Some Type of Skin

My God! It's a lot

I became briefly enamored with the song “Some Type of Skin” by AURORA when it was released a few months ago. I will link to that song at the end; for now, here are the opening lyrics:

Hit me hard where I am soft
Should my heart reveal itself to be
More than a muscle
Or a fist covered in blood
However much it feels to bleed
It's only temporary

We're good people
And we both deserve peace (peace)

My God! It's a lot
(I build some type of skin)
(I got to build some type of skin)

As with most songs, I was first drawn in by the aesthetics—AURORA’s Nordic, lilting, soprano electro-pop frequently resonates for me. I was intrigued by this notion of “building skin”. We don’t build skin, right? It grows on us, like pasty, papery pasta dough; it dries and dies in the thinnest outermost layer—40,000 skin cells a day sluffed off into particulate dust which settles on sills and surfaces—the whole system, as much as 15% of our bodyweight, replenishing completely every 30 days. Departed parts of us float around—recycled cosmic dust breathed in by each of us (how we occupy one-another) and out into the air. And skin grows rapidly, like algae, like plant matter, like the film that forms atop overheated milk, like fingernails, its layers like baklava, unfolding like a perpetually blooming flower—petals ever growing from inner to outermost.

Do we build our skin? Can we?

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When I think of building metaphorical skin, I think perhaps this somewhat describes stoicism. Or aspects of Buddhism (Nassim Taleb once said that “A Stoic is a Buddhist with an attitude”). I imagine “letting go of attachments” through rigorous, ritualized acts of self-coaching and self-discipline being as the systematic knitting of fleshy barriers between us and our environment, between individuals and one-another, to minimize exposure—insulating the self from the messy, cacophonous domain of attachment-prone human experience—hunkering down to shelter from the storm of aliveness—shrouding oneself in aloofness as enlightenment. I got a strong dose of this kind of praxis growing up Orthodox Christian, taught we must be “in the world but not of the world”. By their account, it was critically important that we remain separate, distinct from this environment and the social systems that we occupy, comprised as we are of different stuff, at risk of a kind of spiritual contamination…

We hear often, from a particular demographic, that skin used to be thicker—the way some people see it, the skin of the youths these days might be as rice paper stretched around a spring roll—so thin it’s transparent, and only just barely holding the insides in, keeping the outside out. Hardly capable of keeping these individuals individual, barely capable of keeping them distinct from one-another and the systems they occupy…

Kids these days… who purportedly bleed freely and fluidly through thin, porous membranes into their environment, their environment into them, them across and into one-another, trusting, vulnerable, contaminating and contaminated.

For the record, in adulthood I’ve reconsidered my position on such things. I think that seeing ourselves as innately or necessarily distinct and set-apart from our environment and from one another is an integral ailment of modernity, very much feature rather than bug. I think that intimacy—when identity becomes porous—is critically important to collective and mutualistic thriving. And I think that aloofness, insulation, separation, and isolation—these might be impediments to humanness and to aliveness.

In Chapter 8 of my Patreon project, I spent a little while on the subject of intimacy, and how it relates to social coherence, inspired by insights from

Bonnitta Roy

and

Euvie Ivanova

:

I have been exploring and ruminating on the topics of alignment and coherence for a few years now. I first encountered the concept of intimacy in groups as a dynamic in an interview with Bonnitta Roy and Euvie Ivanova on the Jim Rutt Show. Bonnitta describes her experience of attending a recent conference with words like:

“I was noticing that I was having trouble arriving…”

“As I stood in front of the community and my colleagues, I was noticing that I was tethered to them as well…”

“I started asking myself, what is it like to be in dialogue with people who you are actually creating intimacy with? Intimacy for me is when the boundary between self and others becomes porous… The boundary between my mind and others can become fuzzy.”

She also uses language describing a kind of collective flow wherein ideas will start emerging from an interaction that can’t be cleanly attributed to a single participant. They are the product of a shared, interpersonal form of thinking that feels to me like it neatly fits into what Michael Dila has been describing as “System 3 Thinking”.

Over the course of my career, there have been times when I experienced a certain interpersonal flow with colleagues and collaborators, but these instances were, sadly, very much the exception rather than the rule.

…Is this still about that song I started with?

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I spent a few months with AURORA’s song “Some Type of Skin” on regular rotation, quite convinced of what it must mean—understanding it thoroughly through the lens of my own persistent, often overwhelming sensation of exposure and rawness, my own metaphorical skinlessness.

I have also experienced non-metaphorical skinlessness before, in patches of exposed flesh, when as a child I would skid across concrete or asphalt in the climactic event of many an active day, bailed from a bike or skateboard or blades or took a fall at full tilt on foot. Clear memories still resound of the shock that lasts in the silent pause before the pain sets in, then it hurts, so bad, and then someone older always compels you to make it hurt worse in remediation, because those big patches of bleeding tissue are like a catastrophic breach in the body’s defensive perimeter. The enemy that lurks in droves at the gates, that swarms in invisible clouds around us at all times, seeking to contaminate, to whom this opening offers rare opportunity—they must be denied their eager entry and held at bay. We are at risk, and skin is our saving grace—what separates us from our hostile environment—that which ensures that I am a distinct and closed system—closed-ness being a crucial aspect of any ordered, predictable, stable system across time.

A few months after AURORA’s song came out, I told a friend I had been thinking a lot about that lyric “I’ve got to build some type of skin”. It just struck me as so visceral and weird and interesting. This friend said that she loved to use the word “skin” in her poetry. I think she alluded to it being about skin as the means through which we touch the world and one-another.

I had been thinking about skin as barrier; but skin is also an interface.

To me, our largest organ protects the center which the “me” inside occupies—an encompassing wall that contains the actual self. But to her—a door, a window. How the outside reaches in, and how the inside extends to meet and interact with it. Not only containing the self—but a crucial part of the self, and a means through which the open system of the self interacts with its context and environment.

Clearly, she is right—the organ of human skin serves as far more than just a barrier. It mediates between the system that is us and the systems that contain and interact with us. It regulates thermal transfer—pores enabling moisture to sweat out onto that vast surface area where evaporation facilitates rapid cooling. Capillaries in skin constrict to help the body conserve heat or dilate to release heat. Skin facilitates thermal exchange between us and our environment, and at times, one another: a mother and infant’s skin-to-skin contact after birth serves to regulate the child’s body temperature.

Then there are all these nerves to transmit physical sensation, with which we detect and interact with the world around us. Even as I type this, I’m keenly aware of the important role of sensation in my fingers for finding and pressing letters. Any amount of time in non-haptic virtual space reveals the dimension of touch to be enormously enriching and enabling. Picking up and manipulating objects in virtual reality becomes far more realistic (and functional) when equipped with haptic-feedback gloves. It is easy to fail to notice the crucial role of sensation until you try walking on a foot that has fallen asleep.

Sensitivity is commonly demeaned in our culture. To be labeled “sensitive” is hardly ever considered a good thing. But sensitivity precludes access, understanding, vitality, richness, appreciation, empathy—precursors to one’s capacity to navigate and interface with any being, thing, or environment with deftness and responsiveness.

While closed-ness is a crucial aspect of any ordered, predictable, stable system across time, openness is a crucial aspect of any complex, adaptive, evolving system across time.

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I shared with a few friends that my latest essay was on the subject of skin.

Ethan Eagle

responded by sharing the book “Thin Skin”, a collection of essays by Jenn Shapland. I immediately dove in—Shapland is clearly traversing many of the conceptual paths I have been seeking out with this exploration, informed by the author’s own experience with physical fragility—a few diagnoses render her more susceptible to environmental harm, one of which is actually lacking an important layer of dermis—and her sensitive, responsive exploration of how systems of bodies, cultures, economies, institutions, and the relationships within them can be understood through dynamics of containment, disruption, contamination…

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. Writing under lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic only made this more obvious and inescapable. As I wrote, 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.

I am only just getting into it, and am fascinated by the threads Shapland opens and explores. Per her own summary of the project,

Writing can be a mode of perception, a sensitivity to the world. This book is about the joys and perils of our dissolving boundaries: the physical boundary of our skin as it absorbs chemicals, the emotional border where real fear meets cultivated violence, the obscured line from our desires to our material things, the ever-more-fluid overlap between self and work, and the imaginative realm beyond our prescribed expectations for a full life and toward expanded ideas of personhood, meaning, and purpose.

What I’m getting from the essays so far is the sense that how we think about porousness and separateness, facilitated by the boundaries between us and our environment, between you and I, between us and institutions and even larger cultural systems, is in some cases clearly dysfunctional for being too thin, too permeable, and in other cases too thick, too impenetrable, fostering separateness, isolation or insulation, inhibiting the sensitivity to be able to detect and respond to what might on an organic body be signals indicating injury or disease, signals that ought to pass through nerves inside the skin.

When I ponder that critique of kids these days—about them being overly sensitive or too fragile or snowflakes or whatever the fuck, I sometimes think…

I wonder if we tend to think that wisdom and sensitivity are inversely correlated.

How much sense does that make?

In many domains, breadth and depth of experience demonstrably increase a person’s sensitivity to nuance and signal.

It might be that the stoic deadening of moral/ethical/empathetic sensation and sensitivity in actuality renders a person more prone to belligerence, and mis-calibrating the porousness, permeability, and sensitivity-to-signal of the social and institutional systems we create and modulate?

Are we like a person walking on fully sensationless legs?

How might we restore lost but necessary sensitivity?

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The organ of skin, for vertebrates, serves three primary functions: protection, regulation, and sensation. Thickness and permeability can vary wildly across species, and across a single body. In humans, the whole system dies off and replenishes as rapidly as every 30 days. Where and when the skin on hands or feet face consistent friction, calluses form which increase protection at the expense of sensation…

Part of writing this piece has been a developmental effort to add skin to my arsenal of metaphors to employ in sensemaking, something like

Dave Gray

’s collection of visual frameworks. I feel like this has gone well enough. I hope you found it at least somewhat diverting.

I only recently read what AURORA herself had to say about her song:

"I've always been told that I should build some type of skin. I've always let myself merge too much with the world, not really knowing where the world ends and I begin. This song screams the muchness of it. And it's delicious. Being human is really delicious, even though it's more than any of us can handle. My god it's a lot."

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Scraps

• On the subject of establishing identity boundaries around social systems, last year I wrote the essay What Do You Mean “We”.

• On the subject of boundedness and its relationship with entropy, I wrote the essay “Entropy is Always Decreasing”