Yes, we spend our lives trying to see where we end and the world begins. The border is so hard to see because, when all the stories fall away, there is no border – only a fluid, leaky membrane that is constantly shifting depending on the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and where we are. Lynn Margulis captured this in terms of natural and evolutionary science when she noted that “life is a single phenomenon, no matter how we express that fact.” Dr. King captured the social equivalent in his insistence that “we are caught in an inescapable web of mutual understanding.” Whitman captured its fundamental and most existential dimension in that immortal line: “Every atom of mine is as good as yours.”
If we fail to see the connections between things, we fail to anticipate the effects of any one thing. A century before we began to kill the whole of nature with pesticides aimed at exterminating each species, before we began to discuss the complex genetic makeup of the genome, the naturalist John Muir rejoiced that “if we try to choose anything by itself, we find it compatible with everything else in the universe” – happiness that now reads like a warning.
How to blind yourself to this cosmos of communication and its trailing force field is what Jenn Shapland explores in her essay collection. Thin Skin (public library) — “a realistic account of how thin the membrane is between us and each other, between each of us and the outside world,” inspired by the medical reality of his skin lacking a membrane: a diagnosis of literally thin skin.
With a metaphorical eye for his situation, Shapland writes:
There is no “outside”… The world is part of our cellular makeup… we touch it with every little choice we make.
[…]
I began to see what I now think of as literal metaphors for my entrapment, my participation, in my whole life: in my diagnosis of skin “thin skin,” in finding my friends' children as the world burns, crystals rising everywhere to heal us of something, in my sense of vulnerability and my desire to feel safe. I began to question the idea that I am someone who needs to be protected, indeed as something that cannot be protected. Nothing can protect us… It struck me when I wrote that I was very vulnerable to all other people, all the other creatures on Earth, and they were also vulnerable to me… I began to look for other ways of understanding myself that might be more useful than this trembling, weak thing we have to face the world.
And yet from that singular vulnerability emerges a unique power – freed from the usual boundaries between the self and the world, which act as a cultural safety valve that limits what is possible and permissible, one is free to imagine “an alternative to our limited narratives about family, love, work, longing, happiness, security, and heritage.” A century after DH Lawrence recognized the power of empathy, Shapland writes:
Having a thin skin is to feel sharp, to see things that may not be visible, ignored, that others choose not to see.
What he sees above all is the connection between things, a Rube Goldberg machine of effects that connects the past and the future, himself and the other, here and anywhere else. She writes about Los Alamos and Rachel Carson, about the pitfalls of parenting and the dilemmas of selfhood, about mending clothes and mending hearts. Appearing in the news is a reminder, both troubling and reassuring, that in this increasingly fractured and divided world, life remains defiantly indivisible.
There is power in such porousness – a higher ability to question the structures that create division, perhaps nothing more disturbing than the idea that the nuclear family is the ideal unit of existence and communication, an idea based on the emotional desire of immortality despite the end of our creation: to pass on our genes and values as a way to continue dying. Watching her friends freeze their eggs and go through rounds of IVF, Shapland reflects:
If we expand our view of family beyond man to the wider world of creatures and nature, we can begin to ask what we want for ourselves. From them. We can begin to see ourselves as related. Acknowledging and reckoning with death – and the limit of our existence, and the fact that we are only temporary – can redefine what it means to live. What do we want to leave behind? What do we want to support, preserve, in this limited time here?
A good answer comes from Shapland's interview with Marian Naranjo – a Native anuclear activist from Santa Clara Pueblo, a stone's throw from where the atomic bomb was born. Through the eyes of ancestral knowledge of living in peace and harmony – knowledge that has faced the erasure of colonialism and capitalism – Naranjo sees a new era of remembering what we have forgotten: how to be caretakers of communication. Sitting across from Shapland in an integrated space of harmony, he echoes Ursula K. Le Guin's story of the transformative power of real-life conversation and reflects:
It's that next circle, that circle of balance. When we restore our heaven and earth, our heaven returns to earth. Bring it back. How do we do that? This is it, talking face to face. Do more of these.
But somewhere along the line of so-called progress, we have forgotten what indigenous traditions have known for a thousand years: that truth is a tapestry, not a single thread can survive the wear and tear of the truth alone, the truth that must be tested every time to be true. This destructive isolation plagues even the history of our understanding of the basic foundations of life – the chemical elements that create, or destroy.
With an eye to the discovery of radioactivity and Marie Curie's epochal work on radium, Shapland writes:
Soon after its discovery, radium became a multi-million dollar business. Forties, you could buy radium skin rejuvenating cream, lipstick, tea, bath salts, hair growth tonic, a “radium bag worn around the scrotum” that was “supposed to restore virility.” There was a radium toothpaste to improve whiteness. Radium therapy, called Curietherapy in France, was first used to treat cancer. First, fifty needles were inserted into the breast tissue, or radon “seeds” that caused a severe reaction. There was a “genital radium bomb consisting of a lead sphere supported by a rod for insertion” to treat cancer. Marie and her daughter Irene took a radiological car to the front in World War I to X-ray troops. Later, he provided radium lamps to French medical personnel to treat wounded and sick soldiers and civilians with radium therapy.
The discovery of radioactivity is a matter of willful ignorance, of knowing but wishing not to know, pretending not to know, how powerful and damaging it was. Scientists and merchants alike believed in its medicinal, healing powers. Radium was harmful enough to kill cancer, to burn Pierre's skin with a glass bottle in his vest pocket, but somehow it was not thought to be harmful enough to kill the scientists who carried it around all day, people brushing their teeth with it. Marie kept the bottle in her nightstand so she could enjoy its light as she slept. He called it his child.
[…]
This scientific refusal to believe the obvious because it cannot be proven, because it is technically uncertain, is consistent with our understanding of toxic substances to this day.
This blindness to communication, risk, and the effects of radioactivity is not at all surprising: To achieve what she achieved, against the difficulties of her time and place, Marie Curie had to have a tough skin. Perhaps a thin skin, with its ability to see the permeability and interdependence of things, could have saved his life, could have protected him from the tragedy that Adrienne Rich so poignantly captured in the final words of her beautiful tribute to Curie:
A famous woman died in denial
his wounds
to deny
his wounds came from the same source as his strength
Complete with Marie Howe's poem “Oneness” – a wonderful antidote to our delusions of separateness – and the inspired echo of young poet Marissa Davis, reinforcing our fundamental bond with nature and each other.
