(Cont'd from home page)
Stuart R. Ward's novel is a crazy-quilt time-bent memoir scoping the history of society's clothes-happy, carcass-craving ways. And the surging trend towards radical body freedom and non-violent diet. Equal parts nudist novel, veggie novel, pop history, visionary fantasy and quasi-autobiography, the work breaks away from other, nonfictional, books on the subjects. Subjects rarely dealt with together in any guise. Though, as the narrator reveals, they're both integral parts of a holistic lifestyle.
Zet recounts how former dress and diet habits drastically affected his life growing up in sixties' San Francisco. He tells of the long journey within and a fitful search for new ways, living closer to nature, learning to better honor self, others and the planet. He reveals how olden diet and dress customs made his journey and those of his generation and eccentric relatives and peers more...well, interesting.
"Advocates of body freedom and natural diet must have felt at times they were stranded on some strange flesh-eating, textile-obsessed planet."
Mulling over present times, Zet offers a flood of reasons why we keep dutifully wrapped in cloth even in nice weather, though it crimps our comfort, drains our pocketbook and invalidates the integrity of our beings. And delves into what drives us to routinely rob, kill, and devour fellow sentient beings, by the billion each year, in so doing generating worlds of suffering, destroying health, perpetuating world hunger, degrading the planet's ecosystem, and -- most significantly -- stifling humanity's spiritual awareness of life's interconnectivity.
"...an enlightening story that creatively promotes a more aware and compassionate way of living."
- Will Tuttle, Ph.D,
author of The World Peace Diet - Eating for Spiritual Health and Social Harmony
Zet relates in whimsical fashion how he grows up, more dysfunctional than most, not far from San Francisco's then-blossoming Haight-Ashbury counterculture. Swept into the merry contagion of a massive no-boundaries departure from staid lifestyles, he soon realizes he'll never fit into conventional society. In due course he flees the city and goes to live in high desert woodlands. There, over the decades, he revels in the glad tidings of nature, continues shedding conventional conditioning along with his clothes and radically changing his diet. With the grace of years -- confirming it was more the times, that were weird, not him (necessarily) -- he comes to find a gentle quirky humor in it all.
Now, oping to make sense of things both for himself and posterity, he explores the myriad contributing factors to our former habits. He then boils them all down to humanity's profound disconnect from nature. One brought about over millennia of unthinking habit, insatiable greed, control hunger and yur garden-variety spiritual ignorance. He muses over how we first got separated from nature -- in time getting to where the notion of not concealing one's body in public was deemed perverse, and the idea of not devouring slain sentient beings thought unhealthy, even vaguely subversive. And traces our present trends rejecting such life-unfriendly thinking to embrace a new paradigm in positive living.
All the while, he ties unfolding events to his own fitful quest for liberation, using his life story as ready example for how truly odd our times are, how prevailing conditions all too easily slow the unfolding of our innately noble, peace-loving selves.
"...Quimby's take on his own experience of the times...is astute, wryly humorous, and often laugh out loud funny ...Zet's psychological honesty and clarity as he works through his emotional and cultural baggage are endearing... The book is much more than a polemic for the naturist movement."
- Sibyl Walski, Mount Shasta Herald [CA]
Using a futuristic sci-fi story framework to gain radically fresh perspective, Strange Days is a sometimes serious, sometimes pixilated tale about body acceptance and body freedom, peaceful diet -- and journeys to new realms of being.
Realms for a while yet still below the radar of today's mainstream consciousness.
"We felt the need to devour part of an animal carcass before thinking we'd had a real meal."
So says Zet. Even as he tells of his experiences and those of his quirky relatives, the memoir brims with real names in the news, dates, quotes, and figures, supplying capsule histories of nudism and veggie diet and environmental awareness. Included are Germany's early 1900's nature-cure movement -- little known but profoundly influential proto-hippie phenomenon -- and the later sixties' hippie counterculture directly linked to it.
"...Ward takes us on a cultural journey, some of it rooted in the past and some, imagined, projected into the future. And what a future, indeed."
- VegNews
Zet remembers watershed body freedom advents: Spencer Tunick's worldwide nude-group photo shoots, Nevada's Burning Man, Berkeley's Naked Guy, and the pro-peace Baring Witness movement. Also clothing-optional mineral springs, World Naked Bike Day, Britain's Naked Rambler, rainbow gatherings, and nude holiday cruises -- one of which he goes on with his partner, Nuela. Veggie flashbacks include the 60s' natural-food renaissance, speculations on how man first came to devour fellow species, and the present explosion of interest in plant-based, organic, whole-food diets. He delves into how self-serving powers dismiss and twist mountains of evidence linking animal diets to the onset of most every degenerative disease under the sun.
In his most detailed remembrance, Zet recounts how he and old high school friends join in an historic 2011 Bay-to-Breakers footrace in San Francisco. Thousands of springtime celebrants stroll across town, totally naked, one spring day, triumphantly reclaiming their long-denied body freedom. Back home, he and Nuela write a fantasy about the run triggering a global body-liberation phenomenon. Finally, our narrator tells how catastrophic natural disasters, fused with a grand leap in spiritual awareness, lead humanity to realize planetary peace.
Thus fulfilling mankind's cherished desire to live in harmony -- and be naked if you want to.
Strange Days Indeed is printed on 100% POST-CONSUMER RECYCLED PAPER. No trees were felled in its making of its pages.
A generous portion of any profits generated from any book's sale will be donated to worthy green causes.
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The following book review was published in California's Mount Shasta Herald March 13, 2007:
Local Author's 'Strange Days' Are Our Own
by Sibyl Walski
It is 2061. Zet Quimby, a 112 year old, has written his own first person account of the strange days when he was young, before the catastrophic earth changes of 2012 forced what remained of humanity to rethink how heavily it could afford to walk upon the earth.
"Strange Days Indeed" is well embedded in Siskiyou County and draws heavily on the author's personal experience. Local readers will easily recognize many places, and possibly several people, because author Stuart Ward has a gift for descriptive writing, and an intuition for the right word.
Quimby looks back over the abyss of an event horizon which ended the world as he knew it, after he and other survivors recreated a gentler society more attuned with the environment around it.
They now live in close connection with nature, in a clothing-optional community and the understanding that the other creatures who share the earth are sentient, intelligent beings, not to be used for dinner or the raw materials for clothing.
The reader will easily recognize the strange days of which he speaks - they are our present and the recent past most baby boomers remember, beginning in the 1960s, when the old social structures were challenged in earnest, and began to morph into something else or simply break down in many areas.
Quimby's take on his own experience of the times, as he compares his own inner inclinations and developing life philosophy with the expectations of the mainstream culture is astute, wryly humorous, and often laugh out loud funny. It is also poignant and sometimes a bit sad.
His stance as an involuntary outside observer gives him the emotional distance to analyze the unexamined cultural beliefs that demand conformity and condition group behavior.
Most people, for example, do not go naked in public. Consequently, says Quimby, there is an unhealthy quality of "forbidden sexual fruit" that surrounds the idea of the nude human form which he himself spent years trying to overcome. Ironically, Quimby himself grew up the son of a clothing magnate, forced to be a closet nudist who could never appreciate the values of consumerism and vanity that drove the clothing industry.
He did not find out until he was in his late teens that his mother's side of the family were naturists, who believed in a holistic, clothes-free lifestyle that included healthy nutrition as well as nudity.
His "clothes-horse" mother was the odd one out in that family, but he could relate completely. His life up until the earth changes became a long search for places to drop the imprisonment of clothes - and society's conditions about them - among kindred spirits, and much later to embrace a consciously cruelty-free diet that excluded anything obtained by exploiting animals.
His travels up and down the West coast led him to live somewhere in the high plains desert outside Montague. Without power tools he built his off-the-grid cabin from scratch, where he could live without clothes to his heart's content.
The book's characters are well developed and sympathetic and Zet's psychological honesty and clarity as he works through his emotional and cultural baggage are endearing.
The book is much more than "a polemic for the naturist movement," as some reviewers have said. It is really about spiritual purity and existential transparency. Shucking his clothes is only the symbol for the deeper work.
His life task seems to be to identify and drop the repressive, shame-based internal conditioning that, for him, is represented by garments.
Ward has a witty, intelligent writing style [...]. The passages on cruelty-free diet are [...] pulled off with persuasive eloquence and compassion for all sentient life.
Anyone who has felt compelled to embark on a spiritual quest should be able to relate to the greater story without feeling compelled to step out of one's knickers in public.
There are places of the spirit that any person thinking deeper than the superficial passing show knows must be there - and that inner terrain is easily revisited in Quimby"s company.
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© Stuart R. Ward. All Rights Reserved.
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