Getting Under the Skin of Things

Often when I write an image comes to mind, a hand with claw like fingers, piercing the skin of an arm. They dig down and wriggle under, sludging through flesh, knuckles forming bump after bump on the surface of the skin. The image never seems painful or gross. Both parties seem in on the act, the fingers more distressed than the arm, if anything. Frustrated that they can’t clear the flesh, break the bone and emerge the other side.

At first I thought this was manifestation of my insanity. Finally proof! But later I realised this image is simply analogous to writing. Analogous to artistic endeavour, symbolic of the frustrating clawing and digging we undertake.

Let me explain.

From my balcony I can see trees, unkempt hedges, a lit candle dripping onto a table and a bottle of wine. I can hear foreign words dance on the wind, the receding heat of the day still lingering. This is the surface. The hairs and follicles, bumps and moles that occupy the outer skin of the world. Easily touched. Malleable and evident. The stimuli our senses detect and interpret.

But what we really care about as writers is what is going on underneath. Pierce the skin and you get the fleshy abstract, the image of a tree, mental rather than physical, an idea tied up in emotion and meaning. Not as it is, but as it is in relation to us. This can be what it provides such as fire, shelter and oxygen. Or what it may mean, perhaps purity, growth or a naturalness unachievable by construction or machine. I’ll bet your ideal image of a tree isn’t evil. Probably it is bathed in sunlight and a couple are stood underneath, kissing.

And from one abstract we move to another and to another. In our heads physical objects become conceptually linked. Bees, berries and orange peel make honey, jam and marmalade. They are tied together in consciousness under the title condiments. In the physical world these things are disparate, expect of course for their physicality, but in our minds they find commonality. They find category and meaning. This is unfashionably anthropocentric but it is how we write, always in reference to ourselves. We can’t help but, the self being ever inescapable.

And here is where most of us skate, on this web of abstracts, non physical but oh so very real, linking everything we can touch, taste, hear, smell and see in innumerable different ways. These links spread sideways for mile upon mile, twisting country roads and roaring intellectual highways, paths for our minds to race between concepts.

Yet at this level we are still just below the surface, still clawing through flesh, not a bone in sight. We search for deeper webs, the downward spread of concepts, those that are simpler, that explain more of the world, that link with more elegance. An attempt to find the answer. It is just the same as the movement between individual, family, society and species. Categories that become ever more fundamental, more essential, yet all the more complex, expansive and incomprehensible.

Scientists get less stuck. Their world is smaller and their tools sharper. They have reason and logic, adept at penetrating a world of ones and zeros, lined up waiting to be measured. For us, things are stickier and fluffier. Creativity and interpretation have nothing on reason and logic, but they are all we’ve got. Our romantic dispositions refusing to let us define down the world. Forcing it to stay complex, innumerable and exceedingly difficult to work out. Often overwhelming and always frustrating.

Even as I write I can feel skin pressing down on the top of my head, compressing my chin into my neck. An article about digging deeper failing to dig deep enough, missing the larger point, not making the links. Failing to bring it all in under one big satisfying net. Herein lies the perennial frustration of the artist, the font from which the tortured painter chained to his garret springs. We try to explain too much. It is so often beyond us. There is always a nagging, gnawing sensation that what we’ve created contains a certain truth, but that it misses the truth. That it doesn’t penetrate, doesn’t dig deep enough. Doesn’t crack bone as we’d like it to. The bottom of the pool always out of reach, your lungs begging for oxygen and your ears ringing with the pressure.

But we go on drowning, knowing that the surface will never compare once you’ve glimpsed what is down below.

You can follow Joseph on twitter @josephalextodd

Read more at www.jatodd.com

Photos by Colin & Marek