Dermatology
I did not want to wear this skin, so unwashed and caked in sin. Taken off and hung like cloth, beneath the chest and flanks of flesh: a message etched on something bony — what it said was dry clean only.
Begin with Skin
Every day, all the time, all of us everywhere walk around in our God-given costume. Our skin is our body’s largest organ, but it is also, more than anything else, our body’s sense-making organ (sorry, brain). Every interaction we have with the world outside ourselves must first pass through this great filter.
None of us really choose to wear this thing, it’s just unceremoniously draped over us sometime between conception and birth. We adapt to it and accept it. We even love it. We have to love the skin we’re in, or so we’re told. Sayings and songs and symbols all selling smoothness and softness, soaps and creams, maybe skin itself. Buddy, I already have some and there is a strict no-return policy, so lay off. If you were the Lord of Bones on some pilgrimage to the great graveyards of the Earth, you might begin to suspect there is some sort of conspiracy by Big Skin, some kind of propaganda war being waged. All around you there would be thousands of millions of skeletons yearning to be free.
Nobody likes to be confronted with obvious facts about material reality. Confronting nature as it is tends to produce fits of Lovecraftian horror, so we obscure simple truths with etymological sleight-of-hand. You, an English speaker, do not go to see the skin doctor. Hapless victims in scary movies go to see the skin doctor. You go to see the dermatologist, so they can recommend you soaps and creams to keep all kinds of outside from getting in.
We’re all quite literally skinwalkers, and we’re all scared to admit it.
Makes No Sense
Day 36: Another pitch rejected at work. “That has nothing to do with soap and even worse nothing to do with our brand.” I don’t like my boss and I don’t like how cold the office gets. I don’t like the goosebumps I get. My skin has been itchy. Maybe it’s a rash, maybe it’s in my head. I don’t feel like seeing the skin doctor again.
“Skin is not the sense-making organ, that makes no sense, what about the brain,” said the noise-making organ on behalf of the skin to spite the bones beneath. If you doubt the primacy of membrane over brain, just close your eyes and take a look at your eyelids. What are those made of?
When we think of life and all the things that can go wrong, we often think about the loss of one of our senses. No one would dispute that to be blind, deaf, or dumb is a misfortune, but everyone has considered the possibility, and many have observed the reality, of a life without seeing, hearing, or speaking evil. It can be done. A life without smell would seem something of a joke were it not for recent events in public health — but we now know those woes when the nose goes. They are not enough to cause despair.
The one sense no one truly reckons with is the loss of touch. The lack of free movement in space, confinement to a wheelchair, or worse, a bed, this is what people fear. To the extent a loss of feeling is feared, it is a fear of what it might be like not feel one’s own legs rather than what it might be like to not feel the grass beneath one’s feet.
Actually, it is not fair to say no one truly reckons with the loss of touch. It is more accurate to say people rarely, almost never, reckon with the loss of touch. There is one time when they do, and this is when they meditate on death. They of course are considering the loss of many other senses, too, but touch is among them. They imagine a total lack of embodiment. Trying and failing to imagine non-being, they conjure up the mental equivalent a cartoon body on a black background gradually being erased only to leave cartoon eyeballs peeping in the darkness. This, we suppose, is a world without touch.
A Little Bit of Chicken, Fried
Day 47: I sat in the park for 16 hours today. Today was the longest day of the year. The skies were clear. Lots of sun. My skin got red. I watched a snake shed its skin under the hot sun. My skin got redder. I felt jealous when I watched the snake.
One of the worst and best things that can happen is the roasting and crisping of skin. It’s no good for you, but you love it when it happens to a chicken or a fish. The real meal is the tender flesh beneath, but we relish the falling away of flaky skin. In this way, it is the same as trespassing. The emotional peak occurs at the point of hopping the fence, not while exploring the forbidden area. We were never meant to be let in, how naughty, crunch crunch.
But every crisp gives way to cracking, and burns show the danger of letting the outside in. Your skin is the boundary between you and everything you are not. You are you because you are only semipermeable. The third degree burn opens you up to the maelstrom of life that moves all about the air, and total death of the skin risks total death of the person. This is true in terms of your consciousness as well as your body. Every layer peeled away, every extra point scored on Openness to Experience, is a baring of bone to the violent world, an opening where you can spill out and mix with the world until you aren’t really there anymore.
There are those who do not eat skin, uncrustable souls who peel every potato, who only eat boneless, skinless chicken thighs from the bodypart factory. Maybe they sense that the consumption of skin is the ultimate transgression. Maybe they fear that the skin, being the boundary, is the source of identity, and to eat of it would risk tainting their own identity. Maybe they prefer to only put the insides inside themselves and keep the outsides without.
What the Skin Owes the Bone, What the Bone Owes the Skin
Day 52: I stopped peeling the other day so I started frequenting the tanning salon. They told me it’s not good to do that every day. Same way the skin doctor tells me to wear sunscreen. Getting sun is good for your bones and bad for your skin. A funny little trick.
If one doubts that the skeleton yearns to be free, one need only consider sunlight. Every moment in the sun is a vitamin delight for the bones and a risk for the skin. Stay for too long and soon there will be that great flaking away. Your bones beckon you toward the light while your skin asks you to skulk in the dark.
Melanoma! shouts the skin doctor. Fine, stay inside.
But even the gods favor your bones — sitting in the dark you will still cast off flake after flake, slowly but surely. Ashes to ashes, and skin to dust. Perhaps you are a golem born to be brought forth in a sacrifice. Perhaps you are wearing your sacrifice.
So you are born waiting and we are all born waiting and we must wait. Our skeleton is a story and our skin is its leather binding. All your life is merely the anticipation of the opening of a book. All this talking is a means of passing the time, peeking at possible passages and playing at potential parables that we hope to find etched into our true selves at the end of all things.
To speak “the truth” takes teeth. It is no coincidence that these are the freest bones: the skeleton is the source of the river of being and the teeth are its mouth. When the sacrifice is made and you are perfected in death, you will return to the skin of the Earth.
My bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh, and I am escaped with the skin of my teeth.
Job 19:20
The Outside of Outside and the Inside of Outside
Day 60: I’m still peeling. I wonder if Eve peeled the apple before she ate it. I wonder how a snake would feel watching someone peel an apple. Eating a skinless apple, naked, in just my skin. I’ve been taking hot showers and plucking little bits of skin off.
The Earth itself has a skin, its crust, and that is where we live. When we damage our own crust, we are told to rub some dirt on it, to patch our skin with the greater skin. To walk around barefoot is to give the Earth a back-walking, intimate, massage. Skin on skin, the golem within.
Of course, the skin of the Earth is itself a type of bone, its exterior being rock and mineral. The Earth is so perfect that it bleeds a blood that becomes bone-skin.
This makes man a cursed creature. The majority of life on Earth is a mirror image of planetary perfection, with hard exteriors mostly made of chitin and cellulose, skin with the good sense to mimic bone. The closest we come to scratching that itch is the keratin of our fingernails.
What a joy to nap in the sun on the cool, soft soil, on a hot, hard rock — to dream of rebirth, of an igneous metamorphosis by the fire of that star…
We are outside in. It is time we let our insides out.
Day 63: Sunny again. No tanning salon. Hit the park and saved a few bucks. I saw a woman reading a leather-bound book. We take trees, remove their skin, pulp them up, and bind them in some bovid’s skin, all so we can read a little fiction and feel like we’re wearing someone else’s skin. A binding ritual. A grimoire. A funny little trick.
Day 70: My skin is starting to feel leathery. I can’t really make it peel anymore. My story is all stuck inside. It’s etched all over my bones, but it’s all bound up in leather now. I watched a video about degloving injuries today. Maybe there’s hope afterall.
Something to Think About
Skin and bone, Left all alone, To simmer in a pot. Chicken skin And collagen Are getting nice and hot. Taking stock Of making stock, You sure can learn a lot. Melt away My flesh today Before it ever rots. Skeleton, Reveal yourself: My final form unlocked.