Underneath the Dress

(fragment)

Ester Krumbachová

Underneath the Dress III.

Floral material, a dress decorated with artificial or real flowers, feathers, a bird and fruits on a hat, always in a different way. Attire for girls or women repeated in different forms, as we can observe in pictures – dresses treated according to a certain taste and certain technique, but in general, it’s always about women or girls dressed as a garden, in the guise of a meadow, in the costume of nature in bloom.
Even the colors of the material not only tend to resemble some of the elements of nature – green water, green leaves, clouds, fruit, flowers – and even the names of these colors, used to this day, emphasize this goal. Apricot, salmon, cherry, raspberry, these are the terms used to describe the colors of lipstick or underwear, while some time earlier the fashionable names of colors were those of common hollyhock, clouds, ripe grapes and they were used as frequently as cherry lipstick or salmon underwear today.
Under the influence of the constant promotion of abstract art styles, the fragrances of women and girls have changed for the time being to scents with abstract names – Scandal, Antelope, Red and Black, etc. but we cannot exclude a return again to lilac inundation, rose scents, etc., as was common in the past, in boxes decorated with the relevant flowers in accordance with other manifestations of feminine beauty and its image of the promised fragrant and blossoming garden.

2. Men, with their skills of imagination, declared themselves to be superior beings, the more intelligent, more capable ones, they created god-men, usually grumpy and cruel old men, vain, self-opinionated, requiring respect and praise, disregarding the suffering of those around them. It’s ridiculous that such a picture of tyranny was accepted by women, who were always subject to this god’s disdain, and often more than by their inventors.
But still, even though men have done everything they could to support their authority – which was quite a lot – in the end they follow their own personal taste and tend to prefer the women who are, as they say, most feminine. Flowers and leaves and colors, called women’s taste, are obviously also the men’s taste, as they are addressed to men, they are intended mainly for them and intelligence or stupidity are not a measure of life’s impulses, they are just notions. Maybe in that complicated unfathomable world of hostility among people, that is between men and women, in the world of love and hatred, subjugation and continuous fight, in the end the only moment of rest and hope is always the evening under the moon, the garden, parks, groves, and woods, when the meadows blossom, leaves emanate sweet scent, and everything always begins again, and perhaps that’s why the girls will always dress in flowers again to remind themselves of the truce between the two, the moment of happiness and joy that might later completely disappear.

3. It cannot be said that for example a railway engine or a car or an airplane with their shapes, contours, and details would not be interesting as adornments. When an ordinary parsley leaf played an important historical role in the development of a complicated ornamental style, why not the locomotive? Yet, except for excesses of fashion for youngsters, we do not know of inventions and their graphic representations anywhere else but on materials for children’s clothes, on pyjamas, where they lose their serious content and turn into cute playthings.
The adults, in the end, also surround themselves with civilizational elements not because they serve as a source of highest pleasure as such, but only because they save them time and energy and the civilized people – naturally only theoretically – may thus devote themselves more to their own culture. Otherwise the images of civilization have not permanently and directly entered the spheres of arts or aesthetics. However, still present and always repeating in different modifications are people’s reactions to unavoidable events such as death, disease, old age, grief, or to better moments such as when it is warming up, when the birds return from the south, when people venture outdoors because hope and a feel for the land and its natural laws cannot be replaced by anything.

4. Ten naked women and ten naked men differ much less than women and men dressed according to their social, intellectual, and aesthetic positions.
A person’s true appearance always remains more of a question for a philosopher, since being oneself – as we say – is just a cliché. What would it mean to be oneself? What is it?
To be oneself would mean to recognize and strengthen one’s true appearance to refute the proverb that The clothes make the man, which is unfortunately true, it would mean to get to know one’s own appearance that does not emulate anything or anybody, that follows one’s own nakedness and one’s own disposition. And that is completely impossible, because from the moment of birth the baby inhales everything it has been born into with all the errors, conventions, and prejudices, as well as positive features. A baby from the year zero, a baby from the Middle Ages or the Baroque period, and a baby from our times – three different babies with different pacifiers and different attributes surrounding them that the baby, as a creature capable of the highest degree of perception and imagination, records and discerns and recognizes not as a convention but as reality, that is truth. And truth is a little different every time.
Broadly speaking, we’re still similar. No doubt about it. Neither our skull nor our stature have visibly changed since the era we call the cultural one, and since we are physically the same, we probably won’t differ much psychologically. We are limited by our senses, by the degree of our intelligence. So basically, we’re similar. It means we are similar in the ability of our imagination, in the ability of creating illusions, ideals, directives, in our fantasy of how to dress and how to model our appearance and also in our ability to asses ourselves – but also how to de-assess ourselves, join, endure, to not burn our fingers. That is how it is and how it ever was. Nowadays even children who obstinately refuse to learn don’t believe that baby weasels are born through their mothers’ ears as the medieval schools used to teach – but they will easily believe other nonsense. Racism, chauvinism of all kinds still continue even today in the old traditions of inhuman cruelties that people manage to carry out on other people, whether we call them cultured, uncultured, modern, or old.

5. The fact we often believe that the phenomena surrounding us are the only known truth is quite an unflattering testimony for us. One time the sign of the eccentric is growing a beard, another time it’s shaving it off. What meaning does such a judgement have other than just a childish notion of appearance, obedience, or opposition against the general rules? A bearded man today may see himself as a rebel, but in the times of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he would not be considered for a job in an imperial office without a beard. Thus in those days, a man sporting a beard would take a razor and shave it off with the same feeling of heroism.

So what can we really say about our own appearance?
If it does exist, then it is not going to be visible, but will be rooted in actions rather than in appearance or words, because even the most bizarre attire in the end only hides us, people with their specific behavior that fundamentally either is or is not in accord with the belief that men should behave decently towards others.

6. It cannot be said that all the rules and regulations restricting human society were in their original form as cruel and stupid as their consequences.
In the Book of Moses we learn about the most cruel punishments that people would suffer if they didn’t respect their parents, if they stole from one another, if they didn’t respect the family units of others, and the punishments seem inhumanly horrific. Yet if we realize that people originally didn’t know that they shouldn’t treat old people roughly – since, after all, the old ones no longer made any contributions and only used up the food, which was painfully scarce – if we realize they didn’t know that other herdsman shouldn’t be killed just because they have sheep or cows that everybody needed, they didn’t know what to go by because they were still not as self-confident as we are, and they didn’t think in terms of good or bad – not in itself unproblematic, but still, they show an effort to understand the situations of life – what else could Moses do but shout at them that what he says are the words of God who will punish everyone who disobeys his commandments?
Thus, the Ten Commandments that could be recited even by the simplest man using his ten fingers, limited the chaos of thinking and egotism of social life to such an extent that the comfortable idea of a decent human being started to arise. Naturally, one of the first decent people, at a time when the term was still not in use, was Moses himself who, for reasons unknown to the others, disliked killing, stealing, and disrespect towards parents.
However, the same laws that formed society also began to deform it after a certain amount of time had passed. The domestic despots willing to kill even their own children rather than let them act according to their own will acted in accordance with the law – and the children who might have been a hundred times more right were still, according to the law, disobedient children. A wife who found in her partner the one support she had in her struggle against the oppression and serfdom of wifely obedience was in the end found to be in violation the law, violating the fidelity of marriage, and even if her husband beat her to death, she was obliged to remain faithful to him.
Jesus of Nazareth paid the price for having revised these laws, for his counseling and his encouragement to tolerance, for having excused and not punished the so-called woman taken in adultery. Those who accused her didn’t have the courage to stone her when he told them: –He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her. – Those people who left the woman in the street without casting a stone demonstrated some decency, at least at the moment they were reminded that transgression and guilt are not easy to deal with, and they exceptionally realized that what they understood about themselves applied also to others. But in reality Jesus was killed mainly because, in the eyes of orthodox believers, in the eyes of the fanatical advocates of the laws of old, he violated the laws established by Moses in the interest of mankind.
These are the embarrassing elements repeated again and again: the laws are always devised by those who have a conscience, who have their own opinion. And they are joined by those who lack opinion and blindly assert the letter of the law.

7. The so-called freedom of an individual within social regulations – that is a topic that will again and again be of interest to people.
In Italy during the Renaissance there lived a designer and coiner named Pisanello. His freedom was limited to the area of a round coin. And he managed to fit inside it with his fantasy, and he even managed much more: He understood that this limitation was in fact an advantage, a firm basis, a precondition, and he created beautiful coins with a picture harmonizing with the roundness of the coin, not going beyond what was given, not rebelling, but complementing.
Few people are this lucky. Van Gogh was not, even though he was a great artist. He couldn’t fit within the convention of what was permitted and systematically broke old forms, which he was transcending with new concepts. Thus he enriched our awareness with previously unseen pictures of the world, but also with knowledge about the vigor of the human spirit that in certain cases wants to be exposed, delivered to this world as a child, even though the author of these ideas lost his life as a result.
It is thus difficult to decide what is right: Pisanello, managed to fit within predetermined limits without violence, as did many others like him – while others had to look for a place to break the ceiling in order to change the room that had previously been inhabited.
Some know how to fit in, others have to change things – in accordance with an unrelenting question, with a vision of the unseen that arrives, nobody knows why, through certain people.
Bach’s music is in many aspects extraordinary, mainly because of the fact that before him there was no such music, that it was brought to us and to our world by one Bach, a man with the same senses and the same bodies that others possess.

8. Children often imitate adults, little people imitate big people, weak nations imitate the strong ones. The desire to be more than one’s own self is a completely common longing, the same as imitating ideals or specific people.
Someone imitates a film star, another person imitates his boss at the office. Someone continuously repeats what he heard, saw, or read, and all those people together produce nothing else but the fact that they only have value as imitators who exploit other people’s attire as actors do on the stage, they suppress their own self to pretend they are somebody better.
The rococo society, which appropriated and elegantly imitated shepherds and shepherdesses, is one of the many pieces of evidence of this imitative trend that comes up again and again. Instead of worries about the herd, they appropriated only the shepherd’s stick, naturally improved and artistically crafted, they used a fine scarf instead of a rough one to wrap themselves in. The sentimental stories about gracious and wise nature that live in the urban world to this day, about singing brooks and rustling woods were just different illustrations of perfect imitations of material that nobody tried to decipher in any other way than that of the idol, deification, an inhuman relationship.
Why did the rococo ladies and gentlemen imitate the poorest of the poor? Because they believed that this person had it better than they themselves did. They believed he was merry and happy, enjoying his life, that he was to be envied.
Philosophy can also be fashionable. And that was the fashion of those days, to return to the womb of nature, to resemble as much as possible those who lived permanently within its boundaries.
It is strange – but we are capable of believing that if we put on a different dress, the one that belongs to the person we want to be, then we really become them.