Original Skin. Maryrose Cuskelly
baby. For the first six weeks of his life, my first child had barely been out of my arms: I had bathed him, breastfed him, stroked him, slept with him; I had spent hours and hours touching him.
Once, after a marathon breastfeeding session when my baby would cry if he wasn’t attached to the nipple, I recall feeling as if I had this enormous parasite sucking the life out of me. My husband, sensing this—or rather, having it shrilly and tearfully conveyed to him—suggested I go out to a movie with a friend, leaving the baby with him. Not long after I left the house, I was aware of a vague, physical sense of loss. I wasn’t missing my child in my head or even in my heart—it was a relief to be away from him—but my skin had come to know his intimately, and that’s where this loss resided: in my very pores. My selfish heart had pushed my son aside momentarily but my skin remained faithful and would not forget him.
OUR LIPS, OUR TONGUES, and our fingertips are areas of skin densely crowded with nerve endings; as a result, they are especially sensitive. We use these parts of our bodies to explore and identify objects in our world.
Beneath the fingertips of someone who is blind, the raised dots of Braille characters transform themselves into words, instructions, stories. With touch, we can test if a cake is baked or the washing dry, and recognise the difference between leather and vinyl, silk and nylon.
A surgeon may rely partly on touch to tell healthy from diseased tissue, use her fingertips to find a wiry vein, or discern where one organ begins and another ends by the difference in texture.
Lips pressed to a child’s forehead will sense if he has a temperature. Even with our eyes closed, those same lips puckered in a kiss can recognise the difference between a nipple, a fingertip, or the end of a nose.
We explore objects with touch in a variety of ways that we may not even be aware of. Pick up an unfamiliar object now with your hand. Your fingers will immediately begin a series of actions to help you gain information about it. They will rub across the surface of the object to determine its texture—tracing its edges, finding where the surface dips and swoops, where it protrudes and recedes, its patterns and features. Pressing down upon the surface will allow you to gauge its hardness: is it malleable to the touch or does it remain unyielding to the pressure of your hand? How will you assess its temperature? Most likely, you will simply let your fingertips rest on its surface for a moment to gain this information. You might extend your hand, holding the object away from your body to gauge its weight, and then wrap your hand around it to discover more about its form and volume. To garner more precise knowledge of its shape, your fingers will trace the outline of the object.
THE SENSORY RECEPTORS in our skin are highly specific. Nerve endings only respond to particular stimuli: heat, cold, air movement, pain, pressure, vibration. When a specific sensory receptor is excited, a particular sensation is felt: a burn feels distinct from a scratch, a change in air pressure unlike a change in air temperature.
Chains of neurons connect nerve endings in our skin to the spinal cord or at the brain stem, and onto the cerebral cortex. Information derived from these sensory receptors in our skin travel along these chains. We can then respond accordingly and appropriately: scratching an itch, pulling away our hand from a sharp or hot object, slapping an insect.
Given the sensitivity of our skin, why aren’t we in a constant state of irritation at the persistent brush of fibres from our clothes, driven mad by the pressure of our feet on the ground as we walk around, or bowed under of the weight of the atmosphere bearing down on our shoulders? Mercifully, we are kept from the insanity of such unceasing stimulation by the fact that our touch sensors respond to changes in stimuli, and not to those that are ever-present.
Our sense of touch is able to alert us to information that extends beyond the mere physical banalities of temperature, texture, and atmospheric pressure. It offers us clues that hint at relatively intangible things, such as how others are feeling about us, their intentions, desires, attitudes—all can be discerned in a touch. Is the person grasping our hand trying to assert their dominance or communicate their submission? Are they demonstrating affection, support, solace, approval, or disgust? Our skin will tell us.
The pressure and duration of touch, in addition to where we are touched, can alarm, excite, irritate, warn, comfort, disgust, or seduce us. City dwellers regularly tolerate the press of flesh from unknown fellow commuters. Unfamiliar backs rest against hips, buttocks brush against the back of a stranger’s hand. But in the crowded space of at train a peak hour, it takes merely a slight increase of pressure, a subtle change in intensity where skin meets gaberdine or linen, to alert a woman that someone is taking advantage of the enforced proximity to experience a moment of unshared titillation. Even such a relatively minor example of unwelcome touch can make us feel violated.
Touch connects us all, literally. When we empathise with another’s pain or grief, share the excitement of our team winning the grand final, or the triumph of a successful business deal, we are moved to touch each other—a shake of hands, a pat on the shoulder, a quick hug. A friend’s eyes fill with tears as they recount a failed relationship, a moment of humiliation, or the death of a parent and, instinctively, we reach out to them. A child comes crying with a skinned knee, and we encircle them in our arms. Dejected team mates pat each other on the back after a loss, or wrestle each other on the ground in an orgy of self-congratulatory delight. These sometimes casual, fleeting, or impulsive connections affirm our place in the world, that we belong.
Psychologists and other observers of human interaction have long been aware that our touching behaviour is influenced by culture, gender, age, and the relationships between them. How we come to connect physically with others, skin to skin, even in the most perfunctory manner, is determined by a host of different factors that at a conscious level we may only be dimly aware of. Your boss might touch you briefly on the arm to gain your attention, but would you take the same liberty with her? A young man in Indonesia might walk along the street with his friend, their hands touching, but would young heterosexual men in Sydney do the same? A close female friend may drape her arm around your waist, but if she assumed the same liberty with your husband or partner how would you react?
Generally, we spend little time analysing the appropriate way to touch others. It is something that most of us know deep within our bones, and is based on learning that began the moment that we emerged from our mother’s body and—depending on the year and the circumstances of our birth—were either placed in her arms, held upside down and smacked on the bottom, or whisked away in the latexed hands of a professional for medical tests or intervention. Based on experience and observation built up over our formative years, we know without thinking how the layers of culture, age, intimacy, status, and gender dictate the appropriate way to touch another person.
Occasionally, though, the way we use touch may be more calculated: at the beginning of a business negotiation, how long will you clasp your colleague’s hand when you greet them? Will you grasp their elbow at the same time? To garner a friend’s allegiance in a fall-out with another crony, will you use touch to subtly underline the bond between you? As a lone woman in a roomful of men, will you decide to initiate a handshake in order to signal your determination to be taken seriously in the discussion about to take place?
‘I’M TOUCHED.’ We hear the phrase often when someone is trying to describe how a gesture or a word has moved them, directly connecting the realms of emotion and physical sensation. As a matter of course, we regularly use words with tactile overtones to describe our sentiments and moods: the prickle of irritation, the warmth of a smile, the sting of rejection, the weight of loneliness, the buzz of excitement. Anger is ‘hot’, kindness is ‘warm’, and to be ignored is to be ‘given the cold shoulder’. Given this linguistic link, would emotions still have the same power if we could not feel the physical world?
Without the ability to name and describe feelings in this tactile way, would emotion wash over us in a deluge of feeling devoid of the nuances that we can categorise so precisely: would anger feel the same as frustration, would sorrow be indistinguishable from ennui, passionate love similar to confusion? Perhaps we would wade through a porridge of feeling rather than dart among the sharply defined mosaic of emotions that we are accustomed to. Such puddles of ill-defined perception would make for much murkier interactions with our fellow humans,