Disappointment

The photograph is of a statue often called "Apollo and the Lizard." I can't remember who did it except that it was one of those dead guys (XD) and I can't remember where I got the picture except that I am inclined to think it was one of those places that posts these things for public use. (Because I originally snagged it for something involving class one time. Heck, it may have been emailed to me by a teacher.)

So yeah. I must've been, what, twelve, thirteen, possibly fourteen, when I suddenly realized that this horrible/wonderful thing that had been too terrible for public eyes, and too terrible for a youth to look upon, was actually pretty much the same thing that the ancients had seen fit to cast in bronze, marble, wood and so forth, which I had been looking at for as long as I could remember because Mom wanted us to get a cultural education and invested in a set of Eyewitness books in order to spark our interest.

And I was mildly disappointed, because American cultural attitudes about nudity had set my expectations pretty high. (This is probably also what took me so long to figure it out in the first place, because I kept looking at the way people act about nudity, versus the rather understated way that the Greeks treated it, and thinking "It can't be that simple.")

Now I'm not saying that we should all walk around naked or anything like that. There are plenty of reasons for preferring to cover one's own body, especially in the company of others (some of which have nothing to do with embarrassment or modesty.) But I do think people make too big a deal out of it. Great Adult Conspiracies make growing up weird and difficult, and life overall would be easier if we didn't make such a big fuss over things like this.

(Apollo himself has been cut off in such a way so that I don't have to put a mature rating on this.)

The actual text of the poem, for anyone who finds that difficult to read:

That first time I looked
and was old enough to realize
I was looking at a true effigy of
the masculine
naked and powerful
shown as he was
and as he was not
supposedly hidden from me
since I was a small child
(but not really because
all the picture-book statues
were also nude)
because I was a little girl
and thought too tender to expose to
the masculine
naked and powerful
as he was
I still remember asking
"That's all?"

Because he was beautiful, surely, but he was still only a man in his skin and I saw nothing to be awed about.