“There’s another kind of language, another form of communication: by means of feeling, and images. That is the contact that stops people being separated from each other, that brings down barriers. Will, feeling, emotion—these remove obstacles from between people who otherwise stand on opposite sides of a mirror, on opposite sides of a door…”

Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

In writing, if words are the clothing in which we wrap our thoughts and feelings, what would a completely naked language look like? What would it be capable of expressing? By extension into other art forms, what exists beneath the colors on a canvas, in the uncarved marble of Michelangelo’s Prisoners, in the silences of a Bach cello suite, in the space between the lips of two lovers just before their very first kiss? This may be the realm of “naked language”

But how far can we extend our nudity…? Can we wear it boldly only in the shower stalls without mirrors? Can we stretch it out in the public sanction of the nude beach? Can we shit with the bathroom door wide open, or roam the streets sniffing each other’s histories and deepest urges with canine precision and unselfconsciousness?

In short, can we communicate without mediated symbolic interfaces? And if the artist succeeds at this unmediated communication, will he, like the best teachers in the world whose students surpass their wildest hopes, work himself out of a job?

The artist is working within a medium, an image construction, a symbolic interface which provides an outlet, satisfies a need, brings joy, suffering or both in the gestation of its expression and communication. He may not be able or willing to pursue a naked language for he would strip away not only the medium of expression but also his source of livelihood. Copywrite law has not yet, and hopefully never will extend its avaricious and small-minded tentacles into the realm of our individual or collective unconscious. And how could it? Without packaging and marketing, our ideas and feelings are as free as oxygen, only entering the marketplace once they have been packaged, bottled, priced, pitched, bought and sold.

But what would a naked language ‘look’ like?

In the occult, one could allude to telepathic connections…the perception of vibrations that usually remain outside of our ken…instant, direct communication without a symbolic intermediary. For what is perception but the reception of a select set of vibrational frequencies for which we are uniquely adapted? When we look at a painting, a flower, a lover, our eyes don’t go out from their sockets to the object of our vision. Rather, we filter-feed the photons bouncing off the object, through the ocean of the air we breath, and those vibrations that fall within the bands of visible light in the spectrum activate our optic nerves, travel along the trunk of neurons in discreet packets, in a particular rhythm (24 images per second), arriving in the brain where the information is processed, assembled, inverted, and raised to consciousness. Similarly, sound is received within the limited range of 20-20,000 cycles per second, and even within that range, the mesh of our nets is only so large and only so small as to capture a tiny fraction of the specious moment. The other senses…tactile, olfactory, and gustation, while they require chemico-physical receptivity, which for the moment avoid the particle/wave duality of light, they still exist within this time-space continuum in which Einstein already eliminated the myopic need for the dichotomy between matter and energy. As such, the chemical stimuli and receptors still fall into the category of vibrational entities and the gossamer nets that convert them into ideas, feelings, and thoughts.

Perhaps a functional naked language exists in some elusive space between telepathy and concrete symbol construction…

In attempting to communicate using a naked language, the writer is perhaps most plagued by this reality, using the blatant symbolism of words to express his thoughts, desires, fantasies, fears, hopes, and ultimately his personal truth. And yet, if the goal is communication and not merely publication, recognition, and money, then the attraction of a naked language is as alluring and intoxicating as having sex with your lover in silence, without breaking eye contact for even a millisecond, and orgasm is possible even without physical touch.

And yet, I have no desire to throw out the baby with the bathwater…the quivering colors on a canvas, the savoring of mama’s homecookin’, the fluid warmth of a fine whiskey, the smell of jimson weed, your lover mingling with you in tactile immediacy, or the transportative quality of music (arguably the most naked that language can get). These are not merely forms of communication, but joys that dwell in the deepest springs, connecting us to the earth and each other…they make life worth living. But the pursuit of naked language makes them neither obsolete nor superfluous.

Approaching a naked language allows us to work forward from the most fundamental pulse outward to a symphony of expression, instead of working backward from the symbolic image to the feelings behind it. It is this regressive approach that is taught and practiced in all too many academic settings as gurus and disciples alike race to carve out their “look”, their “sound”, their “voice”…but instead of finding their voice, they find a pattern of symbol construction that the world at large, or at least the world of art consumption at large, can readily associate with the “name” that the artist makes for himself. This is in precise contrast to the approach from which naked language derives both its path and its power.

In approaching truth scientifically, one could catalogue the myriad forms in the natural world, and after a lifetime of data collection, discern a pattern and describe it in probabilistic terms with an error term of “x”. To an artist, this mere approximation of truth is ultimately unsatisfying, and so naked language works in the other direction, beginning not with the outward manifestations but rather with the inner distillation of one’s personal truth and then working outward, using basic principles and algorithms to the expression of that truth within the context of its nascence.

I have no formula to offer that will, like a dose of ayahuasca, allow the spirit to leave the body, stripping off not only the clothing but the flesh and bones as well. There is no paint by numbers here, no nets below the high wire, and noone to hold your hand beyond the final circle…not even Dante’s Virgil could take the last step with him.

And yet, there seems to be a fundament involved in walking naked in the sunlit streets of time and matter.

First, is the going beyond fear…acknowledging its presence like a dragon guarding a treasure, but then going past its paralyzing presence.

Second, is the ability to be unattached to the outcome. Come what may, we are explorers in terra incognita. Stepping into this void, if we are lucky, we may be able to become enveloped in linguistic nudity, arriving at a ‘place’ in which a feeling expressed by a painter 150 years ago can speak to someone’s personal truth today. Tarkovky again puts it better than I can…”If two people have been able to experience the same thing even once, they will be able to understand each other. Even if one lived in the era of the mammoth and the other in the age of electricity.”

Working out from there to the expression of this discovered truth, the transmission and subsequent reception of it undoubtedly requires the same painstaking practice as does a mastery in any medium.

But there are no teachers who can guide us in this development. And maybe that is just the point…