Just start looking at the button,
the double six, or our own bones to
begin to understand that underneath it all,
in the depths of our being, is where
the skin grows.
Grassa Toro
There is nothing deeper than the skin. Paul Valéry’s oracular and prophetic poem opens up perspectives that are independent of its author to demonstrate what the poet knew: that the uncertain epidermis of time in which all narratives are inscribed dwells in each of us, although only good poets know how to say it, tell it, teach it…
The skin is a connector. A conduit of emotions
in which all the stories that link us
to “the others” and “the other” are recorded.
With the others, she will weave together a thread of figures as real as they are ghostly, figures we will never know for sure whether they are part of or different from that first epidermal figure who welcomed us before words intervened, before we knew how to channel our desires, before we knew fear and vertigo: the figure of the mother. That figure that represents, contains, inaugurates as a subject and as a role, the invention of an origin, the starting point of a journey always open to the unpredictable, to the future, to the unheard-of that is every biography, always to be written, before life ends. And the others, radically others, those with whom we weave the fabric of who we are, with whom we fantasise about what we would have liked to be and were not, those who open unexpected shortcuts to pleasures or misfortunes that are always fundamental to starting, accompanying, enjoying, suffering, and concluding stories. Without those others, we are not. They are the ones who sustain the possibility of our being, the probability of being unique and at the same time equal, the improbable eventuality of truly becoming human.
Cristina Santamarina
He who sees within himself as in an immense universe and carries within him milky ways, also knows how irregular the paths are, leading to chaos and the labyrinth of existence.
Friedrich Nietzsche