text Gray’s Anatomy, but, on a deeper level, it is through our skin that we connect to our world and the others with whom we share the planet. Apart from intestinal rumblings and the odd heart palpitation, the mind is aware of the body primarily through the skin.
When we touch another person—no matter how fleeting the contact—a bond is established or modulated to some degree: a perfunctory kiss between spouses; a passionate, full-body embrace in the pre-dawn; an overwhelming rush of love as a parent nuzzles their child’s neck; a press of the hand from a trusted friend. Other, more casual contacts also occur: a pat on the shoulder, a shake of the hand, a touching of palms as coins are exchanged or a credit card is proffered. Along the way, items are bought, deals finalised, respect given, emotions communicated, attention sought, and pain inflicted.
Skin, as burns surgeon Fiona Wood remarked to me, is ‘not just a plastic bag to keep our giblets in’. No, indeed: the skin is a parchment, a canvas, a prison, a barrier, a conduit, a revelation; like silk, like sandpaper, like flaky pastry; the colour of milk, of chocolate, of wheat, of burnt biscuits. As we go about our daily lives, we constantly brush up against our fellow human beings. Each of these individuals exists inside their own tenuous envelope: the only thing that separates them from the rest of the universe—their skin.
Touch Me
‘She reminded him of the pleasure of being scratched, her fingernails in circles raking his back.’
—The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje
THE SKIN has a memory all of its own.
‘I remember that touch,’ a lover once said to me, recalling the first time I laid my hand on his arm. That small contact, weeks after we had first met, was enough to prompt him to ask me out. Some 18 years later, I still remember it, too, and can see the scene played out in the dingy foyer of the community theatre where I was performing in a play: the liverish red of the foyer walls, steam rising from the tea urn, a cluster of audience members and my cast mates chatting after the show.
‘You were good,’ he says to me, ‘which was a relief, because I didn’t know what I’d say to you if you weren’t.’ I laugh at his honesty and, made brave by the compliment, reach out, the fingertips of my right hand brushing his left elbow It is enough to confirm the flick of sexual attraction between us. It’s what I intended to convey when I extended my hand in that first crucial touch that seared itself into both our skins.
APART FROM ITS MOST obvious purpose—keeping the body whole and integrated—the skin’s primary function is that of a sense organ. It is here, in the pliable, vulnerable, elastic skin, that our sense of touch is located. Known as the mother of all our senses, touch is the first to develop and the last to leave us. While our other senses—sight, smell, taste, and hearing—are located in discrete organs, touch is dispersed throughout the surface of our body in the skin.
When we distrust what our other senses are telling us, it is touch that we ultimately rely on to verify our experiences. That lingerie may look beautiful, but only when it is against your skin will you be able to verify whether it is silk. You may hear your beloved’s professions of love over the telephone, but until he is in your arms you will be not be completely reassured that it is to you he is still devoted. Despite clearly remembering that I put my passport in my bag, as I approach the immigration counter at the airport I repeatedly search it out with my fingertips to reassure myself that I have not forgotten it.
RIDING INTO THE CITY on my bicycle, a light, feathery sensation alerts me to something brushing against the back of my right hand. I glance down in response to where my grip encircles the handlebar. Before I even fully register what has caused the nerve endings in my skin to alert my brain to something foreign touching me, I flick off a large huntsman spider skittering across the back of my hand. I gasp, and an expletive rushes out as my sharp intake of breath reverses. The spider must have crawled into the hollow inside the handlebar, confident the small, dark place would be an ideal den. The vibrations travelling through the tyres and up through the metal frame of the bike had disturbed it.
My neck stiffens, the skin across my shoulders and down my back quivering as if the spider had run down my spine. Twenty minutes later, a vague itch in the exact spot where the spider had been keeps me glancing nervously at my hand.
TOUCH CAN BRING us back into our bodies in a way that our other senses do not. While breathing in the heady scent of an old-fashioned rose or taking in a panoramic view of the landscape tend to transport us, swelling the boundaries of our bodies to take in that which is beyond us, our sense of touch shrinks us back into ourselves. Stressing our inescapably corporeal existence, touch reminds us of our body’s borders more rapidly and completely than any of our other senses. Touch is impossible to escape: we can close our eyes, stuff silicon plugs into our ears, hold our nose, and refuse to eat, but our skin is always receiving signals, impossible to turn off.
So central to our lives is our sense of touch, so intrinsic is it to the way in which we experience the world, that we can barely conceive of a life without it. Loss of the other senses is easier to imagine. Most children play variations of Blind Man’s Bluff; earplugs can offer us some insight into a world without sound; and anyone who has endured a heavy cold knows what it’s like not to be able to smell—but a life without tactility? How would we know where we ended and where everything else began, if not for touch? Would it be possible to learn to navigate our body’s way in the physical environment without the information we glean through our skin?
Monitoring our bodies and our surroundings would be exponentially more difficult without our sense of touch. Thrown back on to our other senses to bridge the gap in our sensory arsenal, sight would become crucial in gauging the position of our bodies in any particular space. Grasping objects, judging the weather, navigating around potentially injurious surfaces—those with the capacity to cut, to burn, to bruise—would become exercises requiring immense concentration. If the lights suddenly went out when we were standing up, we would simply fall over, not being able to feel the ground beneath our feet.
Surely comfort would be much more difficult to give and to receive without touch? Not even sex would make sense. Yes, our lover’s beauty would still exist, as would the smell of their hair and the taste of their lips, but without touch I imagine sex reduced to a mechanical task undertaken purely to ensure the continuation of the species. It would be akin to having a shower in order to stay clean, but without the simple, sensual pleasure of warm water on skin.
The gratification we draw from eating would be radically diminished, too, with the texture of food a mystery to our lips, tongues, and fingers. Perhaps our sense of taste would become much more acute to compensate, and we would find that the fresh acidity of limes, the bite of a salt crystal on our tongues, or the sweetness contained in a teaspoon of honey would become even more piquant.
I don’t want to underestimate the power and the importance of our other senses, or to wish them away, yet I can only imagine what strange, constricted creatures we humans would have evolved to be without the ability to physically feel our environment. The trade-off for the release from physical pain would be a harsh price to pay for foregoing the kiss of wind on our skin, the subtle pleasure of clean sheets, or the shock of cold water on a hot summer’s day, not to mention the more obvious delights of the caress of a lover’s touch. It would be impossible to compile a complete catalogue of the sensual delights that would be denied us without our sense of touch, so varied, subtle, and enmeshed it is in our experience of being alive.
We only have to see an infant mouthing every object it can get its hands on to recognise the importance of touch in gaining information about the world. How would babies learn, when still too young to have language or to understand or interpret what they see? Without a sense of touch to immediately signal that they had
