Vaseline

A part of my ongoing Dead God project on sentient oil.

My skin is falling off. A minor annoyance. My immune system has a quirk where it overreacts to certain common yeasts, and causes my skin cells to reproduce at an accelerated rate: psoriasis. Somehow, this condition could someday work its way into my body from its current perch on my surface, and cause arthritis.

Nonetheless a minor medical annoyance; I’d rather be alive with psoriasis than any other option available to me. I do courses of steroid creams and hair oils once an a while, but you can’t use that all the time. Due to conceptual and chemical innovations in rheumatology, there exist oral medications that would correct this condition, but they make you feel sick, and a course of them is at least a month. I’m far too busy to deal with that right now. I’m already struggling mightily (and failing) under the obligation to see a dentist once in a while.

So I live with it, and that entails smearing generic-brand petroleum jelly (brandname Vaseline) on psoriatic lesions, after thorough exfoliation. What I do is pour a quarter of the little bottle of Tea Tree Oil (which used to be expensive but now available at Trader Joes), right on top of that rod wax — as it used to be known — then stir up the container with my finger. The petrolatum (its scientific name) forms a moisture barrier that keeps the tea tree active on the skin for a longer time, since the tea tree only does anything while it is wet. I have to add more tea tree oil to the jar periodically, since it doesn’t penetrate the rod wax easily.

Throughout these rituals, I wonder what I don’t know about Robert Chesebrough.

What I do know is how to tell his story as it became Chesebrough Ponds (bought by Unilever 1986) corporate lore and marketing copy: He was a chemist who worked at a small-scale refinery that made lamp fuel out of vegetable oils, tallow, and whale oil. When Petrolia came online in 1859, he was quickly made redundant. He traveled out to the oilfields to see if he couldn’t find a way to make good. He started hanging around Oil Creek, watching the drilling process. He noticed a waxy, pale substance that coated the equipment, the drillbits, and that the oilmen rubbed on their many injuries. Rod wax, they called it.

He found Vaseline, he didn’t synthesize it. He just figured out a way to purify it and turn it into the first major petroleum byproduct commodity. The substance we now call Vaseline is naturally occurring; it comes out of the well along with the crude oil and the methane, depending on local conditions. Natural medicine by any definition, but you’ll never find that on a Vaseline label because it feels synthetic, doesn’t it? (by now all the Vaseline is synthetic, actually; cheaper to synthesize it than to filter the natural material.)

And then the kicker: He ate a spoonful of Vaseline every day. And he lived to age 96.

Chesebrough feeding himself a spoonful of white petrolatum every day until his death in 1933 presages the Dead God’s conquest of the human body. This was a process that began even before oil drilling began; the oil from seepages in Appalachia, called Rock Oil, was marketed widely as a cure-all, including by this jingle which would be at home in Gravity’s Rainbow but is reproduced in The Prize (Yergin):

There’s various kind of oil afloat, Cod liver, Castor, Sweet;

Which tend to make a sick man well, and set him on his feet.

But our’s a curious feat performs: We just a well obtain,

and set the people crazy with “Oil on the brain.”

There’s neighbor Smith, a poor young man, Who couldn’t raise a dime;

Had clothes which boasted many rents. And too his “nip” on time.

But now he’s clad in dandy style, Sports diamonds, kids, and cane;

And his success was owing to “Oil on the brain.”

While Chesebrough’s daily nip of Vaseline likely didn’t keep him healthy, neither did it harm him; it did make him wealthy. The spoonful of Vaseline a day was a hyperstitional entity of the coming pharmaceutical sciences as an appendage of a larger medical apparatus, which would forever alter the human body, collective and individual, in yet another way creating a barrier of artificiality between the human and the animal/natural. As Donna Haraway would say, making cyborgs of ourselves. The general medical apparatus is fundamentally dependent on chemical inputs derived from petroleum. The small pills you take daily are carefully rearranged bundles of petrochemicals, different from plastics only in the specifics of the particular relationships between atoms — reduce the scale any more and you’ll enter the realm of the Void — usually high-energy bonds of various types.

At the level of medical practice, crude oil has been so abstracted as to be completely unrecognizable, especially to the scientists and doctors involved with the Industry. But you can’t make something out of nothing; if the ingredients in your pill aren’t petrochemicals themselves, they were only placed into the pill with the assistance of petrochemical solvents.

Pharmaceuticals are only a small part of the medical apparatus; sometime after Oil’s incorporation as the basis of human material production, there developed a new type of medicine, we call today Western Medicine, in contradistinction to the preexisting human medical practices. The medical apparatus is much more than its petrochemical inputs; industrialization was a necessary condition for western medicine, but not sufficient. The modern medical apparatus is built out of a lot of scientific work and capital investment. But of course, like every other facet of life in the twenty first century, it requires large energetic and chemical inputs.

The modern formation of health care was tremendously successful: lifespans were extended as it eliminated hundreds of causes of death, diseases, and yes also disabilities. And so it came to pass that bodies were integrated into the petrocapitalist structure, changing the very understanding of Life and rearranging the economy around medical institutions. It does not all boil down to oil; there is a lot of other stuff in there. But the medical apparatus would never be able to function without plastics, without disposability, without Vaseline, without pills, or without electricity. Oil is a precondition for cyborg life, just as it is a precondition for digital life.

My skin is still falling off.