Humans as habitat
Apologies if you were hoping for more photos of Yorkshire: this one is about parasites
I’m working on some writing about the ways humans think of ourselves as different to other animals (in a different way to the way we think animals are different to other animals).
I’ve been writing about all the things you’d expect I should, like our obsession with rationality, but I’ve also been thinking about permeability and how humans don’t like being permeable. I have a particular problem with sounds getting inside my head - Ed Yong points out in An immense world that the sense that hearing is most closely related to is touch, and who likes having their brain touched? - but even well-balanced humans mostly don’t like their bodies being invaded.
Luckily we have Olivia Laing, who writes about all of this much better in Everybody. For example, she writes about Phillip Guston’s paintings of the Ku Klux Klan, wearing their robes designed to show only the eyes. ‘The white robes are also sexless, while the hoods have no mouths, which is to say no appetite. Everything about them is designed to attest to purity, to differentiate them from the animal bodies of the swarm… It makes me wonder if what drives prejudice is at root horror of the body itself. After all, as Sade observed, the body can be a terrifying place: open and insatiable, helpless and dependent. Hatred is a way of displacing this annihilating fear onto other bodies, asserting a magnificent autonomy, a freedom from the sullying, hopelessly interdependent life of flesh.’
Which has led to me writing about interdependence, and the largely misplaced human conviction that each of us is an individual. Except that in many cases we are as much an ecosystem as we are an individual. Being human is wild. Wild in both senses: untamed, and so strange as to be beyond understanding. We are a wild part of that wild world, full of and covered in creatures who are utterly undomesticated.
Demodex folliculorum lives only on the skin of humans: we are its sole habitat. If Covid-19 had wiped us out, if the next pandemic does, D folliculorum goes extinct alongside us. This tiny mite lives its entire life at the base of hair follicles on our faces, mating and raising its babies and dying, primarily on our cheeks, noses and foreheads, because our oil glands make the nicest homes. At night, they travel up to 16mm across our skin. Its close relative, D brevis, has a very similar life and also lives nowhere but on humans. These small creatures - who apparently help keep our pores unblocked - could be headed for extinction. I thought it would be because we’ve gotten so good at washing our faces, but no: the mites barely notice it, tucked away in our pores. It’s because they’re becoming more and more specialised to human faces, shedding genes, simplifying, and relying on us to provide some of their functions for them.
I’m getting on to thinking about all the bacteria that use us as their habitat and without whom we couldn’t function, but I’ve enjoyed this small detour into face-mite-world, and into wondering about all the species whose extinctions don’t seem to bother us a bit (we fret about the thylacine, but not much about the parasites that relied on it for their existence, for example).
Reading
James Bradley told me to read Chuck Wendig’s Wanderers, so that was my weekend done for. I’d have written a whole lot more rambling nonsense about our bodies’ non-existent boundaries if I hadn’t been completely obsessed with reading this massive pandemic/artificial intelligence dystopia. Reading books set in pandemics isn’t as fun as it used to be, but Chuck still makes it very hard to not read just one more chapter, then just one more, then just…
Knitting
I have been knitting Goldwing for about a year, because I am very slow at knitting. I’m making it in dark brown with pale blue pattern, and it’s very pretty and I’m halfway through the pattern on the second sleeve, which means I’m almost done. Wish me luck.
I like the reference to Olivia Laing (I immediately grabbed "Funny Weather," thinking maybe you'd quoted the wrong book as there's an article about Phillip Guston in that, but no, it doesn't contain that quote....I must read "Everybody" soon.) And yes, it is a shame about those photos of Yorkshire, when parasites are famously so.....um....non-photogenic...
This might be good for thinking about bodies too, if you want to think about them some more https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/439526/art-monsters-by-elkin-lauren/9781784742935