The deepest is the skin

Hi how are things? I hope you have started 2022 in the best possible way. I'm counting down to go on vacation. I don't think I've ever waited for them as much as I do now.

Today I am going to touch on a topic that is very much in keeping with these times – at least for the southern hemisphere. I'm going to talk about the skin. Of the skins. At times when the heat becomes intense, skins immediately begin to show themselves and have an increasing role in our lives. It has already happened to me several times to go out to the sidewalk of my house and see naked men riding bicycles or walking, refreshing their epidermis as if nothing had happened. Also photos of friends sunbathing on beaches, the areas of the body that we generally hide during the year under our clothes, posing in swimsuits. And even I myself suffered transformations in the skin due to the relentless sun: my freckles began to get bigger, my arms began to gradually lose their characteristic paleness.

The skin is there all the time with us. It is an organ that extends and covers us. He gets hair, moles, warts, spots. There are softer areas and others rougher or prickly. It can be dry, greasy. We must protect it, take care of it, put different expensive ointments on it. So this fortnight we will deal with different cultural manifestations that have it as the protagonist. And looking for books and movies to include here, I realized that, beyond certain metaphors such as "he has the devil in his skin" or passion in relation to skin contact ("Your skin makes me cry", says Thom Yorke in “Creep”), she's most noticeable when she's bruised. A skin with scars, burns or diseases draws powerful attention. On the other hand, healthy, normal skin usually goes unnoticed.

Let's talk a little about it, to see how far it takes us.

drawings forever

The phrase that gives this news its name (“The deepest is the skin”) is taken from an aphoristic poem by Paul Valéry included in The Fixed Idea. It was taken up by Deleuze in Logic of sense. I have had it in mind for a long time and I am shocked to see that it is indeed so. One might think that the other organs of the body, which are more hidden or interconnected, are the most "deep" among other things because they are not before our eyes. But the skin is responsible for putting the inside in contact with the outside. It is the threshold of sensations, of body temperatures in relation to those of the world. The one that can store a caress, shudder or turn purple from a blow. Witnessing their aging, their flaccidity, is also quite shocking because it reflects that something similar may be happening inside us. So we fill ourselves with potions waiting for the magic. And of course, there are also people willing to inject themselves, to transform their skin with surgeons. Michael Jackson, without going so far, wanted to change its color. Do we feel for the skin or is it the skin that feels for us?

To illustrate this Thread, we are going to bring the images of some old tattoos and the bodies that carry them. Those that were made more than a century ago and that already demonstrated different forms of art: that of drawing, but also that of working with needles on a living and changing canvas like skin. Tattoos change the appearance of the people who wear them and also change over time. The ink gets bigger, the lines widen or blur. I think maybe their meanings are also transformed.

I do not have tattoos. At this point in the 21st century, it seems like a rarity. I am surrounded by people who do. The idea of ​​getting them never appealed to me and I tried to think about the reasons. I think it is, on the one hand, because I am indecisive and changeable. So a drawing or motif that I like today, maybe in a short time I won't like it anymore. The idea of ​​choosing something once and forever makes me nervous. And not to mention the decision on the part of the body to tattoo. Very difficult. I also don't have much tolerance for physical pain. So risking pain doesn't sound like a great plan to me. But I think a deeper reason has to do with family history. The first tattooed person I met as a child was my great-grandfather Alessandro, who had a huge eagle (huge in my memory) tattooed on his right arm, in two colors. He had done it in 1919, in China, when he arrived from Italy by plane in the middle of a mission that he undertook as a military aeronautical engineer. That eagle represented, perhaps, for him, the presence of heaven and flight in his life. In his skin. It was a trace of what he most enjoyed captured until the end of his days, when he no longer flew or did aerial acrobatics and was a small, wrinkled old man who lived in Argentina. In other words, for me, forcing the interpretation a bit, the tattoo is not so much a decoration of the body, but the record of the past on the skin. Of what someone was thinking or feeling when they got that tattooed.

In another time, tattooing was something that was done mainly by prisoners, criminals. There was quite an indecipherable coding in those drawings. It breaks my head to think that messages were hidden by displaying them on the skin. If you are interested in the subject, you can read this Vice article in which they interview the compiler of a bunch of tattoo photos of convicts from Soviet prisons, where he tattooed himself in a primitive and painful way. It seems that a dagger through the neck indicated that someone had been murdered in prison and that he was available to do other "little jobs". And tattooing drops of blood could indicate the number of murders committed.

inhabit the skin

These first days of the year I immersed myself in reading La piel, the latest book by the Spanish writer Sergio del Molino, published in 2021 by Alfaguara (available on paper, ebook or audiobook). I hadn't read anything by him and it was a good surprise. It is one of those writings that is difficult to classify, because it can be read as a novel, but also as a literary essay with an autobiographical bias. Or as the life chronicle of someone who suffers from his diseased skin condition. It is that Del Molino suffers from psoriasis since he was very young, and with the excuse of telling his son about the ailments and reflections to which his skin leads him, he also tells the story of other personalities or "monsters" who had the same illness. The best chapters are those on Stalin, John Updike, and Vladimir Nabokov. But it also deals, for example, with Pablo Escobar and Cyndi Lauper. Psoriasis is a skin condition that causes a lot of itching, irritation, and scaling of the skin. When scratching at the work of "that red and white enemy", it is normal to hurt yourself and make those wounds or scales bleed. There are different ways to treat it. And Del Molino mentions, in fact, the acceptable or terrible results of some treatments that he tried (sunbathing, for example, seems to help).

In the stories that he weaves together in the frame story, the protagonists not only suffer from the disease, but also the shame of wearing mottled, damaged skin. They hide with clothes even if they are very hot, they have no way to stop the outbreaks, which end up, of course, greatly influencing the character or humor in daily life. And against the grain of psychoanalytic interpretations, Del Molino takes the opportunity to lower the line on the experiences that psoriasis ended up defining. He left you some parts of the book that left me thinking.

In a hypermedicalized and cosmetic society, in which racism still continues to generate tremendous inequalities associated with the color of bodies, it is interesting to keep in mind that the skin is what isolates us and what at the same time communicates us with others. He exposes us and at the same time defines us before others. Our skins are much more expressive than we sometimes imagine.

And speaking of injuries that require delicate treatment, I cannot fail to mention the film by another Spaniard: The Skin I Live In, by Pedro Almodóvar, which is now ten years old. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. It tells the story of a plastic surgeon played by Antonio Banderas who, as a result of an accident suffered by his wife and which leaves her with burns all over her body, decides to lock her up and test with her the creation of a new laboratory skin, insensitive to caresses, like a shield against aggression. Using cell therapy and without any scruples, this psychopathic and obsessive surgeon is involved in a plot of betrayals and provocative dramas as Almodóvar has accustomed us. It is a story of love, manipulation and revenge that also includes a reflection on the excesses that bioethics can cause.

Other deformations

And we come to what is one of my favorite novels of Argentine literature: The desert and its seed, by Jorge Baron Biza (published in 1998 by Simurg and later reissued by Eterna Cadencia), a strong, very original and also a bit sad book. . With their names changed, Jorge recounts the fate of his parents, the couple made up of Raúl Barón Biza (Arón in the novel), a completely crazy and eccentric rich Cordovan writer and politician (biographed by Christian Ferrer) and Clotilde Sabattini (Eligia in the novel). novel), a woman from Rosario, daughter of the founder of the Radical Party, recognized pedagogue, creator of the Teaching Statute. But he narrates it from a specific event: the moment when, about to sign the divorce decree on August 16, 1964, in the apartment that the couple had in Buenos Aires and in the presence of their respective lawyers, Raúl throws muriatic acid in Clotilde's face, hidden in a whiskey bottle, to destroy her face. It seems that he intended to blind her, with the image of him etched on her retinas as her last impression.

The novel begins right at that shocking scene in which Eligia-Clotilde's face begins to change forever. I transcribe it because I find it very powerful and of great skill in describing what a skin transformation consists of (no less than the irreversible injury to her mother's face).

What begins to deform along with the face is precisely the identity of Eligia, who practically does not express herself for pages and pages, resigned to reconstructive treatments, grafts and flaps, placed in the hands of doctors, unable to look at herself in the mirror. But a family that will no longer be constituted as such also enters into decline. The day after the attack, they find Arón shot in the temple, a death that begins a series of suicides as a trademark of his legacy (Clotilde and Jorge end up committing suicide as well, in 1978 and 2001 respectively). Even so, The desert and its seed is also, and fundamentally, a formative novel narrated by its protagonist, the disconcerted twenty-three-year-old Mario, caring for and assisting his mother in an Italian clinic, immersed in profound loneliness, surrounded by of nurses, prostitutes and alcohol, which little by little shows its elusive sensitivity, conjuring up the tragedy and transforming it into something else. Beyond the morbid, the novel is very well written. The registers reached by Jorge Baron Biza are exquisite. And he also has quite a bit of humor.

Jorge was also a very intelligent art critic and collaborator in different media. Several of these texts were compiled in Everything is allowed inside and in To the rescue of the beautiful. He left you here a short text of his called precisely "The autobiography" in which he reflects on how to fight against gossip and complacency, how to accommodate memory, and how to generate certain unwavering pacts with readers to narrate their own lives.

skin music

Let's finish with a chop of songs. The number of topics that talk about skin is immeasurable. Surely everyone will come up with one. I leave several listening options that have nothing to do with each other.

Before I say goodbye, I want to ask you for a kind of collaborative favor, since we have nothing less than #41 Threads: if you think of any topic that you think I can write about, please reply to this email with your suggestions, or let me know in Twitter (find me there as @noeselcaso). I'm going to try to take all this into account to put together the content for the year ahead.

Now yes, we leave here and meet again in February.

Hopefully this Thread has made you want to take care of your skin if you didn't. Or to carefully study your moles. Take precautions with summer and sunshine. (And by the way, let's support the campaign that Ofelia Fernández and @Dadatina are launching in the Buenos Aires Legislature so that prepaid companies deign to cover the cost of sunscreen.)

Thank you for reading. And please take good care of yourself.

Malene