Under the Skin

[Image: page/installment #11 (2019-03-12) in Chapter 1 — “Claws that Catch” — of Obverse & Reverse, part 2 of the long-running Skin Deep webcomic from Kory Bing. See the note at the foot of this post for more information… or, even better, just read the comic from start to finish.]

From whiskey river:

Have an uncomfortable mind; be strange. Be disturbed: by what is happening on the planet, and to it; by the cruelty and stupidity humanity is capable of; by the unbearable beauty of certain music, and the mysteries and failures of love, and the brief, confusing, exhilarating hour of your own life.

(Kim Addonizio [source])

…and:

I Have Just Said

I have just said
something
ridiculous to you
and in response,

your glorious laughter.
These are the days
the sun
is swimming back

to the coast
and the light on the water
gleams
as never, it seems, before.

I can’t remember
every spring,
I can’t remember
everything—

so many years!
Are the morning kisses
the sweetest
or the evenings

or the inbetweens?
All I know
is that “thank you” should appear
somewhere.

So just in case
I can’t find
the perfect place—
“Thank you, thank you.”

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

As I see it, to refuse the possibility of finding another person interesting, complex and as complicated as oneself is a form of violence. At bottom, this is a refusal of nuance, and I wish to posit that nuance is sacred. To call it sacred is to value it so highly that we find it fitting to somehow set it apart as something to which we’re forever committed. Nuance refuses to envision others degradingly, denying them the content of their own experience, and talks us down tenderly from the false ledges we’ve put ourselves on. When we take it on as a sacred obligation, nuance also delivers us out of the deadly habit of cutting people out of our own imaginations. This opens us up to the possibility of at least occasionally finding one another beautiful, the possibility of communion.

(David Dark [source])

Not from whiskey river:

The Spirit Is Too Blunt an Instrument

The spirit is too blunt an instrument
to have made this baby.
Nothing so unskilful as human passions
could have managed the intricate
exacting particulars: the tiny
blind bones with their manipulating tendons,
the knee and the knucklebones, the resilient
fine meshings of ganglia and vertebrae,
the chain of the difficult spine.

Observe the distinct eyelashes and sharp crescent
fingernails, the shell-like complexity
of the ear, with its firm involutions
concentric in miniature to minute
ossicles. Imagine the
infinitesimal capillaries, the flawless connections
of the lungs, the invisible neural filaments
through which the completed body
already answers to the brain.

Then name any passion or sentiment
possessed of the simplest accuracy.
No, no desire or affection could have done
with practice what habit
has done perfectly, indifferently,
through the body’s ignorant precision.
It is left to the vagaries of the mind to invent
love and despair and anxiety
and their pain.

(Anne Stevenson [source])

…and:

Sous-Entendu

Don’t think

that I don’t know
that as you talk to me
the hand of your mind
is inconspicuously
taking off my stocking,
moving in resourceful blindness
up along my thigh.

Don’t think
that I don’t know
that you know
everything I say
is a garment.

(Anne Stevenson [source])

…and:

God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside of God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they will disappear…

You may ask why God sometimes hides in the form of horrible people, or pretends to be people who suffer great disease and pain. Remember, first, that he isn’t really doing this to anyone but himself. Remember, too, that in almost all the stories you enjoy there have to be bad people as well as good people, for the thrill of the tale is to find out how the good people will get the better of the bad. It’s the same as when we play cards. At the beginning of the game we shuffle them all into a mess, which is like the bad things in the world, but the point of the game is to put the mess into good order, and the one who does it best is the winner. Then we shuffle the cards once more and play again, and so it goes with the world.

(Alan Watts [source])

…and:

Knots & Splices

Take hold of the bitter end;
pass carefully around
the standing part,
being mindful of the bight.
Finish with a round turn,
make the knot up tight
and it will not slip under load.

But you’ll find it not
so easily undone;
dangerous in the dark and cold
and wet, when it matters most.
These knots command allegiances.

The Turk’s head and midshipman’s bend,
the lighterman’s hitch and
the hangman’s noose.
See what names mean:
Knots are men.

Facing page—a simple eye-splice.
Apply a whipping at the end
so no strands come loose
in the braid. The knot will hold
Anything you care to bind.

(Bruce F. Murphy [source])

__________________

About the image: The Skin Deep storyline as a whole began in November, 2006, with part 1: “Orientations.” (The page excerpted above is the one published last week: March 12, 2019.) Briefly, Skin Deep is the tale of a young woman named Michelle — pronounced “Mee-shell” — who goes away to college in a big city and, while there, picks up and dons a medallion she sees dropped by a mysterious cloaked figure. Things Go Terribly Wrong for Michelle, as they often do for people caught up in sagas involving odd trinkets: while she’s using a computer that weekend, her hands begin turning into clawed paws (“What the CRAP?”). She awakens from a stupor to discover that she’s now in a forest, as a young winged sphinx named Michelle. Further, her roommate Merial has become a nixie; Merial’s boyfriend Jim, a gryphon; and their friend — later Michelle’s boyfriend — Greg, a satyr… The medallion, it seems, has not launched Michelle (et al.) into a fantasy: it has stripped away the fantasy of everyday life as she thought she’d been living it. In a way, the whole series is about what Alan Watts called, in The Book, the Game of Hide-and-Seek (a/k/a the Game of Black-and-White).

In 2009, the webcomic went on a brief hiatus. In its place — and later, during other extended breaks — Bing ran a series of questions asked of the series’ characters by readers; the answers were provided, as sketches, by those characters. E.g.:

(I love that the characters seem — if shorn of their speech balloons — so cute and friendly. But they’re often quite spiky verbally… See? Hide-and-seek!)

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