{"id":5383,"date":"2023-12-15T09:33:56","date_gmt":"2023-12-15T13:33:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/the-power-of-a-thin-skin-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2023-12-15T09:33:56","modified_gmt":"2023-12-15T13:33:56","slug":"the-power-of-a-thin-skin-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/the-power-of-a-thin-skin-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"The Power of a Thin Skin \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

\n

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

Yes, we spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins.<\/a> The boundary is so difficult to discern because, when all the stories fall away, there is no boundary \u2014 only a fluid, permeable membrane that is constantly shifting depending on the stories we tell ourselves about what we are and where we belong. Lynn Margulis captured this in ecological and evolutoinary terms when she observed that \u201clife is a unitary phenomenon, no matter how we express that fact.\u201d<\/a> Dr. King captured the sociological equivalent in his insistence that \u201cwe are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.\u201d<\/a> Whitman captured its most elemental and most existential dimensions in that immortal line: \u201cEvery atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

When we fail to see the connections between things, we fail to anticipate the consequences of any one thing. A century before we began slaying entire ecosystems with pesticides meant to eradicate individual species, before we began tinkering with individual genes in the complex cathedral of the genome, the naturalist John Muir exulted that \u201cwhen we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe\u201d<\/a> \u2014 an exultation that now reads as an admonition.<\/p>\n

How to unblind ourselves to this cosmos of connection and its attendant forcefield of consequence is what Jenn Shapland explores in her essay collection Thin Skin<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 \u201ca corporeal account of how thin the membrane is between each of us and one another, between each of us and the world outside,\u201d fomented by the medical reality of her epidermis missing a layer: a diagnosis of literally thin skin.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art by Lia Halloran for The Universe in Verse<\/em><\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

With an eye to the embodied metaphor of her condition, Shapland writes:<\/p>\n

\n

There is no \u201coutside\u201d\u2026 The world is a part of our cellular makeup\u2026 we impact it with every tiny choice we make.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

I began to see what I now think of as literalized metaphors for my entanglement, my complicity, all over my life: in my dermatological diagnosis of \u201cthin skin,\u201d in my friends\u2019 having babies as the world burned, in the crystals cropping up everywhere to heal us of something, in my own sense of vulnerability and my desire to feel safe. I began to question the idea of myself as a being in need of protection, indeed as something that could be protected. Nothing can protect us\u2026 It struck me as I wrote that I was utterly vulnerable to every other person, every other creature on Earth, and they were also vulnerable to me\u2026 I began to seek other ways of understanding the self that might be more useful than this shivering, weak thing we must shore up against the world.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And yet out of that singular vulnerability comes a singular strength \u2014 liberated from the standard boundaries between self and world, which serve as culture\u2019s safety valve constricting what is possible and permissible, one is free to imagine \u201calternatives to our limited narratives about family, love, labor, longing, pleasure, safety, and legacy.\u201d A century after D.H. Lawrence reverenced the strength of sensitivity<\/a>, Shapland writes:<\/p>\n

\n

To be thin-skinned is to feel keenly, to perceive things that might go unseen, unnoticed, that others might prefer not to notice.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

What she notices above all are the connections between things, the Rube Goldberg machine of consequences that binds past and future, self and other, here and everywhere else. She writes about about Los Alamos and Rachel Carson, about the traps of parenthood and the paradoxes of self-compassion, about mending clothes and mending hearts. Emerging from the essays is a reminder, both haunting and assuring, that in this increasingly fractured and fragmented world, life remains defiantly indivisible. <\/p>\n

<\/a>
Art by Violeta L\u00f3piz from At the Drop of a Cat<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There is power in such porousness \u2014 a heightened ability to question the structures that make for fragmentation, perhaps none more tyrannical than the idea that the nuclear family is the optimal unit of belonging and connection, an idea rooted in our touching yearning for immortality despite our creaturely finitude<\/a>: passing on our genes and values as a way of perpetuating ourselves beyond our mortal limits. Watching her friends freeze their eggs and go through rounds of IVF, Shapland reflects:<\/p>\n

\n

If we extend our idea of family beyond the individual to the wider world of creatures and ecosystems, we can begin to ask what we want for them. From them. We can begin to see ourselves in relation. Acknowledging and reckoning with death \u2014 with the limit on our existence, with the fact that we are temporary \u2014 can reframe what it means to live. What do we want to leave behind? What do we want to support, maintain, in the limited time we are here?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A beautiful answer comes from Shapland\u2019s conversation with Marian Naranjo \u2014 a Native antinuclear activist from Santa Clara Pueblo, a stone\u2019s throw from the birthplace of the atomic bomb. With an eye to the ancestral knowledge of how to live in peace and harmony \u2014 knowledge that has suffered the erasures of colonialism and capitalism \u2014 Naranjo envisions a new epoch of remembering what we have forgotten: how to be caretakers of connection. Sitting across from Shapland in the embodied space of mutuality, she echoes Ursula K. Le Guin\u2019s passionate case for the transformative power of real human conversation<\/a> and reflects:<\/p>\n

\n

That\u2019s the next circle, that circle of balance. Where we do put back our heaven and earth, our heaven back on earth. Get it back. How do we do that? It\u2019s this, it\u2019s talking face-to-face. It\u2019s doing more of this.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But somewhere along the arc of so-called progress, we forgot what indigenous cultures have known for millennia: that truth is a tapestry, no single thread of which can survive the wear and tear of reality in isolation, the reality against which truth must be continually tested in order to be true. This damaging isolationism haunts even the history of our understanding of the basic building blocks of life \u2014 the chemical elements that compose it, or discompose it. <\/p>\n

With an eye to the discovery of radioactivity and Marie Curie\u2019s epochal work on radium, Shapland writes:<\/p>\n

\n

Soon after its discovery, radium became a multimillion-dollar business. For four decades, you could buy rejuvenating radium skin cream, lipstick, tea, bath salts, hair growth tonic, \u201ca bag containing radium worn near the scrotum\u201d that \u201cwas said to restore virility.\u201d There was radium toothpaste to boost whitening. Radium therapy, called Curietherapy in France, began to be used to treat cancer. It was first inserted by fifty needles into breast tissue, or by radon \u201cseeds\u201d that caused serious reactions. There existed a \u201cvaginal radium bomb consisting of a lead sphere supported by a rod for insertion\u201d for cancer treatment. Marie and her daughter Irene took a radiological car to the front in World War I to X-ray soldiers<\/a>. Later, she supplied radium bulbs to the French health service to treat the military and civilian wounded and sick with radium therapy. <\/p>\n

The discovery of radioactivity is a story of willful ignorance, of knowing but longing not to know, pretending not to know, how powerful and damaging it was. Scientists and salespeople alike believed in its power to cure, to heal. Radium was damaging enough to kill cancer, to burn Pierre\u2019s skin through the glass vial in his vest pocket, but somehow not thought to be damaging enough to kill the scientists handling it all day, the people brushing their teeth with it. Marie kept a vial on her nightstand to bask in its glow as she slept. She called it her child.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

This scientific refusal to believe what is obvious because it cannot be proven, because it is technically uncertain, accompanies our understanding of toxic substances to this day.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This blindness to connection, causality, and the consequences of radioactivity is hardly surprising: To achieve what she achieved, against the odds of her time and place, Marie Curie had to be thick-skinned<\/a>. Perhaps a thinner skin, with its attendant power of seeing the permeability and interdependence of things, would have saved her life, would have spared her the tragedy Adrienne Rich captured so poignantly in the final words of her magnificent tribute to Curie<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

She died\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0a famous woman\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0came\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0from the same source as her power<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Complement with Marie Howe\u2019s poem \u201cSingularity\u201d<\/a> \u2014 a stunning antidote to our illusion of separateness \u2014 and the young poet Marissa Davis\u2019s inspired echo of it<\/a>, serenading our elemental bond with nature and each other. <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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