Going Down the Up Staircase                                                               
a meditation on Marcel Duchamp's Nu déscendant un escalier

                                    i
Whose nude? Who's nude? Whose leg / the many legs/ plethora of legs
            going up /coming down? Who can tell?
Legs without feet, motion without mobility, figure without body, promises unkept.
Where's the nude?       Where the body?            Where to look?       
            'a prize for anyone who can find the nude' 

Head reduced to a line    lines on a canvas     body
            shorn of clothes    genitals/breasts
                        body moving with no body : geometry.

                                    ii
He says : a formal decomposition : a distortion of one sort or another

Down the up staircase : fear of falling    fear of failing
            fear of not being new      of losing the self in expectations :
                        the École des Beaux Arts
where he failed the test : the charcoal nude.             
            His revenge : secession :
                        on to the Salon des Indèpendants
                        on to the Armory Show
                        on to the Philadelphia Museum of Art
                                    and immortality.            
       

                                    iii
Nu descendant un escalier : nude walking.
            Non/ non     not allowed     nudes do not descend staircases;    
odalisks recline     receive the gaze.
            Non/ non     not like Manet and that rude nude Olympia     and her brazen stare.

Out of line     completely out of line : nudes must be respected        
            tradition upheld    a few myths    an allegory or two :           
                        ridiculous        scandalous.

                                    iv
The figure moves      only     in the eye of the beholder
            who holds nothing     cannot even tell what to behold :
                        an explosion in a shingle factory.
            Yet    the beauty    the mechanism    the pure physics of descent
the pain of moving from one plane to another by increments.

                                    v
Fractured personality    fractured self / does she (famous nude) find
            her self in the garden reclining?     Odalisk on a divan?
            Taking a bath? Moving through time and space at a clip?
What can we know of a nude descending a staircase? 

What does it take to remove one's clothes? To descend the stairs?
            Does anyone think to ask the nude?

Not Manet, who certainly failed to ask his nude, in the park
            with those men, at their picnic, Déjeuner sur l'herbe,
            with their mustachios and their chapeaux--but I digress.      
The nude may not digress; it is all egress--going and going,
            entering some world or leaving it.     

Non/ non. There is no entering; there is no leaving; there is only walking,
            no arrival, merely the struggle.
When will this poor walking nude have the chance to recline in a park,          
            enjoy a pâté, a truffle?
Non/ non. No respite for nudes :
            for Manet's only--the stare/ for Duchamp's only--the stair.

                                    vi
Walking as fugue: its elegant counterpoint: each step
            a reproduction of itself    reproduction as proliferation/ replication
            nu en pochoir     or     on display     dans La Boîte-en-valise,
failure to accept the male gaze                the male intentions 
            eroticism undermined by the fake nudes, the rude nudes.

What falls outside the frame?      the plane?     the box?
Sans clothes/ hopes/ desires     only the descent     only geometry?

A Rrose by any other name.