by Brian Dillon
I must have grown used to the feeling that my body was betraying me, because I recall clearly the moment when it stopped being merely an embarrassing nuisance and became an obsession. My mother had recently returned from one of her increasingly regular stays in hospital when, one evening, as she examined my scalp, she wondered aloud whether it might be psoriasis. Suddenly, my suffering had a name, and worse: my mother proceeded to describe (to my father, as if I were not in the room) the psoriatic patients in the ward she had just left. She spoke, I remember, of their condition as if it were worse than her own. I shuddered at her account of a disease I was immediately convinced was about to condemn me to a lifetime of pain and disfigurement. I had no notion that this might be a disorder one could live with, or that my own very mild case was unlikely to blossom into florid and agonizing life all over my body. I thought I was doomed.
Psoriasis became my imagined destiny. Without once voicing my fear to anybody, I began to think of my body as possessed by a hideous secret which was at the same time quite visible to everybody around me. I started to anticipate my body’s betrayals; it might give me away at any moment, mark me out as diseased, grotesque, an animated image of decay and barely contained horror. My discomfort, in fact, was in itself manageable: I learned to control the urge, as the itch overcame me like a cloud of tiny biting insects, to scratch till my scalp bled. At times, heat and embarrassment would set up a hideous relay, each feeding the flame of the other until my head might as well have been on fire, such was my distress. I did my best to keep such attacks to myself. But it was more difficult to control the evidence, and I lived in constant fear of having to name the condition that sent an uninterrupted blizzard of dead skin drifting from my raw, red scalp. Haircuts became a trial before which I would have to steel myself for days in case a hairdresser might recoil when faced with the full horror. Of course, my ‘condition’ was nothing like as appalling as I imagined, and the gap between my extreme reaction and the perception of those around me ought to have been a clue that the origin of my terror lay elsewhere: in a growing, generalized obsession with the frailty of my own bodily integrity. Sometimes, the gap would close. I remember our next-door neighbour, a hairdresser, commenting to my mother that my intractable itch was probably, as she put it, ‘psychosomatic’. I remember my mother remarking later that it was odd that I should be afflicted with psoriasis, as sufferers were usually of a ‘nervous’ disposition. Even at the time (I must have been about twelve), I was amazed that she had failed to notice that I lived in a state of perpetual agitation, and that the source of my fear was precisely my inexplicable itch.
My affliction provided me with an elaborate, and wholly private, personal mythology. I was convinced, for the best part of a decade, that my daily struggle with constant discomfort presaged a lifetime – a brief lifetime – of disease and disfigurement. I suppose it is not unusual for a nervous teenager to imagine not making it to adulthood, but I seem to have taken a sense of my own impending demise to quite outrageous extremes. For a time, I took to hanging around the medical section of our local library, giddy and tearful, amassing grisly evidence of the horrors to come. I foresaw my whole body colonized by livid expanses of weeping and flaking skin. I discovered that the disease might even attack my fingernails, and gave up hours to a vigilant watch over the signs I was sure had already appeared. I found out that at its worst, psoriasis was linked to the onset of a particularly vicious form of arthritis, and began, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, to calculate how many years of mobility I might have left. At one point, I convinced myself that my perilous prognosis was plain to see, and came to dread even leaving the house. At the slightest glance from a stranger, I fancied that my physical decline was the object of hushed and revolted comment. I fantasized an entire narrative of diagnosis, failed treatment and a miserable future, based on the notion that I would eventually be spotted in the street by a passing dermatologist and swiftly transported to the kind of ward that my mother had once described.
This grim and elaborate fantasy continued for many years. I suppose that I was free of it only in my early twenties, when I had conspicuously failed to succumb to a more concerted and generalized attack, or to acquire any of the ancillary symptoms I was sure were ahead of me. (I had by then anyway substituted other terrors for this one.) I had always imagined that I would be dead by twenty-three: why this specific calculation, I have no idea. In the meantime, I had kept my fears entirely to myself. If they found an outlet, it was in a secret obsession with the life and works of the television playwright Dennis Potter, who famously suffered for most of his adult life from a particularly severe case of psoriatic arthropathy (precisely the prognosis I felt sure awaited me). I had watched The Singing Detective – the series in which Potter dramatized his own illness alongside the comically noirish fantasies which his fictional stand-in deploys to take his mind off his ruined body – in horrified fascination. I devoured every published script, every article or interview I could find for references to the writer’s illness, feverishly imagining a frail hope for myself in the image of a crippled man making a career for himself out of his circumstance. Potter, I learned, was assured of spending six months of every year completely at the mercy of his disease; the rest, he said, he spent writing. I took to imagining myself similarly constrained, and wondered if I would have the presence of mind to take advantage of what little relief medical science might be able to give me. I must have devoted, if one counts up the remembered hours, whole weeks to such giddy speculations. That I might have been swiftly disabused of my carefully tended terrors by a quick trip to a doctor (it was the one ailment I never took to a doctor) is only the first, comic, irony which they now conjure up for me. (What sort of idiot, I have often wondered since, spends the best part of a decade convinced of his own imminent collapse?) But they seem too to have belatedly taught me something: a lesson about the intimacy of the body, memory and unacknowledged loss.
¶ Dermographia
‘Psychosomatic’: the word which our neighbour had used so casually to describe my affliction sounded time and again in my mind over the years. I was always half aware that my symptoms were in part invented (this is one of the tricks that hypochondria plays: allowing just enough doubt to let its subject keep a hold on hope, thereby making every real or imagined symptom seem all the more terrifying). The word certainly describes my predicament, but it fails to capture the exact psychological mechanism by which I came to present such a manifest and enigmatic set of signs. An assumption that has passed into common sense tells us that the skin displays on a single plane the obscure and confused depths of unconscious emotion. The skin is a sort of screen on which are projected all the secret and unspeakable fears and desires which we would like to contain (but which we also long to express). According to this way of thinking, all the psychic flow is in one direction: towards the surface, where the emotional slurry we cannot process is poured out on to this pristine surface, scarring it, discolouring it.
The idea that the skin is the visible expression of the unconscious (and not merely, say, the evidence of moral purity or corruption) has its origins in the work of the French psychiatrist Jean-Martin Charcot. From 1862 until his death in 1893, Charcot, as head of the Salpêtrière clinic in Paris, produced a vast photographic record of his ‘hysteric’ patients and their alarming symptoms. Among the more extraordinary manifestations of their disease (largely performed for the camera at the instruction of Charcot and his colleagues, or painfully induced in accordance with an already documented typology) was the phenomenon of ‘dermographia’, whereby all manner of telling or mysterious legends were inscribed spontaneously on the flesh of the patients. At least two women are recorded as presenting, on their backs, the word ‘Satan’; in one celebrated case, a woman’s arm bore the livid inscription ‘Urticaria’: another name for dermographia. Most, if not all, of these ostensible messages from within were in fact the result of a painful tracing of the words on the skin by Charcot and his staff, or of
a crude retouching of the photographic evidence. But such methods could easily (if in bad faith) be excused as bringing out the truth rather than fabricating it, and seem not to have lessened Charcot’s faith in the notion that the flesh could speak its pain. Later, his student, Freud, would refine his mentor’s overly dramatic scenography of the skin to a more subtle exchange between mind and body (Charcot, said Freud, was not a ‘thinker’ but an ‘artist’). The secrets of the unconscious would no longer be literally written on the body, but would slip out, unnoticed, in a vast array of tiny clues and ciphers: the skin would become a conduit from inside to outside, rather than the parchment on which desire, fear and guilt were carved in legible figures.
In my case, I think, rather, that the skin itself was at issue. I used my skin not to express but to reflect: it was the mirror of the skin with which I could not otherwise reconcile myself: my mother’s. The skin, we are told, expresses the self: but it might be equally accurate to say that the self is a function of being in one’s skin. Skin (the state of my skin, its prickling or burning, its relative calm, its embarrassing oiliness or dry friability) was what made me, not the other way round. I lived, as it were, at the extremity of my own body: a surface which I thought might betray me without warning, revealing my fearful lack of a comfortable or coherent presence in the world. I was in constant retreat from my skin, and at the same time condemned to keep feeling its sensitivity to the world, to the air, to things: all of which, I imagined, threatened to agitate or injure my skin.
One way to interpret my adventure in my skin might be to say that all of my unspoken fears about my mother’s illness had risen to the surface of my own body, there to compose a legible alphabet of expressive fissures and contusions. But over the years I have come to prefer an alternative metaphorical model for the affinity between her disease and my infinitely less serious disorder. In the absence of any way of communicating my turmoil in the face of my mother’s illness, it seems to me now that my psoriasis was less an expressive medium than a sort of mirroring: as if, by elaborating my own epidermal map of woe, I could signal across the space between us all that I could not express in words. Perhaps the difference seems excessively subtle; I mean simply this: that although between us no touch seemed possible in those last years of her illness, I had made of my own half-fancied affliction a way of feeling myself closer to her. When she died, I still carried with me, written on my cracked, peeling scalp, a relic of her pain.
¶ Carapace
My father died on a Monday morning while taking a walk after going to Mass (as, in the last couple of years of his life, he did every day). When, a few hours later, my brothers and I were taken to see his body at the hospital, he was still wearing the clothes in which he had set out that morning. In public, my father’s attire hardly varied in all the time I knew him. He made, it is true, some concession to the seasons by varying the weight and thickness of the fabrics he wore, and was even known, especially on holiday, to let himself relax to the extent of wearing a short-sleeved, open-necked shirt. But for the most part he maintained a degree of formality in his dress that was unusual even in a middle-aged civil servant of reasonable seniority and respectable habits. I rarely saw him leave the house without a shirt and tie. Of course, he wore a suit to work, but he never succumbed to the ludicrous fashion (now so generalized as to be invisible) for the ‘business suit’: his was instead of a more cultured vintage; it denoted respectability and, in his choice of fabrics, a vague intellectualism. Every morning, he would choose from a selection of heavy tweed numbers which he persisted, till the year he died, in having regularly tailor-made at either of the two outfitters (no more current terminology would capture their hushed, archaic air) which seemed to be the only clothes shops he ever frequented. Even his socks were things of sturdy and faintly forbidding fabric: I still possess a single pair, perfectly serviceable if a little too woolly for daily wear. They topped a variety of equally indestructible shoes, each pair polished to such a high sheen that you would think he’d have worn them away over the years, so vigorously did he attack them each Sunday morning. They seemed instead to grow stronger with each frenzied buffeting of brush and cloth, developing a protective layer that was as rigid and impermeable as his overall appearance. But it was mostly his suits that defined him. They varied, over the years, only in the occasional nod to changes in tailoring which could hardly be called fashion: his lapels widened ever so slightly, then contracted as if breathing a sigh of relief once that worrying trend had passed. I suppose that the tailors who made these suits must have prided themselves on ensuring that the customer moved as if he had been born in their garments, but I think my father outdid their expectations: he really did look as though his was a second skin. When I think of my father’s physical presence, I think of fabrics: rough tweed, its lighter summer twin, nicely fading corduroy, shirts which might have been starched had my mother actually indulged such old-fashioned excesses (she didn’t; he seemed to leach his own starch into them). With such attire came a bearing that never wavered from a poise stuck somewhere between natural elegance and rigid unease. (It is there already in the photograph of my parents crossing O’Connell Bridge: his uprightness might signal confidence or nerves.) It made him look, too, as if he’d arrived from another time entirely: he stands out, even in photographs from his youth, as an emissary from some more dignified, but also hidebound, era.
His elegance didn’t save him from the indignity of dying in public: he collapsed in the street, and I wonder now whether the nurses who led me to see his body that summer morning had laid him out as neatly as possible, had re-buttoned his shirt and straightened his tie so that his sons would see the same sedulous attention to detail in his death as they had in the living body that never let down its sartorial guard. Later, after the funeral, the hospital returned to us the clothes in which he had died, bundled in a transparent blue plastic bag. We placed it in a corner of his bedroom, where, as I recall, it remained unopened for years, but not unregarded. I was terrified of opening it, of handling the clothes that had been so close to his death. Instead, I went through the rest of his wardrobe, trying to find something of his that I could wear. I discovered the last suit that he had had made: a lightweight green tweed which he must have worn only a handful of times. I tried on the jacket, but it was too small, as was everything else. And so I found (though I could not have admitted to it at the time) another way of paying belated homage to my father’s flawless attire. I started to dress like him, or in as close an approximation as I could muster. I made of my body a sort of secret memorial to my father’s lifelong, anachronous attachment to sartorial rigour; I came to believe, I think, that if I could maintain this façade, I would somehow keep at bay the reality of his actual passing. I sported a succession of second-hand tweed jackets and cords, took to wearing (at great cost) leather-soled shoes that required almost monthly repair, ended up unable to venture out without a waistcoat. (I stopped short of the tie: I had at least the presence of mind to realize my scrawny frame couldn’t carry off the whole look without a certain comic aspect, which might, of course, have been present anyway.) And when I began to suspect my motive for this neurotic reliance on always looking the same, I had at least the consolation that its origin passed largely unnoticed: I could easily be dismissed as a rather tediously fastidious youth. In truth, I had come to resemble, by an affinity which is less morbid than it first appears, my father’s corpse: an image carefully composed to mask a mournful truth.
¶ Ossuary
Years later, I have this dream. I am in our family’s house, standing in the hall, and I know (though they’re not yet visible) that my brothers and my father are there too. Everything is more or less as it had been, except for one detail that immediately strikes me as odd: it is night, and every light in the house is on. The doors leading off the hall are closed, and I move towards the staircase unseen. As I climb the stairs, I listen for my father’s presence: if he discovers that the whole house is illuminated, he will, I i
magine, immediately start turning lights off, closing doors, reminding me that he is paying for my comfort (the house is warm, too: even here on the landing, everything seems bathed in an uncharacteristic glow). But I’m not unduly worried: the house is quiet and I suppose that my father is downstairs in the sitting room, in his usual armchair, reading. On the landing, I look to my left and notice that my parents’ bedroom door is slightly ajar: I can see that there, too, the light is on. I open the door a little further and slip into the empty room, where again nothing has changed from the time I knew it. That is, it looks like an impossible version of itself: all my parents’ belongings are there, as if every stage in the room’s history had somehow come to inhabit the same moment. Just inside the door, several untidy stacks of books totter alongside the wall, the last few piled a little higher in the corner between the right-hand wall and the large, white, built-in wardrobe in front of me. One of its doors is open: inside, I can make out the dull green of my father’s last suit. The bed to my left looks freshly made: on the left, a single pillow for my father; on the right, two or three piled up where my mother slept with her head raised (a sign of her illness, I now realize: her restricted airways demanded it). On either side of the bed, all the usual paraphernalia are intact: yet more stacks of books on the left, and in the narrow space in front of them, a tiny radio with a single earpiece. The table on the right holds, as expected, a neater collection of my mother’s books: on top, her Bible. Still alert for a sound downstairs, I round the end of the bed to come into the other side of the room, where my parents’ dressing table stands as before by the window. Everything that ought to be there is apparently in its proper place: my father’s pipes, his ashtray and tattered brown wallet, my mother’s jewellery, her black plastic hairbrush (between its white bristles, a net of jet-black hair). But something is subtly different: the wood of the dressing table seems to glow, reflecting a light that I do not remember as ever having been so bright in this room.
