SEMINARS IN NEUROLOGY-VOLUME

12, NO. 4 DECEIMBER 1992

HISTORICAL NOTES

Skin for Skin

And Satan answered the LORD, anci said, Skin for Skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life. Job 2:4 (KJV)

I choose to sing a Song of Skin. Old Testament fans, please listen in, And Gospel buffs (if that's the term) Come hear my hymn to ectodermThough 1'11 turn away the dermophobe By dealing with the Book of Job. True, Job lost the kids, but it's my prediction -Job 1:19 2:7 You'd list "sore boils" as his worst affliction: ibid. They appeared in generalized distribution. 42: 13 (Of Job's children, God made restitution.) 2:8 Jot, "scraped himself," so the boils were itchy. 3: 1 After awhile, they made him bitchy. They covered all skin save a tiny fraction. (I'd instinctively think of an id reaction 2:7 Since they even involved the soles of the feet.) 17: 1,19:20 He had bad breath, and he couldn't eat. Like Leviathan, he had scales and flakes: 41: 15-17,23 Eczema, for goodness' sakes! 18:13 Jo1)'s skin was weak, but his mind? Oh, no: 19:26 He figured the body was nexl to go. Then Job, like Moses, met the LORD. (Both rendezvous were untoward.) God told Moses what to d o (Exodus 34: 1 and 2): "Take two tablets; call in the morning." Job, by contrast, got a warning: "Don't try to d o the things 1 can: "I am God and you are man." Job, convinced that God moves mysteriously, Now decided to take him seriously; 'I'hen God and Job reached a coalition. (I'm sure He cured Job's skin condition.)

38: 1,42:5

40: 1-14

(cf. Cowper) 42; 1-6 42: 10 42:ll-17

Most people take Job's story more seriously than my doggerel suggests that I do, but this issue of Seminars is directly about skin and only indirectly about suffering. Besides, my betters have wrestled with the Book of J o b and the results may be consulted elsewhere. I shall cite just a couple of references, then get down to the skin. How else should Rabbi Kushner end his popular and comfbr-ting tract, When Bad thing.^ Happen to Good P~ople,' than by discussing Job? (He also says something about Archibald MacLeish's play, J.B.) And especially to be recommended is poet Stephen Mitchell's wonderfully helpful introduction and compelling new translation from the Hebrew of The Book of Job.' But I did not plan to get onto that profound subject. Let's get back to the integument and take a few snippets (from the nonmedical literature) to examine. To start with something familiar, recall Graham Greene's description of the doctor palpating and charting the thickened areas of leprotic skin in A Burnt-out Case, and showing his African patients that they were not untouchable. And thisGreene's depiction of a woman with healthy African skin, in The Heart oj'the M ~ t t e r : ~ He thought: how beautiful she is. It was strange to think that fifteen years ago he would not have noticed her beauty-the small high breasts, the tiny wrists, the thrust of her young buttocks; she would have been indistinguishable from her fellows-a black. In those days he had thought his wife beautiful. A white skin had not then reminded him of an albino.'P1'

O r this passage on what it is like to be skin-toskin in a hot climate:

Department o f Neurology, Univel.sity o f Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, Rochester, New York

Reprint requests: Dr. Goldbiatt, Box 673, University of Rocl~esterMedical Center. Rochcs~er,N Y 14642 Copyright O 1992 by Thicrne Medical Publishcrs, Inc., 381 Park Aver~ireSouth, New York, NY 10016. All rights reserved.

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David Goldblatt, M.D.

HISI'OKICAL NOTES

To stay a little longer with beautiful skin, here is a prose verse, if you will, from a novel that is a song oC sensuality: Andrk Pieyre de Mandiargue's The Girl Bentnth the Lion4 (first published as Le Lis de M t r [The Waler Lily]-the title has been deflowered, I might appropriately say, in Richard Howard's translation). She held her breath to show herself to him in the most extreme abandon, like an inanimate object she was inviting him to take, and because she had stopped breathing her heart ceased for an instant, then beat all the more wildly. Her breasts were very round and pure in outline, small moreover, superbly distended; her waist was long and slender above hips that were a little full though not heavy, and her legs were very thin, with long, perfectly rounded thighs. From emotion or exposure to the sun, her skin had taken on a pinkish cast that was almost brilliant in the warm light that fell from the candles; her fleece was very dark and glossy, curly too, vigorous and violent. While she showed herself, Vanina thought of what the young marl was seeing from the window. . . .4p7X

Not everyone thinks of skin so romantically. Dylan Thomas, whose prose is often more poetic than the poetry of'others, ends the enticing "novelin-progress" that he titled, enigmatically, Aduenlures in the Skin Trade5 with this send-up of skin and its appendages: T h e men and women drinking and dancing looked like the older brothers and sisters of the drinkers and dancers in the club around the corner, but no one was black. There were deep green faces, dipped in a sea dye, with painted cockles for mouths and lichenous hair, scaled on the checks; red and purple, slate-gray, tidemarked, rat-brown and stickily white-washecl, with violet-inked cycs or lips the colour of Stilton; pink chopped, pink liddecl, pink as the belly of a newborn monkey, nicotine yellow with mustard flecked eyes, rust scraping through the bleach, black hairs axlegreased down among the peroxide; squashed fly stubbles, saltcellared necks thick with pepper powder; carrotheads, yolkheads, blackheads, heads bald as sweetbreads. "All white people here," Samuel said.'PP""'

Ever1 "normal" skin. Thomas would have us believe, can be hideous. Does the beauty of healthy skin decline with age? Setting aside the vested interests and staying with the poets, we can still find differing opinions. "Nothing gold can stay," said Frost. "Bodily decrepitude is wisdorn," said Yeats. "And thou hast filled me with wrinkles, which is a witness against me," Job said. Richard Wilbur, looking more than skin-deep into the question, said, "'The beautiful changes as a forest is changedIBy a chameleon's tuning his skin to it."6

If we then associate wisdom and understanding with a wrinkled skin (ignoring Job's opinion that those qualities are not to be found in the land of the living), that is a kind of beauty. Looking too closely at any subject can, however, have disturbing consequences. Do you remember the unsettling effect of T.S. Eliot's lines from Prufrock: "Arms that are braceleted and white and bareIBut in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair"? 'To sum it up, how we feel about skin is a matter of training and a matter of magnification. J prefer to end with a macroscopic view. For poets, as well as for geologists, the earth has a skin. Ilylan Thomas wrote, "And, mild as pardon from a cloud of pride,/The terrible world my brother bares his skin."7 Richard Wilbur spoke of "Hills lazar-~kinned."~

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T h e smart of his wounded hand woke Scobie at two in the morning. He lay coiled like a watch-spring on the outside of the bed, trying to keep his body away from 1,ouise's: wherever they touched-if it were only a finger lying against a finger-sweat ~ t a r t e d . ~ p ~ ~

When I behold the seamlessness of skin It sometimes 111akes the grassy sward to seem Itself a skin, which smoothly seals within All turmoil of the earth whereon I dream.g

Not daring to end with a fake poem of my own crafting, and not up to a real one, but still wanting to tell you how looking up and then looking up from these writings about skin-to notice the earth's skin-made me feel once, I shall stop with this: The sun is down and a gibbous moon is just high enough in the eastern sky to make the golfcourse a study in chiaroscuro. A walker, not a golfer, I make my way slowly through the long grass of t);e rough, pass between two sturdy cedars, and step to the edge of the green. (I do not know which green I have reached, but it has to be 18 or under.) T h e smooth contours before me swell into low mounds on either side of' the green, glowing softly in the moonlight under the lightest of dews. T h e inner surfaces of those little hillocks slope symmetrically toward a shallow central depression where the shadows are deeper and the dew is heavier. At the bottom of the declivity-identified by the pin that has been thrust within it and is held upright by a little ring in its depths-is the object of the game, the place the golfer seeks: the cup. Because of the darkness, 1 cannot make it out, but 1 know it is there, and for the first time I know the meaning of a golfers' term I never before understood: T h e Skins Game."' ACKNOWLEDGMENT Father Joseph Brennan, who is Director of Religious Affairs at the University of Rochester, kindly gave of his time and wisdonl when he talked with me about suffering and about Job.

REFERENCES 1. Kushner HS. When bad things happen to good people. New York: Avon Books, 1981

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7. Thomas D. 1 makc this in a warring abscnce. In T h e collected poems of Dylan Thomas. New York: New Directioris, 1957:89 8. Wilbur K. Caserta garden. In New a n d collected poems. San Diego: Harcourt BraceJovanovich, 1988:390 9. Goldblatt D. (I hope you thought it was Shakespeare! O r Keats?) 10. Goldblatt D. Sports a n d games as sexual metaphor. Gornorrah NY: DOM Press. 1992

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2. Mitchell S. T h e book of Job. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987 3. Greene G. T h c hcart of the matter. New York: Viking Press, 1948 4. Pieyre d e Mandiargues A. T h e girl hcneath the lion (translated by Richard IIoward). New York: Grove Press, 1958 5. 'rhomas D. Adventures i r ~the ski11 trade a n d other storics. Ncw York: New Amcrican I.ibrary, 1961 6. Wilbur R. T h e beautiful changes. In New and collected poems. San Diego: Harcourt Bracc Jovanovich, 1988: 392

VOLUME 12. NUMBER 4 DECEMBER 1992

Skin for skin.

SEMINARS IN NEUROLOGY-VOLUME 12, NO. 4 DECEIMBER 1992 HISTORICAL NOTES Skin for Skin And Satan answered the LORD, anci said, Skin for Skin, yea, a...
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