P E R M E A B L E S K I N S

Martha Petry

Abrasion

Some men dreamed of women's skin so smooth, so young, so unblemished that they would take their lovers out of the billowing cool tents, one by one, and sit holding their heads vise-like between their thighs, and gently under the glare of the hottest of suns and with the thin blade of a knife's edge would bring it down upon their faces.

She prayed: Emery,
                                      pumice,
                       sandpaper,
               make clean these wounds of my face.


by the skin of one's teeth
        get under one's skin
have a thick skin
        have a thin skin
in with a whole skin
        no skin off one's back
save one's skin
        under the skin
skin alive
I think about these things we create these hypertexts as part of our skin not thread, not warp or woof weaving, not bone or body or sinew, but as skin, as permeable and open as the eyes on our faces, as fine as spun silk, as strong as gut. Skin is fluid.

In storyspace, the words open as the readers open to a world of boxes and places, lines and links, and what we see here or in the formed book is the outer membrane, the surface layer, the rind or peel of fruit, a film on liquid. Skin is thought for space, wrapping its dermal layers around a body that is never still, but is always shifting, sliding, gaining fat or energy, continually growing, shedding, wrinkling, smoothing. There is no belief in emerging order, the skin is what you feel, sense, see, experience, touch. You notice bits of it: the scar of tissue by the corner of my mouth, the ribbon of darkness an iron burn on the back of my palm; how the sweat forms at the nape of my neck. If you would look under the layers of my winter sweaters, you would see other things: how there are several moles or how my underarm hair grows, how the color of my nipples echoes the color of my skin. A skin that is ready to be read. ...the meaning of narrative is not in its space but but rather exists for the space of its unfolding. My body exists for the space of its unfolding. Where will you look first?

madras

"What did you do there ?" I ask her. It is only making talk.

"I was a whore."

She says this so calmly that I think of cotton, her darkly tanned skin against cotton, the sound of strange birds, saffron.

"It seemed a natural enough profession for an army brat, and I had a very expensive habit. A man in Hong Kong offered to manage me in such a venture. He said that Indian men were very repressed, but would pay a fortune for a club whore. He offered full benefits, so to speak, but I had to dye my hair blonde, if you can imagine..."

It's the first that is always so disconcerting, isn't it? or is it the imaginings? Say. Molly Bloom, at Ulysees end, remembers her first and the whole welter of past and present and future Leopold and Stephen and Mulvey come welling up, merging, interacting. You can see my body whole if you look at the skin, outermost living area (epidermis sheathing the corium composed of connective tissue, blood and lymph vessels, sweat glands, hair follicles, and an elaborate sensory nerve network). What will you say when you suddenly see this skin's story? Will it be only a dark presentiment of things to come? You know that your reading will change the color of my skin, its array and configuration. I will change yours, if you let me look.

I wonder

Imagine the trident wrapped in gold and black mylar, imagine him watching the harem girls, and at the slightest thickening of his genitals, the gold and black prevents his moving outward.

If. . . what a big if looms there. . .or can you imagine that, reading and writing hypertext is creating one self, ourselves, risking the simultaneity of shedding and birthing new skin, then you will learn that it is not unlike making love, giving/taking/receiving/bestowing in a dance that hasn't a first, a second, a third. It is a story of listening and moving and talking and being alive to the flow of words, often threatening, sometimes risky, rough and ready, the breath of skin open, pulsing, permeable.

The open spaces are what I become fascinated by in hypertext. There is space enough between the letters and the shift of typefont and comma, to trace a lover's small hollow curve of back and remember the touch of wool or corduroy against my ankle's curve, begin a new imprint of skin. In storyspace I can touch your skin, place a rose or stone, see the plane of water, make it my own. Other images accrue, other stories unfold and are present. There is no closure. Desire is to fill the orifices and to become an orifice for filling.

Lost Missionary

Babies swelled in a ring around my abdomen, they ripened in seconds and consumed me and exploded my skin to escape.

Is this co-authoring or simply reading and reading and reading? How should we talk about seeing bodies through their skins? One skin shimmers next to another, porous worlds intermingling. All changes with . . .Recognition. Sympathy. Witness. . . The art of it is in the dancing barefoot, letting the skin show, all the while knowing that your dance can change mine, mine yours, sometimes in sync, sometimes out of rhythm, but always present to what yet is not known.


Notes

See hypertexts: Afternoon, Michael Joyce; Isme Pass, Carolyn Guyer and Martha Petry; Mahasukha Halo, Richard Gess.

also: Dryden Statement, TINAC and A Feel for Prose, M. Joyce