cardboard ghosts of future past

Back in the old days, before cardboard cutouts depicted demographically apportioned faces, before stone-still, silent, opaque audience members dressed for the occasion (sports, symphonies, operas, bullfights), actual people were in the seats, stands, arenas, galleries. Can you believe it? In those days, people gathered en masse, in the flesh, prey to each other's coughs and sneezes, victims of unwittingly and unwillingly shared particulate matter. Vulnerable to any stranger's invisible or visible imprint. In the olfactory wake of a curnucopia of scents: body odor, body scent, soap, sweat, perfume, eau de toilette, cologne, and a gazillion unnamed human animal exhalations and excretions. Are you taking all this down? Believe it or not, in those days people thronged and congregated: in bars, churches, pubs, classrooms, assemblies, rallies, union halls, corridors of government, conclaves of commerce. Now, as you know, in every instance, such breathing, pulsing crowds (and individuals) have now been displaced by cardboard simulacra, two-dimensional facsimiles of mute stillness. You don't remember this? Of course not. It was before your time. It was before grim and horrid circumstances forced a consensus of care and protection: social distancing, masks, sanitary measures, disinfection. When these efforts failed, people endured lockdowns, shutdowns, closeouts, wall-offs, barrier-bastions, sealant seizing, communal-closeting, superquarantining. New words were invented to describe new fortifications. But it was too late. The damage had been done. The viral wildfires had, well, gone viral. Those who had mocked the seriousness of it all, those who attributed it to a political hoax or a foreign scheme were in the front lines of failure. They were among the legions to succumb first. But not all of them, not all the disbelievers fell to cruel fate and cold reality. Some escaped. Some went into exile, their whereabouts still unknown. However, the masses had no such escape hatch. Instead, they made the best of a novel way of living, three-dimensional forms floating in and around their cardboard fellow citizens. They learned to befriend the cutouts. They even importuned upon the cutouts to imitate them, to serve as substitutes, ersatz personalities, avatars. In this way, large numbers of the Three Dimensionals found gainful employment -- such as it was -- as designers, painters, artists, portraitists, fabricators, shippers. And so the old days became the new days, and everyone forgot about the old days. That is why I wrote this letter to you, my grandchildren.

failure to thrive

When infants or children show signs of not growing according to standard projections, "failure to thrive" might be the diagnosis. The cause or causes might be a host of medical, nutritional, biological, genetic, psychosocial, or environmental factors. Sometimes the cause is undetermined. 

In some cases, failure to thrive, or FTT, is attributed to abuse or neglect. 

Some researchers have focused on maternal touch as a contributing factor to FTT. These studies examine mother-infant tactile interactions: their frequency and type (unintentional, intentional, during play, during feeding). In some cases, the mother or child may exhibit an aversion to physical contact.

Failure to thrive.

The term has poetic gravitas, a resonant summons for us to reflect.

In the Age of Coronavirus, will infants, children, adults, including the ill and the elderly, experience failure to thrive? Will our necessary, imposed self-isolations, self-quarantines, add the unintended affliction of FTT? At a minimum, will our severely restricted social interactions, our social distancing, cause human thriving deficit, or HTD?

We are social animals.

I know I am.

I already have a burgeoning case of HTD.

How about you?

And in the bigger picture, from a global standpoint, from a species perspective, how much FTT or HTD can the human race sustain? And for how long?

Oh, the longing for touch, our ardor for human texture, pining for skin and pulse, hungering for hugs and human scent, blood, sweat, and tears, tactile tension and tangible tenderness.

skinship

She is Japanese but was in Paris. She is Japanese and speaks some French and some English. In a note to me, she used the word "skinship." We were talking about loneliness. The need for human contact. The need for human touch. When children are undernourished and underweight, not growing according to accepted benchmarks, pediatricians talk of "failure to thrive." Many factors are typically at play. Might emotional starvation via lack of touch be a candidate for causality?

How about adults and their failure to thrive? Many factors are typically at play. The presence of absence. The absence of touch. Skin on skin. Skin to skin.

Skinship.

At first, I thought she had coined this portmanteau word herself by a lovely accident owing to language hybrids and differences. I had thought she had stumbled upon it unconsciously. She said, no, it's a thing; it's a term in Japan; a mash-up of two languages that catches on. Nevertheless, I was arrested, taken by the word and what it evoked, in me. I was, and am, excited by the possibilities the word incites.

Skinship.

Is it the kinship of those who possess skin, or of those who indulge in skinness, in subtle skin-drenched tactility, ("I couldn't feel, so I learned to touch..." Leonard Cohen), or is it the kinship of those parched from touchlessness, arid and brittle, perhaps the kinship of those who ache for skin kinship but have lost the thread of emotional genealogy? Is it a skinny vessel sailing to unseen horizons, a ship with no cargo except the heavy burden of empty skinship?

We don't know.

Reports are sketchy.

Rumors abound.

The Premier President Prince of Skindinavia will be making an official statement on these matters presently.
 

tight pecs

Tight pecs, she said. The massage therapist. He was on his stomach. When he flipped to the other side, on his back, like a salmon on a cedarwood plank being grilled, she said it again.

Tight pecs.

She said it factually, indifferently, with no judgment implied. Nevertheless, her repeated assessment unsettled him if only because she hadn't said anything at all (nor him either, uncharacteristically), since she had said, All right now. No more talking, enjoy this, at the beginning of the session.

So, he wondered to himself, were my pectoral muscles so tight she could even tell from the back, it was that noticeable oh boy.

He took no blame, felt no shame. What do you expect after all these years, all these chest-tightening events (CTEs), this parade of pectoral crossings?

Then, on his back, posed morgue-corpse-like, eyes REM-fluttering, the massage being so soothing, so somnolent, his mind (and body) drifted off, untethered from orderly language and thought. Pec. Pecs. Peccavi. Penance. Pick a peck. Peckish. Pecking order. Tight pecs. Loose pecs. Henpecked. Pickled.

And so on, peter-pauling off into Faulknerian-Joycean incoherence, and then pre-Freudian, Jungian gibberish.

Her hands continued their soporific, salutary journey, aided by exotic emollients from unnamed islands south of Madagascar. Her healing hands advanced their sacred mission of sensual reparations, carrying the dessicated, wounded cells back from undisclosed unwinnable battlefields.

Her hands.

His mind.

Like a reverse-backward-forward-slo-mo-1980s-MTV video, like a 1960s LSD-laced kaleidoscopic vision of the Desert Fathers, his gibberish scrambled, rescrambled, and jigsaw-puzzle-solved into something reminiscent of language, suggestive of logic.

Her hands regrooved the worn roads of his pecs. YIELD. Work Zone. 

A configuration of notions, letters, syllables, words lined up on the shore of rationality. Sentries or sentinels, reporting for duty. Reporting for sanity.

I got it, he said, a toddler finding his missing marble, the cerulean cat's-eye with turquoise pupil. I got it.

What, she said.

Tight pecs.

What.

It's easy, he said. So simple.

What.

I have tight pecs because they're trying to protect my heart from ever being wounded again, he said.

Oh.

Oh.

She pressed down on the plastic pump, twice, thrice. More emollients for her traveled and trained hands. Back to work.
 

human touch

Not just any touch. Human. After today's healing service, at St. Paul's Cathedral, downtown Syracuse, I wondered, "Why does this move me so?" When the priest puts the oil of chrism on my forehead, and even more when her hands press upon the top of my head, I am moved. I am touched, literally and figuratively. Why is that? Is it out of a deep hunger? A longing for human warmth and connection? To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, in "Prufrock," it is that and so much more. But if I am honest, it is not touch alone. It is smell as well, though I can't seem to name any. (There was no incense, yet in some deep recess the burning wax of candles resonates, I'm sure. And bread, morsels of sacred bread. Isn't all bread sacred? In our family, as kids, back in Stamford, Connecticut, if we dropped bread from the kitchen table, where we dined, our custom was to pick the bread up and kiss it. Was the practice imported from Poland or Slovakia? I should ask my mom, 98.) So today, snowflakes touched my skin, or could have, this late in cruellest April, but they ain't human. My head will touch my pillow and find comfort there, but it ain't human. Which begs the rank and obvious question, "Am I human?" That is not as morose or as depressing as you might first think. Back in high school, Father Giuliani often said we had to be human before anything else, certainly before we could claim to be Christian (or atheist, for that matter). What is it to be human? You could make an argument, couldn't you, that the absence of touch, inhabiting the arid, monastic cells of the Desert Fathers, vacant of human touch beyond my own skin, my own fragrance, would pin me with the solipsistic label inhuman.

the healing touch

You got there late, as is your habit, character flaw, or constant misjudgment of time constraints. St. Paul's Cathedral. Downtown Syracuse. The Hadley Chapel, a dusty taste of Olde England or late 1800s America. Four men, including yourself, scattered in straightback, wicker (?) chairs, a priest at the altar. She invites all to join her around the table. Communion. Co-union. Eucharist. Thanks. The men look sad, you think, but upon reflection find that a misperception. Sadness, yes, but a calm, subtle smiles, serenity, a hunger. You wonder, does the priest feel threatend by these four men in this cramped space? No sign of it. Besides, the sense of spiritual surrender perfumes the air like incense. After the Eucharist, the priest asks you, "Do you want the healing? You were late, and . . ." "Sure, I'm always up for some healing," you interrupt (another habit or flaw or branding characteristic). She walks up to the front. You kneel at the communion railing with its cushions. The priest, who happens to be the rector of the Cathedral parish, tells you how even if you were not present earlier, the fruits of the healing service were yours to taste. She has a small container in her hands, the holy chrism. She asks if there is any need or person you want to mention, on whose behalf you want healing extended. You are caught by surprise. You can't speak. You can name (or not name) dozens of people, endless needs, candidates for unction, salve, and balm. The emotion embarrasses you and you check it, contain it, at least outwardly. "Josephine," you say. "My mom, 98," you get out. The priest anoints your forehead with oil. Her hands touch your forehead. She lays her hands on your head, firmly, not superficially. She holds her hands on your hair, on your head, saying prayers of healing, invoking Christ to heal, repair, comfort. It's not so much the words. You may even have misheard the words. It was the human touch. You wanted to empty yourself by sobbing. Of course, you did not. (How indecorous would it be?) But this hearty touch. And when her hands lifted, you were lighter. Residual moisture rimmed the corners of your eyes. Did she know? You wondered, what if this were the moment your mother died? Does it matter? All would be well. All things would be well.