic of Emily Alabaster is her affection for black clothing, which you can always find, folded, lying about her. She folds the clothes perfectly — usually there are eight or so articles — lays them out in a surprisingly well-formed circle, and then lies down in the middle. One has the impression that walking on her clothes would be unbearable; that they would transmit an intense heat, of judgement, almost, that one could only arrive truly at Emily Alabaster’s person accompanied by the smell of burning feet, and that this emanation, perversely, would unlock whatever door behind which she lived. Equally, it could be argued that these sorts of absurd, almost slanderous conclusions, are evidence of the futility of a project such as mine, the impossibility of knowing things about people without asking them. Directly asking people about themselves of course has its own complications but perhaps it is within those complications that individuals accidentally, but surely, reveal what it is we wish to know.
Pierre is another member of the nudist colony. He can easily be identified by the rabbit he brings with him. First, he sets the rabbit down, taking it out of what is perhaps an artificially enlarged coat pocket. Pierre takes his clothes off systematically, and there is a clear sense in which he does this in front of the rabbit, that he can only undress in front of the rabbit. The rabbit is calm and stoic, and one wonders what systematic pressures Pierre subjected his rabbit to, such that it can perform this mature, encouraging role, with such mysterious aplomb. One thinks, looking at Pierre, that something is terribly wrong; one thinks of reporting Pierre to the animal welfare charities which abound in Berlin, or simply shaming him publicly. Pierre, naked, his rabbit, naked, the obvious dysfunction and asymmetry: it would rapidly go viral. One can only hope that Pierre is in the midst of some kind of process; that his rabbit is a ‘transitional object,’ which he will happily return to its context, just as soon as he can undress without it looking at him. Studying Pierre though, one can’t help but feel that this is optimistic. There is something simply terrifying about the whole thing; typically I sit facing directly away from him, but nonetheless, something about his rabbit gnaws at me. It is almost as though Pierre’s rabbit is everyone’s rabbit, that we are all complicit, all waiting for some moment in the future in which we stand before each other truly ourselves, and this rabbit, somewhere fundamentally else, feels a rush of freedom as it steps off into the long grasses and is gone. Sad!
