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A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SENSES |
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Touch They are excessively warm hands, that continually want to cool themselves and involuntarily lay themselves on any cold object, outspread, with air between the fingers. Into those hands the blood could shoot, as it mounts to a person's head, and when clenched, they were indeed like the heads of madmen, raging with fancies. -- Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge Our skin is a kind of space suit in which we maneuver through an atmosphere of harsh gases, cosmic rays, radiation from the sun, and obstacles of all sorts. Years ago, I read about a boy who had to live in a bubble (designed by NASA) because of the weakness of his immune system and his susceptibility to disease. We are all that boy. The bubble is our skin. But the skin is also alive, breathing and excreting, shielding us from harmful rays and microbial attack, metabolizing vitamin D, insulating us from heat and cold, repairing itself when necessary, regulating blood flow, acting as a frame for our sense of touch, aiding us in sexual attraction, defining our individuality, holding all the thick red jams and jellies inside us where they belong. Not only do we have unique fingerprints, we have unique pore patterns. According to Catholic belief, there is somewhere, protected in a secret vault, the relic foreskin of Christ. Since he ascended to heaven, his foreskin is the only mortal part of him that remains. We like to decorate our skin whenever we get the chance, and that is made easier by skin being portable, washable, and sloughy. Psychiatrist David Hellerstein's description of skin in Science Digest (September 1985) offers a simple, convenient picture of it in cross section: Skin is basically a two-layered membrane. The lower, thick spongey dermis, one to two millimeters thick, is primarily connective tissue, rich in the protein collagen; it protects and cushions the body and houses hair follicles, nerve endings and sweat glands, blood and lymph vessels. The upper layer, the epidermis, is 0.07 to 0.11 millimeter thick. It is primarily composed of squamous, or scalelike, epithelial cells, which begin their lives round and plump at the boundary of the dermis and over a 15-30 day period are pushed upward, toward the surface, by new cells produced below. As they rise, they become flattened, platelike, lifeless ghosts, full of protein called keratin, and finally they reach the surface, where they are ingloriously sloughed off into oblivion. Our skin is what stands between us and the world. If you think about it, no other part of us makes contact with something not us but the skin. It imprisons us, but it also gives us individual shape, protects us from invaders, cools us down or heats us up as need be, produces vitamin D, holds in our body fluids. Most amazing, perhaps, is that it can mend itself when necessary, and it is constantly renewing itself. Weighing from six to ten pounds, it's the largest organ of the body, and the key organ of sexual attraction. Skin can take a startling variety of shapes: claws, spines, hooves, feathers, scales, hair. It's waterproof, washable, and elastic. Although it may cascade or roam as we grow older, it lasts surprisingly well. For most cultures, it's the ideal canvas to decorate with paints, tattoos, and jewelry. But, most of all, it harbors the sense of touch. The fingertips and tongue are much more sensitive than the back. Some parts of the body are ticklish, and others respond when we itch, shiver, or get gooseflesh. The hairiest parts of the body are generally the most sensitive to pressure, because there are many sense receptors at the base of each hair. In animals, from mice to lions, the whiskers around the mouth are extraordinarily sensitive; our body hairs are sensitive, too, but to a lesser degree. The skin is also thinnest where there's hair. Feeling doesn't take place in the topmost layer of skin, but in the second layer. The top layer of skin is dead, sloughs off easily, and contributes to that ring around the bathtub. This is why safecrackers are sometimes shown sandpapering their fingertips, making the top layer of skin thinner so that the touch receptors will be closer to the surface. A carpenter looking for rough patches may run a thumb over the plank of wood he has just planed. A cook may roll a bit of dough between a thumb and forefinger to test its consistency. Without having to look at the spot, we know at once where we cut ourselves shaving, or where a stocking is starting to run. It's entirely possible to feel wet, even though we may not be wet (when washing dishes with plastic gloves on, say), which suggests the complex sensations that constitute touch. The reason it's easier to get our feet wet first when we brave an icy ocean is that there aren't as many cold receptors in the feet as there are on, for example, the tip of the nose. In the Middle Ages, so-called witches and others who lived on the outskirts of the law, piety, or convention were burned at the stake. Mimicking the fire and brimstone of hell, it was the ultimate horror. Death would happen cell by cell, receptor by receptor; each of life's minute sensations would be torched. Today people who have somehow survived accidental burning come to the burn units of metropolitan hospitals to be re-dressed. If their burns are too deep for the body to repair by itself, they receive temporary coverings (cadaver skin, pigskin, lubricated gauze) until doctors can begin grafting skin from other body parts. Our skin makes up about 16 percent of our body weight (about six pounds), and stretches two square yards, but if too much of the body is burned, there isn't enough skin to graft. In 1983, a Harvard Medical School team led by Dr. Howard Green found a revolutionary way to repair burned skin. Two small boys, Jamie and Glen Selby, were removing paint from their naked bodies when the solvent accidentally caught fire. Only five and six years old, the boys had burned themselves horrendously, one over 97 percent of his body, the other 98 percent. At the Shriners Burn Institute in Boston, doctors covered the boys with cadaver skin and artificial membrane, removed small squares of skin from their armpits and cultured them into large sheets of skin, which they grafted on gradually over a five-month period. They were able to repair half of the burned areas on each boy's body, and a little over a year later the boys went home to Casper, Wyoming. Although the boys didn't have any sweat glands or hair follicles on this skin, it was pliable and protective, and they were able to return to school. The doctors had been able to grow large quantities of new skin. Here is how it is done: In a Harvard laboratory, doctors cut up a small patch of skin donated by a patient, treat it with enzymes, then spread it thinly onto a culture medium. After only ten days, colonies of skin cells begin linking up into sheets, which can then be chopped up and used to make further sheets. In twenty-four days, enough skin will be produced to cover an entire human body. The new skin is attached to gauze that has been saturated in Vaseline, then, gauze side up, sutured to the body. About ten days later, the gauze is removed, and the skin soon grows into a surface much smoother and more natural-looking than the rough one a normal skin graft usually leaves. As revolutionary as skin-growing is, other methods are equally intriguing. At New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, doctors have been experimenting with cadaver skin, which they grow in large quantities and store in a skin bank. At MIT, researchers have developed a high-speed technique that uses a quarter- sized patch of skin from the burn patient to manufacture a large amount of skin in under two hours. A graft can be made right away, without a three-week wait. In two weeks, the burn will be covered with fresh new skin. Again, the skin will lack hair follicles, sweat glands, and pigment, but it will protect and function like normal skin. Such techniques are not for minor burns or even small serious burns; they're useful only in patients who are severely burned over large areas and therefore have too little skin left for grafting. None of the techniques is without risk-delay; rejection; possible infection -- but the very fact of being able to grow an organ, indeed the largest organ in the body, makes one pause to think about growing other organs or at least parts of them -- eyes, ears, hearts -- in a farm whose fields are pans and whose silos are test tubes. Language is steeped in metaphors of touch. We call our emotions feelings, and we care most deeply when something "touches" us. Problems can be thorny, ticklish, sticky, or need to be handled with kid gloves. Touchy people, especially if they're coarse, really get on our nerves. Noli me tangere, legal Latin for "don't meddle or interfere," translates literally as "Don't touch me," and it was what Christ said to Mary Magdalen after the Resurrection. But it's also one term for the disease lupus, presumably because of the disfiguring skin ulcerations characteristic of that illness. A toccata in music is a composition for organ or other keyboard instrument in a free style. It was originally a piece intended to show touch technique, and the word comes from the feminine past participle of toccare, to touch. Music teachers often chide students for having "no sense of touch," by which they mean an indefinable delicacy of execution. In fencing, saying touche means that you have been touched by the foil and are conceding to your opponent, although, of course, we also say it when we think we have been foiled because someone's argumentative point is well made. A touchstone is a standard. Originally, touchstones were hard black stones like jasper or basalt, used to test the quality of gold or silver by comparing the streaks they left on the stone with those of an alloy. "The touchstone of an art is its precision," Ezra Pound once said. D. H. Lawrence's use of the word touch isn't epidermal but a profound penetration into the core of someone's being. So much of twentieth-century popular dancing is simultaneous solo gyration that when people returned to dancing closely with partners again a couple of years ago, we had to call it something different -- "touch dancing." "For a while there, it was touch and go," we say of a crisis or precarious situation, not realizing that the expression goes back to horse-and-carriage days, when the wheels of two coaches glanced off each other as they passed, but didn't snag; a modern version would be when two swerving cars brush fenders. What seems real we call "tangible," as if it were a fruit whose rind we could feel. When we die, loved ones swaddle us in heavily padded coffins, making us infants again, lying in our mother's arms before returning to the womb of the earth, ceremonially unborn. As Frederick Sachs writes in The Sciences, "The first sense to ignite, touch is often the last to burn out: long after our eyes betray us, our hands remain faithful to the world.... in describing such final departures, we often talk of losing touch." Although I am not a portly middle-aged gentleman with nothing else to do, I am massaging a tiny baby in a hospital in Miami. Often male retirees volunteer to enter preemie wards late at night, when other people have families to tend or a nine-to-five job to sleep toward. The babies don't care about the gender of those who cosset and cuddle them. They soak it up like the manna it is in their wilderness of uncertainty. This baby's arms feel limp, like vinyl. Still too weak to roll over by itself, it can flail and fuss so well the nurses have laid soft bolsters on its bed, to keep it from accidentally wriggling into a corner. Its torso looks as small as a deck of cards. That this is a baby boy lying on his tummy, who will one day play basketball in the summer Olympics, or raise children of his own, or become a heliarc welder, or book passage on a low-orbital plane to Japan for a business meeting, is barely believable. The small life form with a big head, on which veins stand out like river systems, looks so fragile, feels so temporary. Lying in his incubator, or "Isolette," as it's called, emphasizing the isolation of his life, he wears a plumage of wires -- electrodes to chart his progress and sound an alarm if need be. Reaching carefully scrubbed, disinfected, warmed hands through the portholes of the incubator with pangs of protectiveness, I touch him; it is like reaching into a chrysalis. First I stroke his head and face very slowly, six times for ten seconds each time, then his neck and shoulders six times. I slide my hands down his back and massage it in long sweeping motions six times, and caress his arms and legs six times. The touching can't be light, or it will tickle him, nor rough, or it will agitate him, but firm and steady, as if one were smoothing a crease from heavy fabric. On a nearby monitor, two turquoise EKG and breath waves flutter across a radiant screen, one of them short and saw-toothed, the other leaping high and dropping low in its own improvisatory dance. His heartbeat reads 153, aerobic peak during a stiff workout for me, but calm for him, because babies have higher normal heart rates than adults. We turn him over on his back and, though asleep, he scrunches up his face in displeasure. In less than a minute, he runs a parade of expressions by us, all of them perfectly readable thanks to the semaphore of the eyebrows, the twisted code of the forehead, the eloquent India rubber of the mouth and chin: irritation, calm, puzzled, happy, mad.... Then his face goes slack and his eyelids twitch as he drifts into REM sleep, the blackboard of dreams. Some nurses refer to the tiny preemies, sleeping their sleep of the womb, as fetuses on the outside. What does a fetus dream? Gently, I move his limbs in a mini-exercise routine, stretching out an arm and bending the elbow tight, opening the legs and bending the knees to the chest. Peaceful but alert; he seems to be enjoying it. We turn him onto his tummy once more, and again I begin caressing his head and shoulders. This is the first of three daily touch sessions for him -- it may seem a shame to interrupt his thick, druglike sleep, but just by stroking him I am performing a life-giving act. Massaged babies gain weight as much as 50 percent faster than unmassaged babies. They're more active, alert, and responsive, more aware of their surroundings, better able to tolerate noise, and they orient themselves faster and are emotionally more in control. "Less likely to cry one minute, then fall asleep the next minute," as a psychologist, detailing the results of one experiment, explained in Science News in 1985, they're "better able to calm and console themselves." In a follow-up examination, eight months later, the massaged preemies were found to be bigger in general, with larger heads and fewer physical problems. Some doctors in California have even been putting preterms on small waterbeds that sway gently, and this experiment has produced infants who are less irritable, sleep better, and have fewer apneas. The touched infants, in these studies and in others, cried less, had better temperaments, and so were more appealing to their parents, which is important because the 7 percent of babies born prematurely figure disproportionately among those who are victims of child abuse. Children who are difficult to raise get abused more often. And people who aren't touched much as children don't touch much as adults, so the cycle continues. A 1988 New York Times article on the critical role of touch in child development reported "psychological and physical stunting of infants deprived of physical contact, although otherwise fed and cared for ... ," which was revealed by one researcher working with primates and others working with World War II orphans. "Premature infants who were massaged for 15 minutes three times a day gained weight 47 percent faster than others who were left alone in their incubators ... the massaged infants also showed signs that the nervous system was maturing more rapidly: they became more active ... and more responsive to such things as a face or a rattle ... infants who were massaged were discharged from the hospital an average of six days earlier." Eight months later, the massaged infants did better in tests of mental and motor ability than the ones who were not. At the University of Miami Medical School, Dr. Tiffany Field, a child psychologist, has been studying a group of babies admitted to the intensive care unit of its hospital for various reasons. With 13,000 to 15,000 births a year at the hospital, she never lacks for a steady supply of babies. Some are receiving caffeine for bradycardia and apnea problems, one is hydroencephalic, some are the children of diabetic mothers who must be carefully monitored. At one Isolette, a young mother sits on a black kitchen chair by her baby, reaches a hand in and gently strokes, whispering motherly nothings into its ear. Inside another Isolette, a baby girl wearing a white nightie with pink hearts bursts into a classic textbook wail that rises and pulses and sets off the alarm on her monitor. Across the room, a male doctor sits quietly beside a preemie, holding a two-pronged plastic stopper close to her nostrils, trying to teach her to breathe. Next to him, a nurse turns a baby girl onto her tummy and begins a "stim," as they call the massage, shorthand for stimulation. They use the word interchangeably as a verb or a noun. What old faces the preemies have! Changing expressions as they sleep, they seem to be rehearsing emotions. The nurse follows her massage schedule, stroking each part of the preemie six times for ten seconds. The stimulation hasn't changed the baby's sleep patterns, but she's been gaining thirty grams more a day and will soon be going home, almost a week ahead of what one would expect. "There's nothing extra going into the babies," Field explains, "yet they're more active, gain weight faster; and they become more efficient. It's amazing," she continues, "how much information is communicable in a touch. Every other sense has an organ you can focus on, but touch is everywhere." Saul Schanberg, a neurologist who experiments with rats at Duke University, has found that licking and grooming by the mother rat actually produced chemical changes in the pup; when the pup was taken away from the mother, its growth hormones decreased. OCC (the "now" enzyme that signals it is time for certain chemical changes to begin) dropped in every cell in the body, and protein synthesis fell. Growth began again only when the pup was returned to the mother. When experimenters tried to reverse the bad effects without the mother, they discovered that gentle stroking wouldn't work, only very heavy stroking with a paintbrush that simulated the mother's tongue; after that the pup developed normally. Regardless of whether the deprived rats were returned to their mothers or stroked with paintbrushes by experimenters, they overreacted and required a great deal of touching, far more than they usually do, to respond normally. Schanberg first began his rat experiments as a result of his work in pediatrics; he was especially interested in psychosocial dwarfism. Some children who live in emotionally destructive homes just stop growing. Schanberg found that even growth-hormone injections couldn't prompt the stunted bodies of such children to grow again, but tender loving care did. The affection they received from the nurses when they were admitted to a hospital was often enough to get them back on the right track. What's amazing is that the process is reversible at all. When Schanberg's experiments with infant rats produced identical results, he began to think about human preemies, who are typically isolated and spend much of their early life without human contact. Animals depend on being close to their mothers for basic survival. If the mother's touch is removed (for as little as forty-five minutes in rats), the infant lowers its need for food to keep itself alive until the mother returns. This works out well if the mother is away only briefly, but if she never comes back, then the slower metabolism results in stunted growth. Touch reassures an infant that it's safe; it seems to give the body a go-ahead to develop normally. In many experiments conducted all over the country, babies who were held more became more alert and developed better cognitive abilities years later. It's a little like the strategy one adopts on a sinking ship: First you get into a life raft and call for help. Baby animals call their mothers with a high-pitched cry. Then you take stock of your water and food, and try to conserve energy by cutting down on high-energy activities -- growth, for instance. At the University of Colorado School of Medicine, researchers conducted a separation experiment with monkeys, in which they removed the mother. The infant showed signs of helplessness, confusion, and depression, and only the return of its mother and continuous holding for a few days would help it return to normal. During separation, changes occurred in the heart rate, body temperature, brain-wave patterns, sleep patterns, and immune system function. Electronic monitoring of deprived infants showed that touch deprivation caused physical and psychological disturbances. But when the mother was put back, only the psychological disturbances seemed to disappear; true, the infant's behavior reverted to normal, but the physical distresses -- susceptibility to disease, and so on -- persisted. Among this experiment's implications is that damage is not reversible, and that the lack of maternal contact may lead to possible long-term damage. Another separation study with monkeys took place at the University of Wisconsin, where researchers separated an infant from its mother by a glass screen. They could still see, hear, and smell each other, only touch was missing, but that created a void so serious that the baby cried steadily and paced frantically. In another group, the dividing screen had holes, so the mother and baby could touch through it, which was apparently sufficient because the infants didn't develop serious behavior problems. Those infants who suffered short-term deprivation became adolescents who clung to one another obsessively instead of developing into independent, confident individuals. When they suffered long-term deprivation, they avoided one another and became aggressive when they did come in contact, violent loners who didn't form good relationships. In University of Illinois primate experiments, researchers found that a lack of touch produced brain damage. They posed three situations: (1) touch was not possible, but all other contact was, (2) for four hours out of twenty-four the glass divider was removed so the monkeys could interact, and (3) total isolation. Autopsies of the cerebellum showed that those monkeys who were totally isolated had brain damage; the same was true of the partially separated animals. The untampered-with natural colony remained undamaged. Shocking though it sounds, a relatively small amount of touch deprivation alone caused brain damage, which was often displayed in the monkeys as aberrant behavior. As I rearrange the preemie in his glass home, I notice that on the walls a bright circus design shows clowns, a merry-go-round, tents, balloons, and a repeat banner that says "Wheel of Fortune." "Touch is far more essential than our other senses," I recall Saul Schanberg saying when we spoke, on Key Biscayne, at Johnson & Johnson's extraordinary conference on touch in spring, 1989, a three-day exchange of ideas that brought together neurophysiologists, pediatricians, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and others interested in how touch and touch deprivation affect the mind and body. In many ways, touch is difficult to research. Every other sense has a key organ to study; for touch that organ is the skin, and it stretches over the whole body. Every sense has at least one key research center, except touch. Touch is a sensory system, the influence of which is hard to isolate or eliminate. Scientists can study people who are blind to learn more about vision, and people who are deaf or anosmic to learn more about hearing or smell, but this is virtually impossible to do with touch. They also can't experiment with people who are born without the sense, as they often do with the deaf or blind. Touch is a sense with unique functions and qualities, but it also frequently combines with other senses. Touch affects the whole organism, as well as its culture and the individuals it comes into contact with. "It's ten times stronger than verbal or emotional contact," Schanberg explained, "and it affects damn near everything we do. No other sense can arouse you like touch; we always knew that, but we never realized it had a biological basis." "You mean how adaptive it is?" "Yes. If touch didn't feel good, there'd be no species, parenthood, or survival. A mother wouldn't touch her baby in the right way unless the mother felt pleasure doing it. If we didn't like the feel of touching and patting one another, we wouldn't have had sex. Those animals who did more touching instinctively produced offspring which survived, and their genes were passed on and the tendency to touch became even stronger. We forget that touch is not only basic to our species, but the key to it." As a fetus grows in the womb, surrounded by amniotic fluid, it feels liquid warmth, the heartbeat, the inner surf of the mother, and floats in a wonderful hammock that rocks gently as she walks. Birth must be a rude shock after such serenity, and a mother re-creates the womb comfort in various ways (swaddling, cradling, pressing the baby against the left side of her body where her heart is). Right after birth, human (and monkey) mothers hold their babies very close to their bodies. In primitive cultures, a mother keeps her baby close day and night. A baby born to one of the Pygmies of Zaire is in physical contact with someone at least 50 percent of the time, and is constantly being stroked or played with by other members of the tribe. A Kung! mother carries her baby in a curass, a sling that holds it upright at her side so that it can nurse, play with her bead necklaces, or interact with others. Kung! infants are in touch with others about 90 percent of the time, whereas our culture believes in exiling babies to cribs, baby carriages, or travel seats, keeping them at arm's length and out of the way. An odd feature of touch is that it doesn't always have to be performed by another person, or even by a living thing. Maternity Hospital in Cambridge, England, discovered that if a premature baby were just placed on a lamb's-wool blanket for a day it would gain an average of fifteen grams more than usual. This was not due to additional heat from the blanket, since the ward was kept warm, but more akin to the tradition of "swaddling" infants, which increases tactile stimulation, decreases stress, and makes them feel lightly cuddled. In other experiments, snug-fitting blankets or clothes reduced the infants' heart rate, relaxed them; they slept more often in their womblike bindings. All animals respond to being touched, stroked, poked in some way, and, in any case, life itself could not have evolved at all without touch -- that is, without chemicals touching one another and forming liaisons. In the absence of touching and being touched, people of all ages can sicken and grow touch-starved. [1] In fetuses, touch is the first sense to develop, and in newborns it's automatic before the eyes open or the baby begins to make sense of the world. Soon after we're born, though we can't see or speak, we instinctively begin touching. Touch cells in the lips make nursing possible, clutch mechanisms in the hands begin to reach out for warmth. Among other things, touch teaches us the difference between I and other, that there can be someone outside of ourselves, the mother. Mothers and infants do an enormous amount of touching. The first emotional comfort, touching and being touched by our mother, remains the ultimate memory of selfless love, which stays with us life long. The little three-pound universe named Geoffrey, which I am stroking in long gentle caresses, has idly twisted his mouth and just as quickly untwisted it again. In other incubators around the room, other lives are stirring, other volunteers continue reaching in through portholes to help the infants begin to make sense of the world. The head research nurse of the ward, a graduate student in neonatal care, gives the Brazelton sensory test to a baby boy, who responds to a bright-red egg-rattle. Picking the baby up, she swings it gently around and its eyes go in the direction of the spin, as they should, then return to the midline. Next she rings a small schoolbell for ten seconds at each side, and repeats this four times. It is a very Buddhist scene. In a nearby crib, a preemie who is having his hearing tested wears a headset that makes him look like a telegraph operator. The policy with premature babies used to be not to disturb them any more than necessary, and they lived in a kind of isolation booth, but now the evidence about touch is so plentiful and eloquent that many hospitals encourage touching. "Did you hug your child today?" asks the bumper sticker. As it turns out, this is more than a casual question. Touch seems to be as essential as sunlight. Touch is the oldest sense, and the most urgent. If a saber-toothed tiger is touching a paw to your shoulder, you need to know right away. Any first-time touch, or change in touch (from gentle to stinging, say), sends the brain into a flurry of activity. Any continuous low-level touch becomes background. When we touch something on purpose -- our lover, the fender of a new car, the tongue of a penguin -- we set in motion our complex web of touch receptors, making them fire by exposing them to a sensation, changing it, exposing them to another. The brain reads the firings and stopfirings like Morse code and registers smooth, raspy, cold. Touch receptors can be blanked out simply by tedium. When we put on a heavy sweater, we're acutely aware of its texture, weight, and feel against our skin, but after a while we completely ignore it. A constant consistent pressure registers at first, activating the touch receptors; then the receptors stop working. So wearing wool or a wristwatch or a necklace doesn't bother us much, unless the day heats up or the necklace breaks. When any change occurs, the receptors fire and we become suddenly aware. Research suggests that, though there are four main types of receptors, there are many others along a wide spectrum of response. After all, our palette of feelings through touch is more elaborate than just hot, cold, pain, and pressure. Many touch receptors combine to produce what we call a twinge. Consider all the varieties of pain, irritation, abrasion; all the textures of lick, pat, wipe, fondle, knead; all the prickling, bruising, tingling, brushing, scratching, banging, fumbling, kissing, nudging. Chalking your hands before you climb onto uneven parallel bars. A plunge into an icy farm pond on a summer day when the air temperature and body temperature are the same. The feel of a sweat bee delicately licking moist beads from your ankle. Reaching blindfolded into a bowl of Jell-O as part of a club initiation. Pulling a foot out of the mud. The squish of wet sand between the toes. Pressing on an angel food cake. The near-orgasmic caravan of pleasure, shiver, pain, and relief that we call a back scratch. [2] On a cattle ranch some years ago, in birthing season, I helped the cowhands with the herd. Whenever we found a cow in trouble, someone had to reach into her vagina and check her condition. "You're a female," they'd invariably say, "you do it," meaning that I was bound to know, by feel, the internal landscape of another female, even if she was only distantly related to me and her organs were horizontal. '"Look for the two big boulders just over a rise ... ," a Spanish-American cowhand had said helpfully on one occasion. Up to your shoulder inside a cow, you feel the hot heavy squeeze of her, but I'll never forget my startled delight the first time I withdrew my hand slowly and felt the cow's muscles contract and release one after another, like a row of people shaking hands with me in a receiving line. I wonder if this is how it feels to be born. Also, scientists have discovered that most of the nerve receptors will respond to pressure, as well as to whatever they specialize in. For the longest time we assumed that each sensation had its own receptor and that that receptor had its own pathway to the brain, but it looks now as if the body's grasslands of neurons relate any sensation according to electrical codes. Pain produces irregular bleats from the nerves at jagged intervals. Itching produces a fast, regular pattern. Heat produces a crescendo as the area heats up. A little pressure produces a flurry of excitement, then fades, and a stronger pressure just extends the burst of activity. After a while, as suggested, a touch receptor "adapts" to the stimuli and stops responding, which is just as well or we would be driven crazy by the feel of a light sweater against the skin on a cool summer's evening, or go berserk if a breeze didn't quit. This fatigue doesn't happen among the deep Pacinian corpuscles and Ruffini's organs (joints) or the Golgi's organs (tendons), which give us information about our internal climate, because if they nodded we would fall down midstride. But the other receptors, so alert at first, so hungry for novelty, after a while say the electrical equivalent of "Oh, that again," and begin to doze, so we can get on with life. We may feel self-conscious much of the time, but we're not often conscious of our physical selves, or we'd be exhausted in a typhoon of sensation. Some forms of touch irritate and delight us simultaneously. Tickling may be a combination of the signals for, say, pressure and pain. Wetness may be a mix of temperature and pressure. But when we lose touch (the dentist gives you a shot of novocaine; an arm or leg falls asleep from lowered blood supply), we feel odd and alien. Imagine how frightening it must be to lose touch permanently. Touch loss can be maddeningly specific: A person loses a sense of temperature, or of pain. When my dentist gave me a shot of Carbocaine, my jaw dropped like a slab of pottery. I could still feel pressure and temperature -- though the temperature sensation was reversed (ice water tasted like water but felt hot) -- but I no longer felt any level of pain in the jaw. The absence of pain's minute markers -- a scratch, a pinch, a twinge -- made the flesh feel cadaverous. In St. Louis, Missouri, one day a couple of years ago, I was going to a reading with novelist Stanley Elkin, who has suffered from MS for many years. Stanley could still drive, and we decided to take his car. But when we got to it and he went around to the driver's door, he stopped and stood for what seemed ages, groping in his pocket. Finally he pulled out the entire contents of the pocket and set it all on the car hood so he could see his keys. Many sufferers of MS can feel an object in their pocket (a set of car keys), but they can't identify it by touch. The brain won't decode the shape correctly. As those who are simultaneously deaf and blind have shown, it's possible to get on predominantly by touch, but to be without touch is to move through a blurred, deadened world, in which you could lose a leg and not know it, burn your hand without feeling, and lose track of where you stop and the featureless day begins. It takes a troupe of receptors to make the symphonic delicacy we call a caress. Between the epidermis and the dermis lie tiny egg-shaped Meissner's corpuscles, which are nerves enclosed in capsules. They seem to specialize in hairless parts of the body -- the soles of the feet, fingertips (which have 9,000 per square inch), clitoris, penis, nipples, palms, and tongue -- the erogenous zones and other ultrasensitive ports of call -- and they respond fast to the lightest stimulation. Inside a Meissner corpuscle, like the many filaments inside a light bulb, branching, looping nerve endings lie parallel to the surface of the skin and pick up a wealth of sensation. Their parallel arrangement may make them especially sensitive to something touching them at a perpendicular angle. Furthermore, they are extremely specific because each area of the corpuscle can respond independently. As one researcher describes it, "It's as though the receptor were composed of separate coils like an innerspring mattress; one can be depressed without disturbing the others." What they record is low-frequency vibrations, the feeling of a finger stroking a beautifully woven sari, for example, or the soft angled skin inside another's elbow. The Pacinian corpuscles respond very quickly to changes in pressure, and they tend to lie near joints, in some deep tissues, and in the genitals and mammary glands. Thick, onion-shaped sensors, they tell the brain what is pressing and also about the movement of joints or how the organs may be shifting their position when we move. It doesn't take much pressure to make them respond fast and rush messages to the brain. But they're also adept with vibrating or varying sensations, especially high-frequency ones (a violin string, for instance); indeed, it may be the onion-like layers of the corpuscle that decipher differing vibrations so well. What the Pacinian corpuscles do is convert mechanical energy into electrical energy, as Bernhard Katz of University College, London, showed in 1950 in electrical experiments with muscles. Subsequent research has led to a better understanding of this process, as Donald Carr describes in The Forgotten Senses: Neurologists now believe that one can picture the touch receptor as a membrane in which there are a number of tiny holes, or at least potential holes, like a piece of Swiss cheese covered with cellophane. In the resting state the holes are too small or the cellophane too thick for certain ions to pass through. Mechanical deformation opens up these holes. When ... currents are ... formed ... by a strong pressure such as a pinprick, the currents are strong enough to trigger nerve impulses and the intensity of the prick is signaled by the frequency of the impulses, since this is the only way nerve fibers can code intensity. Our menagerie of touch receptors also includes saucer-shaped Merkel's disks, which lie just below the skin surface and respond to continuous, constant pressure (they give a sustained message, a continuous monitoring); various free nerve endings, which aren't enclosed in capsules, and respond more slowly to touch and pressure; Ruffini endings, located deep below the skin surface, which register constant pressure; temperature sensors; cylindrical heat sensors; and the most familiar, but oddest, touch receptor of all: hair. Hair deeply affects people, can transfigure or repulse them. Symbolic of life, hair bolts from our head. Like the earth, it can be harvested, but it will rise again. We can change its color and texture when the mood strikes us, but in time it will return to its original form, just as Nature will in time turn our precisely laid-out cities into a weed-way. Giving one's lover a lock of hair to wear in a small locket [3] around his neck used to be a moving and tender gesture, but also a dangerous one, since to spell-casters, magicians, voodoo-ers, and necromancers of all sorts, a tuft of someone's hair could be used to cast a spell against them. In a variation on this theme, a medieval knight wore a lock of his lady's pubic hair into battle. Since one of the arch-tenets of courtly love was secrecy, choosing this tiny memento instead of a lock of hair from her head may have been more of a practical choice than a philosophical one, but it still symbolized her life-force, which he was carrying with him. Ancient male leaders wore long flowing tresses as a sign of virility (in fact, "kaiser" and "tsar" both mean "long-haired"). In the biblical story of Samson, the hero's loss of hair brings on his weakness and downfall, just as it did for the hero Gilgamesh before him. In Europe in more recent times, women who collaborated with the enemy in World War II were humiliated by having their hair cut short. Among some orthodox Jews, a young woman must cut off her hair when she marries, lest her husband find her too attractive and wish to have sex with her out of desire rather than for procreation. Rastafarians regard their dreadlocks as "high-tension cables to heaven." These days, to shock the bourgeoisie and establish their own identity, as every generation must, many young men and women wear their hair as freeform sculpture, with lacquered spikes, close-cropped patterns that resemble a formal garden maze, and colors borrowed from an aviary or spray-painted alley. The first time a student walked into my classroom wearing a "blue jay," it did startle me. Royal-blue slabs of hair were brushed and sprayed straight up along the sides of his head, a long jelly roll of white hair fell forward over his eyebrows, and the back was shiny black, brushed straight up and plastered close to the head. I didn't dislike it, it just seemed like a lot to fuss with each day. I'm sure my grandmother felt that way about my mother's "beehive," and I know my mother feels that way about the curly weather system which is my own mane of long thick hair. One's hairstyle can be the badge of a group, as we've always known -- look at the military's crew cut, or the hairstyles worn by some nuns and monks. In the sixties, wearing long hair, especially if you were a man, often fetched a vitriolic outburst from parents, which is why the musical Hair summed up a generation so beautifully. The police, who seemed so clean-cut and cropped then, were succeeded by a generation of police in long sideburns and mustaches. But I remember at the Boston Love-in in 1967, my first year away at college, hearing one young man say to a passing couple who ridiculed his ponytail: "Fuck you and fuck your hairdressers." I also remember, in the fifties, walking out of my bathroom with my hair sprayed into a huge bubble. "What have you done to your hair?" my father demanded. "I've just teased it," I said. To which he replied: "Teased? You've driven it insane." I wear my curly hair au naturel these days, in a shag cut the French call la coupe sauvage ("the savage cut"), but its volume and faintly erotic unruliness bother my mother's sense of propriety. To her generation, serious women have serious hairdos that are formal, sprayed, and don't move. A few weeks ago, she phoned to warn me that professional women aren't taken seriously if they don't have a "wet set" (rollers, hair dryer, setting lotion, hair spray). Loose ends on one's head signal loose ends in one's life. From this point of view, which has been popular for ages, a woman grows her hair long but keeps it tightly controlled in a bun, under a hat or scarf, or with hair spray, and lets her hair down only in private at night. Most people have about 100,000 hair follicles on their head, and lose between fifty and a hundred hairs a day through normal combing, brushing, or fussing. Each hair grows for only about two to six years, at about five or six inches a year, and then its follicle rests for a few months, the hair falls out, and is eventually replaced by a new hair. So when you see a beautiful head of hair, you're looking at hairs in many different stages in a complex system of growth, death, and renewal. Fifteen percent of it is resting at any one time, the other 85 percent growing; many dozens of hairs are all set to die tomorrow, and deep in the follicles new hairs are budding. Hair has a tough outer coating called the cuticle, and a soft interior called the cortex. People with coarse hair have larger follicles, and also a thin outer coat (10 percent of the hair) with a large inner cortex (90 percent). People with fine hair have smaller follicles, and almost the same amount of cuticle (40 percent) as cortex (60 percent). If the follicle cells grow in an even pattern, the hair will be straight; if they grow irregularly, the hair will be curly. Lice have a hard time attaching to thick hair, which is why black schoolchildren don't succumb to epidemics of head lice as often as their white classmates. Besides being sexy to most people, head hair protects the brain from the sun's heat and ultraviolet rays, helps to insulate the skull, softens impact, and constantly monitors the world only a hair's breadth away from our body, that circle of danger and romance we allow few people to enter. Of course, hairs grow in many places around the body, even on the toes and inside the nose and ears. The Chinese, the American Indian, and some other peoples have very little hair on their face and body; those of Mediterranean descent can be so woolly and thickly haired they seem only a step away from our ape-man ancestors. Bald men are sexy men; they go bald from a high level of testosterone in the blood, which is why you don't see bald castrati or eunuchs. Men with thick mats of hair on their shoulders and backs used to scare me. A word like "carnivore" would form in my mind when I passed them on beaches. Women tend to be smoother-fleshed than men, so it makes sense that we would shave our legs and apply lotions to accentuate the gender difference. But despite efforts to remove hair from our bodies, quite a lot remains on the arms, faces, and heads of women, and the chest, arms, and legs of men, to do what it was intended to do. Hair is special to mammals, although reptiles do form scales, which are related. Each hair grows from the papilla, a wad of tissue at the base of a follicle, where there is a nerve ending, and there may be a group of other nerve endings nearby. The average body has about five million hairs. Because hairy skin is thinner, it's more sensitive than smooth skin. One hair can be easily triggered: If something presses it or tugs at it, if its tip is touched, if the skin around it is pressed, the hair vibrates and sparks a nerve. Down is the most sensitive hair of all and only has to move 0.00004 of an inch to make a nerve fire. Still, it can't be firing all the time, or the body would go into sensory overload. There is an infinitesimally small realm in which nothing at all seems to be happening, a desert of sensation. Then the merest breeze starts to blow, nothing like a real disturbance. When it grows just strong enough to reach an electrical threshold, it fires an impulse to the nervous system. Hairs make wonderful organs of touch. "Breeze," our brain says without much fanfare, as a few hairs on our forearms lift imperceptibly. If a dust mote or insect brushes an eyelash, we know at once and blink to protect the eye. Though hairs can take shapes as various as down or antennae, some especially useful ones are vibrissae -- the stiff hairs cats have as whiskers -- which adorn many mammals, including whales and porpoises. A cat without its whiskers bumps into things at night, and can get its head caught in tight spaces. As we can. If we ever get a say-so in evolution, one of the things I'd vote for is whiskerlike feelers to keep us from bumping into furniture, friends, or raccoons in the dark. Some people meditate, or practice the Zen of archery. I begin each summer morning by strolling around the raised beds in my garden, where twenty-five tea and floribunda rosebushes, twenty-eight lavender and yellow day lilies, a dozen or so shade-loving plants such as hostas and monkshood, and a brilliant range of perennials and annuals flourish. It's not unusual to spend half an hour choosing a sprig of baby's breath, a pink lupine, one stem of bluebell-shaped campanella (whose stem oozes white sap -- almost always a sign of poison), one orange-red rose called "Bing Crosby," one stem of red-and-white bleeding hearts, a bright yellow coriopsis, a huge fuchsia dahlia, a red-and-white, daisy-shaped miniature dahlia, and a flamboyantly speckled red-and-yellow Pavonia tigridia which looks like an iris that married a day lily and went to a fiesta (its name means "tiger-faced peacock," which is wonderful enough, but I've always called it a "Mexican hat dance" instead). Because I don't know what will have opened during the night or early morning, some days it's a little like discovering an emerald in your soup. Then I spend half an hour or so indoors, arranging the day's petaled baubles in a glass dish full of clear marbles, driven no doubt by laws of balance, shape, and color, but working with a calm obsessiveness that allows nothing so rude as thought to intrude. While making a bouquet one morning, I noticed an odd thing about how we perceive temperature. Next to some cutlery soaking in a pan of hot water in the sink was one bowl of cold water and one bowl of warmish water. I put one hand in the cold, one hand in the hot. Then I put both in the warm water and, to my surprise, they gave me contradictory signals. All they were perceiving was the movement of temperature, not hot or cold per se. I've also noticed that, for some reason, objects of equal weight feel heavier if they're cold than if they're warm. There's no simple answer for this phenomenon. Maybe the heat receptors are more specialized, whereas the cold receptors register pressure, too. Most of the cold receptors lie in the face, especially on the tip of the nose, the eyelids, lips, and forehead, and the genitals are sensitive to cold, as well. It's our outer shell that seems to fear cold most, acting as a sentry on perpetual watch. Receptors for warmth lie deeper in the skin, and there are fewer of them. Not surprisingly, the tongue is more sensitive to heat than many other areas of the body. If hot soup can pass the tongue test, it probably won't burn the throat and stomach. Unlike other touch information, temperature reports tell the brain of changes as well as highs and lows, and there are frequent updates. My mother used to urge me to put an ice cube on my wrist when I was too hot. This excites the cold receptors into overreacting and firing furiously. Remove the ice cube, and the wrist stays cold for quite a while. It doesn't seem like much of a poultice, but your skin only has to be warmed by three or four degrees to make you feel truly warm, only lowered by one or two degrees to make you feel decidedly cold. Then your body starts to correct things and you rub your hands together, shiver, or stick your hands under your armpits to warm up. You drink iced drinks or take a cold shower or go for a swim to cool down. On a brutally hot and humid summer day, one on which the sun feels as if it's been dipped in lye, the air is so thick it's drinkable, and your body feels like freshly melted lead, all I have to do is get into a swimming pool and stand up to my neck in cold water, ice down the brain stem, to feel rejuvenated. Why should aspirin be able to lower a fever, but not affect a normal temperature? Because it inhibits the release of the body's own pyrogen, a substance that causes fever. There are still many mysteries about the body's ability to regulate its temperature. We wake up cooler than when we go to sleep, but why should we be at our lowest temperature at about 4:00 A.M.? Suppose we cooled the body from the inside out? In hypothermic surgery, the blood is chilled and recirculated, which reduces body temperature to about seventy-seven degrees. Science-fiction stories often involve an astronaut whose body temperature has been lowered, sleeping in suspended animation like a naked bear in a glass den. Walt Disney's family swears it isn't true, but a popular folk myth for some time now has it that Walt arranged to be frozen when he died and is lying in a magic kingdom of ice, awaiting his rebirth. Trans Time, Inc., a member of the American Cryogenics Society, does freeze people right after death, promising to bring them back to life in a later era, when the mysteries of death are scrutable and the carnage of their diseases reversible. Movies like Ice Man play with the idea of someone being frozen for decades or centuries, then awakening in a new world. What makes it sound so plausible, I suppose, is how familiar the scenario is in religious terms: One dies out of this life to emerge in the next. I don't think there's enough evidence that a brain and body could be frozen and defrosted without damage, but proponents of cryogenics argue that one has nothing to lose. Could there be an extreme metabolic reduction instead of freezing? The suspended animation of sci-fi stories? Different tissues have a different freezing profile, don't they? Wouldn't that mean that some would be overchilled and others underchilled? How will right-to-lifers (who are already vehemently opposed to freezing sperm, ova, and embryos) and religious zealots feel about thawing people out -- what ethical debates and social turmoil will it prompt? Warm-blooded creatures, we overheat easily and then an ancient terror sets in. We moan that we're being cooked, the way we cook other animals: ''I'm roasting," we say; ''I'm burning up"; "It's like an oven in here." Now that we've lost our heavy body fur we chill fast, so we must wear thick clothing when the temperature plunges. I've seen people out walking on a winter's day wearing layered clothes, wool sweaters, and bulky down coats; they look like freshly made beds on the move. The evolution of warm-blooded animals was an extraordinary breakthrough. It meant that they could keep up their body temperature despite the vagaries of the environment, and could actually migrate. Cold-blooded animals (except butterflies, eels, and sea turtles) can't migrate much, and some, like rattlesnakes and pit vipers in general, are excellent at heat detection. So are mosquitoes, moths, and other insects (which has led some researchers to conclude that people who are bitten more often than others may be radiating more heat, which makes them prime targets). Although we don't have such heat-sensing devices built into our bodies, we do create them for military use -- heat-seeking missiles that strike like vipers. In recent sci-fi/horror films like Wolfen or Predator, razor-clawed, blood-lusting monsters live in a world beyond our visual range; but we are exquisitely findable by them because they can sense in infrared. The monster appears without warning, disembowels someone, and vanishes. Something about its heat-seeking ability makes it doubly horrifying. It uses one of our loveliest features to destroy us. For millennia we've relied on our warm-bloodedness as a life-force; we prize caring, compassionate people by referring to their warmth. And here is a monster homing in on that warmth. Our essence is our undoing says the message of these sensory frightmares. Without a thick hair covering to protect us, we have to be vigilant about cold. Although the hands, feet, and other exposed parts of the body seem invaluable, since they register touch so sensitively, when cold hits they become expendable. The hands or feet can freeze, and the body still survive, but if the blood temperature lowers we're goners. So the torso responds immediately to changes in temperature, and we sense cold over a wider range of our body than we do heat. Far more women than men claim to have cold hands and feet, which isn't at all surprising. When the body gets cold, it protects the core organs first (which is why it's easy to get frostbite in your extremities); in women, it protects the reproductive organs. When your lips turn blue or your toes suffer frostbite, the blood vessels are tightening up and the body is sacrificing the extremities, sending blood to the essential inner section. Animals love to lie in the sun and bask. Nothing looks more contented in winter than a black-and-white cocker spaniel sprawling on the living-room carpet in a bright shaft of sunlight. Some creatures, like reptiles or houseflies, do it to regulate their body temperature, and one often sees an American alligator in a Floridian swamp arranging itself in the sun with a voluptuary's exquisite care: one leg and the tail under the water, the lower back and another leg in the shadow of a bush, the head and back and front legs completely in the sun.... The alligators seem quite finicky about it, but really are governing their thermostats just as we do on a fall afternoon, when we leave on a pullover sweater but take off our hat and gloves. The travel industry relies on human beings' love of basking, and basking vacations are available to most anywhere. And, though some of us like adventure travel, most prefer to sit in the sun like a rack of spareribs, basting ourselves regularly with sauce, and quietly frying, taking care to turn over so we'll be cooked on both sides. Why we love to bask isn't hard to fathom. Evolution, that haute couturier of ingenious patterns, probably designed the sensation so that animals would search for climates conducive to good health. But, when enough becomes too much and an animal overheats, the skin's smallest capillaries dilate to let the heat escape. A man's face flushes. A rabbit's ears flush. All animals perspire in one way or another, and the perspiration evaporates, cooling the body. It's not the heat, it's the humidity, we moan on a sultry day when even a cotton shirt seems attached by saliva to one's back. As the outside air temperature reels close to 98.6 degrees, the body starts to lose track of itself and suffers. But if it's also humid, which means the air is saturated with water, we still sweat to cool off in the usual way, but nothing happens. The air's too soggy to allow sweat to evaporate. So one sits on a porch swing in Alabama, listless and sticky, fanning oneself with a flyer from a local construction company that, according to its advertisement, longs to "flash your gutters," while sipping iced tea flavored with a sprig of fresh peppermint or a leaf of pineapple sage. On the other hand, if an animal gets too cold, most often it raises gooseflesh and shivers -- skin muscles contract (to expose a smaller area), and the shaking that follows warms the body. Even though we can't puff up our fur the way other animals do, either to look big and mean or to keep warm, we have tiny leftover erector pili muscles that cause some of our hairs to stand up when we're cold or scared. Certain animals have evolved fascinating strategies for keeping warm. Von Buddenbrock reports a German beekeeper who discovered that hives never got very cold: The explanation is remarkable. In the winter, tens of thousands of bees in a hive cluster closely together. The bees in the center of the cluster are warm enough when the temperature drops, but those in the outer layers get cold; they then begin to kick their feet and flap their wings rapidly -- in other words, they act much as we do when we shiver with the cold. The main thing seems to be, though, that their agitation spreads through the entire cluster of 10,000 or more bees. The concerted efforts of the group eventually generates a sizable amount of heat. The temperature consequently rises until all the bees have calmed down, and then gradually drops until the same process is repeated. Again I remember that week in December when I traveled along the coast of California with Chris Nagano of the Los Angeles Museum's Monarch Project, finding and tagging thousands of overwintering monarch butterflies. Hanging in radiant orange garlands from the eucalyptus trees, the butterflies would occasionally spread their wings wide like solar collectors, or quickly flap them to warm up before setting off to find nectar. It was easy to catch them in a net attached to the end of a long telescoping pole, and for the most part they just rustled quietly inside the net while we sat on the floor of the silent, insect-free eucalyptus grove. We lifted them from the net one at a time to check their health and sex and to see if they were pregnant, and then glued a small postage-stamp-like tag to the top of a wing. But some mornings it was as cool as fifty degrees, and a monarch needs the temperature to be at least fifty-five before it can move its flying muscles. Sometimes, when I finished tagging a butterfly and launched it into the air in the usual way -- as if tossing a hankie -- it would fall right to the ground, a tasty morsel for a quick predator. Whenever that happened, I would pick the butterfly up by its closed wings and hold it in my open mouth while I breathed hot air over its muscles. After a few seconds it would be warmed up enough to fly, I would relaunch it, and it would go about its delicate business in the grove. Touch, by clarifying and adding to the shorthand of the eyes, teaches us that we live in a three-dimensional world. We look at a photograph taken with someone we love at a small one-llama circus in a rural town, and remember the stickiness of that summer day, the feel of the llama insinuating its velvety nose into our shirt pocket, into our hand, under our arm, and around our chest, gently but irrepressibly looking for food. At that moment, the word "llama" becomes a verb in our vocabulary, because you have to llama your way through life from time to time. We remember the feel of the loved one's hand, how his body curves, the texture of his hair. Touch allows us to find our way in the world in the darkness or in other circumstances where we can't fully use our other senses. [4] By combining eyesight and touch, primates excel at locating objects in space. Although there's no special name for the ability, we can touch something and decide if it's heavy, light, gaseous, soft, hard, liquid, solid. As Svetlana Alper shrewdly observes in Rembrandt's Enterprise: The Studio and the Market (1988), though Rembrandt often took blindness as his subject (The Return of the Prodigal Son, the blind Jacob, and others): Blindness is not invoked with reference to a higher spiritual insight, but to call attention to the activity of touch in our experience of the world. Rembrandt represents touch as the embodiment of sight.... And it is relevant to recall that the analogy between sight and touch had its technical counterpart in Rembrandt's handling of paint: his exploitation of the reflection of natural light off high relief to intensify highlights and cast shadows unites the visible and the substantial. One of the things I find thrilling about Rembrandt's portraits is all he leaves unpainted, for the eye to register but the mind to record in full. It isn't necessary to paint anything but the front brim of a boy's hat; the first dozen times you see the painting, you won't notice that all Rembrandt painted was a gesture, the merest insinuation of a hat, which the viewer's mind completes from its own experience. We have touched round. We know what round is when we see it. "Oh, that again, round," the mind says once more, and looks for other fish to fry. What is a sense of one's self? To a large extent, it has to do with touch, with how we feel. Our proprioceptors (from Latin for "one's own" receptors) keep us informed about where we are in space, if our stomachs are busy, whether or not we are defecating, where our legs, arms, head are, how we're moving, what we feel like from moment to moment. Not that our sense of self is necessarily accurate. Each of us has an exaggerated mental picture of our body, with a big head, hands, mouth, and genitals, and a small trunk; children often draw people with big heads and hands, because that is the way their body feels to them. There is so much to know at any given moment. "How are you?" a passerby asks politely in Kafka's novel The Trial, and the hero panics, paralyzed by the shock of being asked one question he can't possibly answer. Everyday life includes a host of similar questions, ones that aren't meant to be taken seriously but are inserted into a conversation like a quarter into the slot of a mechanical horse, and I'm often tempted to give a lengthy and prankish answer. "How are you?" a friend will ask, and I'll report straight from my proprioceptors on the state of my kidneys, nasal mucosa, blood pressure, cochlea, vaginal rugosa, digestion, and general adrenal unrest. Touch fills our memory with a detailed key as to how we're shaped. A mirror would mean nothing without touch. We are forever taking the measure of ourselves in unconscious ways -- idly running one hand along a forearm, seeing if our thumb and forefinger can bracelet our wrist or if we can touch our tongue to our nose or bend our thumb all the way back, feeling the length of our leg as we "ladder" our nylon from the ankle to the thigh, nervously twisting a strand of hair. But, above all, touch teaches us that life has depth and contour; it makes our sense of the world and ourself three-dimensional. Without that intricate feel for life there would be no artists, whose cunning is to make sensory and emotional maps, and no surgeons, who dive through the body with their fingers. Going out to San Francisco, I open a not-to-be-opened-till-in-flight present from a friend -- an exquisite blue-and-gold silk brocade box, inside of which lie two mirror-perfect chrome balls, each in its own silken socket. They bring to mind the mad Captain Queeg, who obsessively rotated two ball bearings while he spoke of pilfered strawberries. Inside the lid, a folded note explains: Ancient mandarins dating back 800 years believed these Chinese Exercise Balls induced well-being of the body and serenity of spirit. These treasured gilts were given to President Reagan and his wife while visiting the People's Republic of China. The Chinese say that rotating the balls in the palm of each hand stimulates the fingers and acupuncture points, and improves circulation of vital energy throughout the body. Sports enthusiasts, musicians, computer users and health-conscious people everywhere consider them great muscle conditioners. Arthritis sufferers feel a decided benefit from this gentle but challenging exercise. Very effective for relaxation and meditation, Chinese Exercise Balls emit a distantly mysterious chime as you turn them. Beautifully handcrafted, 45mm. hollow polished chrome balls are perfectly weighted and fit comfortably into the average man's or woman's hand. Lifting them out one at a time, I marvel at their smoothness and slither, the ping they make colliding, and how relaxing it is to fidget them round and round, world over gleaming world in my hand. Actually, they look like rin no tan, specially weighted Oriental pleasure balls that a woman may insert into her vagina; when she rocks back and forth, the balls moving inside her give her the thrusting feeling of intercourse. Though a trifle arcane, this is a fitting gift for a trip to San Francisco's Touch Dome, at the door of which I arrive a few hours later. At the far end of the Exploratorium, an extraordinary hands-on science museum, stands a three-dimensional maze through which one walks, climbs, crawls, and slithers in marmoreal darkness. The pliant walls give birth to you, or fall away to a sloping floor, or guide you to a sea of what feels like navy beans, or leave you grasping your way forward among rope hammocks. Now and then your hand strays over a familiar shape -- a brush, a sandal -- which seems as startling as a flash flood, and then you return to the indecipherable dark again. A few people get violently claustrophobic and start screaming, and then a guard sneaks into rescue them, but even people who aren't normally claustrophobic have moments of sheer panic when they wonder if they will indeed find their way back to the world of sight. The blackness is as perfect as solid rock, and the maze tumbles into slides too narrow to sit up in. You can feel the beginning of the slide and its rough dimensions, but not its length or how it might change farther on. How far will it plunge? Suppose you get trapped midway, unable to lift your head or move your arms? If you go arms-first, to feel your way along, suppose it narrows and you are unable to back up? Suppose there is a drop at the bottom into a soft surface, which you will enter head first? Down you slide, hands over head, somersaulting free a few moments later. Crawling into a room that seems to have no outlet, you stretch high and discover handholds, then climb blindly up and pull yourself to another level of maze. Something light and sticky brushes your face, the blackness becomes a solid mystery again, disorienting and full of blind alleys; the darkness pours its panic marbles under your feet and you stumble at speed into a quagmire of something dry but mobile that surges up to your knees; then, heart pounding, you trip through thick rubber fringes, grab hold, and fall down a ramp into bright light, having survived a small expedition of pure touch. Human beings may be voluptuaries of touch, but animals are the real touch masters. Sponges have a profound sense of touch; they feel every quiver in the water. Tapeworms are thought to use only touch to perceive the world. Insect-eating plants live mainly by touch. Cockroaches have paved appendages, called cerci, at the base of the abdomen, which are so responsive to vibration that the insects are frequently used in laboratory experiments related to touch. Snails have extremely sensitive feet. Alligators and crocodiles use the many touch receptors around their heads to engage in elaborate stroking and necking during courtship. Though one imagines a turtle's shell to be without feeling, large sea turtles enjoy having their shells lightly scratched, and they can feel an object as delicate as a twig moving across it. Any animal that digs for a living, such as a prairie dog or an anteater, or must live by night, usually has a great sense of touch. The Eimer organ (a Pacinian-like corpuscle in the snout of a mole) can sense the slightest disturbances in the soil that might mean the presence of an earthworm nearby. The duck's bill is very sensitive to water vibrations because its skin contains Herbst corpuscles similar to Pacinian corpuscles. A woodpecker uses its tongue -- which also contains a Herbst corpuscle -- to search for insects in the wood it has thrilled. Penguins must touch to survive -- they stand on their parents' feet and press close to their warm bellies -- and so have developed a real passion for touching and being touched. Rats are compulsive touchers. Some aquatic animals can feel vibrations in the water over large distances, and detect with great precision anything moving in their vicinity. Touch is a powerfully important sense among animals, for whom the slightest touch of an object or another animal triggers responses. One need only watch the body whims of a house cat rubbing and wrapping itself around its owner's leg, or the courting of two giraffes thwacking their long necks together. And many animals enjoy touch games for hours on end, whether it is two dogs, their tongues flopping, playing chase and tumble on the lawn, or a pack of teenage boys playing "touch" football in a corner lot. Folk wisdom has it that animals can predict earthquakes. Livestock are often reported busting out of their barns, household pets leaping from the house, pacing in a frenzy, or simply acting strangely before a tremor, which may be because of the static electricity in the air. As Helmut Tributsch, of the Free University of Berlin, realized, an animal's skin is much drier than that of a human being. There is a lot of electromagnetic upset just before an earthquake, and this produces static electricity, which makes an animal's hair stand up and quiver. I remember watching the launch of Viking II at Cape Canaveral in 1975, and how, during lift-off, the air felt itchy and electric. I felt bristlingly alert, because it was the first time in the history of our planet that we were launching a spacecraft to search for life elsewhere, and the sense of vigil deeply moved me. The launch itself produced an electromagnetic upset much like that of an earthquake and increased the static electricity in the air, which made my flesh creep. Even those skeptics among us viewers could not have been left unmoved, what with the hair standing up on their necks, the shock waves pounding on their chests like giant fists, their minds alert from the stimulating dance of negative ions, and the distant spacecraft lurching upward on spasms of apricot fire. Of all the skin-deforming arts, one of the most interesting and ancient is tattoo, which traveled like gossip over trade routes and continents. Neolithic farmers tattooed their faces with a design of blue tridents; female singers, dancers, and prostitutes in ancient Egypt wore tattoos. In 1769, Captain Cook reported in his journal that both the men and women of Tahiti displayed tattoos (a word that probably comes from the Tahitian tatau, "to strike"). King George V, Nicholas II, and Lady Randolph Churchill all had tattoos, along with souvenir-crazed Americans and fashionable Victorian women who wished a permanent pink to their lips. The Maori of New Zealand perfected an especially intricate style of tattoo, which Terry Landau reports on in About Faces: [They have] an elaborate tattoo technique called moko.... One traveler described a tribal chief who prided himself on having spared no visible part of his body: even his lips, tongue, gums, and palate were completely tattooed. Japanese tattoo, called irezumi, is a serious folk art like landscape painting or flower arranging, and great tattoo masters still perform their Chagall-like work in full-body tattoos that are subtle, repulsive, magical, seductive, sensuous, three-dimensional, thought-provoking, and macabre. Ultimately, tattoos make unique the surface of one's self, embody one's secret dreams, adorn with magic emblems the Altamira of the flesh. It is also a form of self-destruction; fully tattooed people live shorter lives because their skin can't breathe properly and some of the inks are poisonous. Those with tattooed faces, hands, and heads have chosen, in a way, to seal themselves off from normal society forever, and so it is not surprising that the largest number of the tattooed in Japan belong to the underworld. Tattoo masters often help the Tokyo police identify bodies. A person completely tattooed in a single coherent scene dictated by body contour and self-image makes you wonder about symbolism, decoration, and identity. In her book of forty-six almost life-size Polaroid reproductions, The Japanese Tattoo, photographer Sandi Fellman explains her attraction to tattoos as an infatuation with paradox: "Beauty created through brutal means," "power bestowed at the price of submission," "the glorification of the flesh as a means to spirituality." Just as westerners donate their organs after death, a Japanese wearing the work of a grand tattoo master may donate his skin to a museum or university. Tokyo University has three hundred such masterpieces, framed. To walk into this chamber of skins must fill one with shock and wonder: What a marvel to see so many lives at full stretch, defined by needles and ink, so many people who wished to become their own text. In the sand-swept sprawl of the panoramic film Lawrence of Arabia a scene of quintessential machismo stands out: T. E. Lawrence holding his hand over a candle flame until the flesh starts to sizzle. When his companion tries the same thing, he recoils in pain, crying "Doesn't that hurt you?" as he nurses his burned hand. "Yes," Lawrence replies coolly. "Then what is the trick?" the companion asks. "The trick," Lawrence answers, "is not to mind." One of the great riddles of biology is why the experience of pain is so subjective. Being able to withstand pain depends to a considerable extent on culture and tradition. Many soldiers have denied pain despite appalling wounds, not even requesting morphine, although in peacetime they would have demanded it. Most people going into the hospital for an operation focus completely on their pain and suffering, whereas soldiers or saints and other martyrs can think about something nobler and more important to them, and this clouds their sense of pain. Religions have always encouraged their martyrs to experience pain in order to purify the spirit. We come into this world with only the slender word "I," and giving it up in a sacred delirium is the painful ecstasy religions demand. When a fakir runs across hot coals, his skin does begin to singe -- you can smell burning flesh; he just doesn't feel it. In Bali a few years ago, my mother saw men go into trances and pick up red-hot cannonballs from an open fire, then carry them down the road. As meditation techniques and biofeedback have shown, the mind can learn to conquer pain. This is particularly true in moments of crisis or exaltation, when concentrating on something outside oneself seems to distract the mind from the body, and the body from suffering and time. Of course, there are those who welcome pain in order to surmount it. In 1989, I read about a new craze in California: well-to-do business people taking weekend classes in hot-coal-walking. Pushing the body to or beyond its limits has always appealed to human beings. There is a part of our psyche that is pure timekeeper and weather watcher. Not only do we long to know how fast we can run, how high we can jump, how long we can hold our breath under water -- we also like to keep checking these limits regularly to see if they've changed. Why? What difference does it make? The human body is miraculous and beautiful, whether it can "clean and jerk" three hundred pounds, swim the English Channel, or survive a year riding the subway. In anthropological terms, we've come to be who we are by evolving sharper ways to adapt to the environment, and, from the outset, what has guided us has been an elaborate system of rewards. Small wonder we're addicted to quiz shows and lotteries, paychecks and bonuses. We've always explored our mental limits, too, and pushed them without letup. In the early eighties, I spent a year as a soccer journalist, following the dazzling legwork of Pele, Franz Beckenhauer, and virtually every other legendary international star the New York Cosmos had signed up for equally legendary sums of American cash. Choose your favorite sport; now imagine seeing all the world's best players on one team. I was interested in the ceremonial violence of sports, the psychology of games, the charmed circle of the field, the breezy rhetoric of the legs, the anthropological spectacle of watching twenty-two barely clad men run on grass in the sunlight, hazing the quarry of a ball toward the net. The fluency and grace of soccer appealed for a number of reasons, and I wanted to absorb some of its atmosphere for a novel I was writing. I was amazed to discover that the players frequently realized only at halftime or after a match that they'd hurt themselves badly and were indeed in wicked pain. During the match, there hadn't been the rumor of pain, but once the match was over and they could afford the luxury of suffering, pain screamed like a noon factory whistle. Often our fear of pain contributes to it. Our culture expects childbirth to be a deeply painful event, and so, for us, it is. Women from other cultures stop their work in the fields to give birth, returning to the fields immediately afterward. Initiation and adolescence rites around the world often involve penetrating pain, which initiates must endure to prove themselves worthy. In the sun dance of the Sioux, for instance, a young warrior would allow the skin of his chest to be pierced by iron rods; then he was hung from a stanchion. When I was in Istanbul in the 1970s, I saw teenage boys dressed in shiny silk fezzes and silk suits decorated with glitter. They were preparing for circumcision, a festive event in the life of a Turk, which occurs at around the age of fifteen. No anesthetic is used; instead, a boy is given a jelly candy to chew. Sir Richard Burton's writings abound with descriptions of tribal mutilation and torture rituals, including one in which a shaman removes an apron of flesh from the front of a boy, cutting all the way from the stomach to the thighs, producing a huge white scar. Women in some cultures go through many painful initiation rites, often including circumcision, which removes or destroys the clitoris. Being able to endure the pain of childbirth is expected of women, but there are also disguised rites of pain, pain that is endured for the sake of health or beauty. Women have their legs waxed as a matter of fashion, and have done so throughout the ages. When mine were waxed at a Manhattan beauty salon recently, the pain, which began like 10,000 bees stinging me simultaneously, was excruciating. Change the woman from a Rumanian cosmetician to a German Gestapo agent. Change the room from a cubicle in a beauty emporium to a prison cell. Keep the level of pain exactly the same, and it easily qualifies as torture. We tend to think of torture in the name of beauty as an aberration of the ancients, but there are modern scourging parlors. People have always mutilated their skins, often enduring pain to be beautiful, as if the pain chastened the beauty, gave it the special veneer of sacrifice. Many women experience extreme pain during their periods each month, but they accept the pain because they understand that it's not caused by someone else, it's not malicious, and it doesn't surprise them; and this makes all the difference. There are also illusions of pain as vivid as optical illusions, times when the sufferer imagines he or she feels pain that cannot possibly exist. In some cultures, the father experiences a false pregnancy -- couvade as it's called -- and takes to bed with childbirth pains, going through his own arduous experience of having a baby. The internal organs don't have many pain receptors (the skin is supposed to be the guard post), so people often feel "referred pain" when one of their organs is in trouble. Heart attacks frequently produce a pain in the stomach, the left arm, or the shoulder. When this happens, the brain can't figure out exactly where the message is coming from. In the classic phenomenon of phantom-limb pain, the brain gets faulty signals and continues to feel pain in a limb that has been amputated; such pain can be torturous, perverse, and maddening, since there is nothing physically present to hurt. Pain has plagued us throughout the history of our species. We spend our lives trying to avoid it, and, from one point of view, what we call "happiness" may be just the absence of pain. Yet it is difficult to define pain, which may be sharp, dull, shooting, throbbing, imaginary, or referred. We have many pains that surge from within as cramps and aches. And we also talk about emotional distress as pain. Pains are often combined, the emotional with the physical, and the physical with the physical. When you burn yourself, the skin swells and blisters, and when the blister breaks, the skin hurts in yet another way. A wound may become infected. Then histamine and serotonin are released, which dilate the blood vessels and trigger a pain response. Not all internal injuries can be felt (it's possible to do brain surgery under a local anesthetic), but illnesses that constrict blood flow often are: Angina pectoris, for example, which occurs when the coronary arteries shrink too tight for blood to comfortably pass. Even intense pain often eludes accurate description, as Virginia Woolf reminds us in her essay "On Being Ill": "English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache ... let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry." Just as there are many forms of pain, there are many remedies for it. Anesthetics like novocaine or cocaine either block the body's ability to send high-frequency pain signals to the brain or will not allow sodium to flow into the nerve cell. Some drugs manage to confuse the signals given at different stages of the pain message. Naturally occurring opiates called endorphins occupy the receptor sites so that they can't receive the neural transmitter's message of pain. [5] Cocaine interferes with the neural transmitters in just this way. Part of the reason heroin addicts need more and more of the drug to get high is because that drug causes the body to produce less of its own endorphins and begins to depend on the heroin to take over their task. This increased threshold can also happen among arthritis sufferers or other long-term heavy users of simple analgesics. Aspirin works by inhibiting the flow of substances that stimulates pain receptors when you have an injury, so that you don't receive as many pain impulses. Continuous use of any analgesic can neutralize its beneficial effect, but only twenty minutes of aerobic exercise is enough to stimulate the body to produce more endorphins, natural painkillers. Shifting your attention to something else will distract you from pain; pain requires our full attention. A simple and effective form of pain relief comes from "lateral inhibition": If a mob of neurons all try to respond at once they get blocked. If you stub your toe and then rub the area around it, the pain will subside in the mass confusion. If you apply ice to a bruise, it will not only help with swelling, it will also transmit cold messages instead of pain messages. During sex, we tend not to mind a certain amount of pain (indeed, for some people, pain seems to heighten the pleasure) and that may be because of lateral stimulation -- the brain is receiving so many pleasure signals it doesn't pay much attention to those of moderate pain. Relaxation techniques, hypnosis, acupuncture, and placebos can fool the body into producing endorphins, and stop the pain message from being sent out. We don't feel electricity, of course, we feel sensations; but if the electrical code for pain isn't handed around, we don't feel pain. Human beings can withstand enormous amounts of pain (women have higher pain thresholds than men), but not without chemical help, or sleight of mind. During pregnancy, endorphin levels rise as the time of delivery gets closer. One researcher has even suggested that a pregnant woman craves certain foods because they're high in substances that produce serotonin, which the woman will need to endure the pain of childbirth. I once knew a songwriter with a lovely sherbety voice, who played guitar and sang in nightclubs in Pennsylvania. At the age of twenty-eight her arthritis was so acute that she had to loosen up her hands before each performance by baking them in gloves of warm wax. In time the pain grew too stubborn, and she gave up performing for teaching. For long-term sufferers, "Pain is greedy, boorish, meanly debilitating," as neurologist Russell Martin says in Matters Gray and White. "It is cruel and calamitous and often constant, and, as its Latin root poena implies, it is the corporeal punishment each of us ultimately suffers for being alive." In a number of specialized pain-control centers around the country, it's understood that pain is as much an emotional and psychological affliction as a physical one. Teams of neurologists, psychologists, physical therapists, and other angologists (people who study pain) work with those disabled by chronic pain, and try to find ways through the madness of their patients' bodies. Why human beings feel pain has been the subject of theological debate, philosophical schisms, psychoanalytical edicts, and mumbo jumbo for centuries. Pain was the punishment for wrongdoing in the Garden of Eden. Pain was the price one paid for not being morally perfect. Pain was a self-affliction brought about by sexual repression. Pain was dished out by vengeful gods, or was the result of falling out of harmony with nature. Indeed, our word holy goes back through Old English to haelan, "to heal," and the Indo-European kailo, which meant "whole" or "uninjured." The purpose of pain is to warn the body about possible injury. Millions of free nerve endings alarm us; whenever they're hit, we feel pain. Slam our elbow against a bookcase, and, as Russell Martin describes the process: . . . a number of chemical substances such as prostaglandins, histamine, bradykinin, and others stored in or near the nerve endings at the site of the injury are suddenly released. Prostaglandins quickly increase blood circulation to the damaged area, facilitating the infection-fighting and healing functions of the blood's white cells, antibodies, and oxygen. Together with bradykinin and other substances, present in only minute quantities, prostaglandins also stimulate the nerve endings, causing them to transmit electrical impulses along the length of the affected sensory nerve to its junction with the "dorsal horn" of the spinal cord, a strip of gray-matter tissue running the length of the spinal cord, which collects sensory signals from all parts of the body and relays them to the brain -- first to the thalamus, where pain is first "felt," then on to the "sensory strip" of the cerebral cortex, where the pain becomes conscious, its location and intensity perceived. According to the pattern theory, nerve impulses combine to telegraph those Morse-code-like messages of pain. Some pains just rush to the spinal cord, so that we can flinch if we touch a hot stove; and we call this a reflex, by which we mean that, as we always suspected, we can act without thinking and we frequently do. Acute pain -- a ripped ligament, a burn -- hurts so badly that we'll immobilize part of the body long enough for it to heal. A prick of the skin may not hurt the most, but it hurts the fastest, the signal traveling to the brain at ninety-eight feet per second. Burning or aching travels slower (about six and a half feet per second). Leg pains sometimes travel at up to 290 miles per hour. We pay no attention to our internal workings unless something goes wrong, when we might feel hunger pangs, or headaches, or thirst. Still, scientists do not agree on exactly what pain is. Some say it's a response of specific receptors to specific dangers -- noxious chemicals, burning, stabbing or cutting, freezing -- and others feel that it's much more ambiguous, an extreme sensory stimulation of any kind, because, in the delicate ecosystem of our body, too much of anything will disturb the balance. So, in this sense, pain really is a sign that we're out of harmony with Nature. When we're in pain the localized place hurts but the entire body responds. We grow sweaty, our pupils dilate, our blood pressure shoots up. Oddly enough, the same thing happens when we're angry or scared. There is a deep emotional component to pain. If we're badly hurt, we might also be afraid. And what are we to make of those individuals who are sadomasochists, who combine pleasure with pain? In his famous experiments, Ivan Pavlov gave dogs a strong electric shock, which pained them severely. Then he fed them each day after a painful shock, conditioning them to associate the shock with something positive. Even when he increased the strength of the shock, they wagged their tails and salivated in expectation of dinner. In other experiments, he allowed cats to hit a switch that shocked them and fed them at the same time, and found they were eager to put up with the shock in order to get the food. Kafka wrote short stories in which people endure pain professionally, as "hunger artists" or other self-mutilators; audiences often pay for the dubious privilege of watching someone suffer. There have always been performers of pain, artists of self-mutilation, to whom pain has a different meaning than for the rest of us. Edward Gibson, a turn-of-the-century vaudeville performer billed as "the human pincushion," let customers stick pins into him and at one point acted out a crucifixion on stage, nails piercing his hands and feet. It was only because people in the audience started fainting that authorities stopped his performance. Then there was the notorious German self-mutilator, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, whose "performances" of self-inflicted razor slashes and knife wounds filled a public hungry for sadism with unparallelled horror. Do these people not feel pain at all? Are their pleasure and pain centers cross-wired by mistake? Or, like T. E. Lawrence, do they feel pain in all its molten terror and not mind? Sex is the ultimate intimacy, the ultimate touching when, like two paramecia, we engulf one another. We play at devouring each other, digesting each other, we nurse on each other, drink each other's fluids, actually get under each other's skin. Kissing, we share one breath, open the sealed fortress of our body to our lover. We shelter under a warm net of kisses. We drink from the well of each other's mouths. Setting out on a kiss caravan of the other's body, we map the new terrain with our fingertips and lips, pausing at the oasis of a nipple, the hillock of a thigh, the backbone's meandering riverbed. It is a kind of pilgrimage of touch, which leads us to the temple of our desire. We most often touch a lover's genitals before we actually see them. For the most part, our leftover puritanism doesn't condone exhibiting ourselves to each other naked before we've kissed and fondled first. There is an etiquette, a protocol, even in impetuous, runaway sex. But kissing can happen right away, and, if people care for each other, then it's less a prelude to mating than a sign of deep regard. There are wild, hungry kisses or there are rollicking kisses, and there are kisses fluttery and soft as the feathers of cockatoos. It's as if, in the complex language of love, there were a word that could only be spoken by lips when lips touch, a silent contract sealed with a kiss. One style of sex can be bare bones, fundamental and unromantic, but a kiss is the height of voluptuousness, an expense of time and an expanse of spirit in the sweet toil of romance, when one's bones quiver, anticipation rockets, but gratification is kept at bay on purpose, in exquisite torment, to build to a succulent crescendo of emotion and passion. When I was in high school in the early sixties, nice girls didn't go all the way -- most of us wouldn't have known how to. But man, could we kiss! We kissed for hours in the busted-up front seat of a borrowed Chevy, which, in motion, sounded like a broken dinette set; we kissed inventively, clutching our boyfriends from behind as we straddled motorcycles, whose vibrations turned our hips to jelly; we kissed extravagantly beside a turtlearium in the park, or at the local rose garden or zoo; we kissed delicately, in waves of sipping and puckering; we kissed torridly, with tongues like hot pokers; we kissed timelessly, because lovers throughout the ages knew our longing; we kissed wildly, almost painfully, with tough, soul-stealing rigor; we kissed elaborately, as if we were inventing kisses for the first time; we kissed furtively when we met in the hallways between classes; we kissed soulfully in the shadows at concerts, the way we thought musical knights of passion like The Righteous Brothers and their ladies did; we kissed articles of clothing or objects belonging to our boyfriends; we kissed our hands when we blew our boyfriends kisses across the street; we kissed our pillows at night, pretending they were mates; we kissed shamelessly, with all the robust sappiness of youth; we kissed as if kissing could save us from ourselves. Just before I went off to summer camp, which is what fourteen-year-old girls in suburban Pennsylvania did to mark time, my boyfriend, whom my parents did not approve of (wrong religion) and had forbidden me to see, used to walk five miles across town each evening, and climb in through my bedroom window just to kiss me. These were not open-mouthed "French" kisses, which we didn't know about, and they weren't accompanied by groping. They were just earth-stopping, soulful, on-the-ledge-of-adolescence kissing, when you press your lips together and yearn so hard you feel faint. We wrote letters while I was away, but when school started again in the fall the affair seemed to fade of its own accord. I still remember those summer nights, how my boyfriend would hide in my closet if my parents or brother chanced in, and then kiss me for an hour or so and head back home before dark, and I marvel at his determination and the power of a kiss. A kiss seems the smallest movement of the lips, yet it can capture emotions wild as kindling, or be a contract, or dash a mystery. Some cultures just don't do much kissing. In The Kiss and Its History, Dr. Christopher Nyrop refers to Finnish tribes "which bathe together in a state of complete nudity," but regard kissing "as something indecent." Certain African tribes, whose lips are decorated, mutilated, stretched or in other ways deformed, don't kiss. But they are unusual. Most people on the planet greet one another face to face; their greeting may take many forms, but it usually includes kissing, nose-kissing, or nose-saluting. There are many theories about how kissing began. Some authorities, as noted, believe it evolved from the act of smelling someone's face, inhaling them out of friendship or love in order to gauge their mood and well-being. There are cultures today in which people greet one another by putting their heads together and inhaling the other's essence. Some sniff each other's hands. The mucous membranes of the lips are exquisitely sensitive, and we often use the mouth to taste texture while using the nose to smell flavor. Animals frequently lick their masters or their young with relish, savoring the taste of a favorite's identity. [6] So we may indeed have begun kissing as a way to taste-and-smell someone. According to the Bible account, when Isaac grew old and lost his sight, he called his son Esau to kiss him and receive a blessing, but Jacob put on Esau's clothing and, because he smelled like Esau to his blind father, received the kiss instead. In Mongolia, a father does not kiss his son; he smells his son's head. Some cultures prefer just to rub noses (Inuits, Maoris, Polynesians, and others), while in some Malay tribes the word for "smell" means the same as "salute," Here is how Charles Darwin describes the Malay nose-rubbing kiss: "The women squatted with their faces upturned; my attendants stood leaning over theirs, and commenced rubbing. It lasted somewhat longer than a hearty handshake with us. During this process they uttered a grunt of satisfaction." Some cultures kiss chastely, some kiss extravagantly, and some kiss more savagely, biting and sucking each other's lips. In The Customs of the Swahili People, edited by J. W. T. Allen, it is reported that a Swahili husband and wife kiss on the lips if they are indoors, and will freely kiss young children. However, boys over the age of seven usually are not kissed by mother, aunt, sister-in-law, or sister. The father may kiss a son, but a brother or father shouldn't kiss a girl. Furthermore, When his grandmother or his aunt or another woman comes, a child one or two years old is told to show his love for his aunt, and he goes to her. Then she tells him to kiss her, and he does so. Then he is told by his mother to show his aunt his tobacco, and he lifts his clothes and shows her his penis. She tweaks the penis and sniffs and sneezes and says: "O, very strong tobacco." Then she says, "Hide your tobacco." If there are four or five women, they all sniff and are pleased and laugh a lot. How did mouth-kissing begin? To primitive peoples, the hot air wafting from their mouths may have seemed a magical embodiment of the soul, and a kiss a way to fuse two souls. Desmond Morris, who has been observing people with a keen zoologist's eye for quite a while, is one of a number of authorities who claim this fascinating and, to me, plausible origin for French kissing: In early human societies, before commercial baby-food was invented, mothers weaned their children by chewing up their food and then passing it into the infantile mouth by lip-to-lip contact, which naturally involved a considerable amount of tonguing and mutual mouth-pressure. This almost bird-like system of parental care seems strange and alien to us today, but our species probably practiced it for a million years or more, and adult erotic kissing today is almost certainly a Relic Gesture stemming from these origins.... Whether it has been handed down to us from generation to generation ... or whether we have an inborn predisposition towards it, we cannot say. But, whichever is the case, it looks rather as though, with the deep kissing and tonguing of modern lovers, we are back again at the infantile mouth-feeding stage of the far-distant past.... If the young lovers exploring each other's mouths with their tongues feel the ancient comfort of parental mouth-feeding, this may help them to increase their mutual trust and thereby their pair-bonding. Our lips are deliciously soft and responsive. Their touch sensations are represented by a large part of the brain, and what a boon that is to kissing. We don't just kiss romantically, of course; we also kiss dice before we roll them, kiss our own hurt finger or that of a loved one, kiss a religious symbol or statue, kiss the flag of our homeland or the ground itself, kiss a good-luck charm, kiss a photograph, kiss the king's or bishop's ring, kiss our own fingers to signal farewell to someone. The ancient Romans used to deliver the "last kiss," which custom had it would capture a dying person's soul. [7] In America, we "kiss off" someone when we dump them, and they yell "Kiss my ass!" when angry. Young women press lipsticked mouths to the backs of envelopes so all the tiny lines will carry like fingerprint kisses to their sweethearts. We even refer to billiard balls as "kissing" when they touch delicately and glance away. Hershey sells small foil-wrapped candy "kisses," so we can give love to ourselves or others with each morsel. Christian worship includes a "kiss of peace," whether of a holy object -- a relic or a cross --- or of fellow worshippers, translated by some Christians into a rather more restrained handshake. William S. Walsh's 1897 book, Curiosities of Popular Customs, quotes a Dean Stanley, writing in Christian Institutions, as reporting travelers who "have had their faces stroked and been kissed by the Coptic priest in the cathedral at Cairo, while at the same moment everybody else was kissing everybody throughout the church." In ancient Egypt, the Orient, Rome, and Greece, honor used to dictate kissing the hem or feet or hands of important persons. Mary Magdalen kissed the feet of Jesus. A sultan often required subjects of varying ranks to kiss varying parts of his royal body: High officials might kiss the toe, others merely the fringe of his scarf. The riffraff just bowed to the ground. Drawing a row of XXXXXs at the bottom of a letter to represent kisses began in the Middle Ages, when so many people were illiterate that a cross was acceptable as a signature on a legal document. The cross did not represent the Crucifixion, nor was it an arbitrary scrawl; it stood for "St. Andrew's mark," and people vowed to be honest in his sacred name. To pledge their sincerity, they would kiss their signature. In time, the "X" became associated with the kiss alone. [8] Perhaps the most famous kiss in the world is Rodin's sculpture The Kiss, in which two lovers, sitting on a rocky ledge or outcropping, embrace tenderly with radiant energy, and kiss forever. Her left hand wrapped around his neck, she seems almost to be swooning, or to be singing into his mouth. As he rests his open right hand on her thigh, a thigh he knows well and adores, he seems to be ready to play her leg as if it were a musical instrument. Enveloped in each other, glued together by touch at the shoulder, hand, leg, hip, and chest, they seal their fate and close it with the stoppers of their mouths. His calves and knees are beautiful, her ankles are strong and firmly feminine, and her buttocks, waist, and breasts are all heavily fleshed and curvy. Ecstasy pours off every inch of them. Touching in only a few places, they seem to be touching in every cell. Above all, they are oblivious to us, the sculptor, or anything on earth outside of themselves. It is as if they have fallen down the well of each other; they are not only self-absorbed, but actually absorbing one another. Rodin, who often took secret sketch notes of the irrelevant motions made by his models, has given these lovers a vitality and thrill that bronze can rarely capture in its fundamental calm. Only the fluent, abstracted stroking and pressing of live lovers actually kissing could capture it. Rilke notes how Rodin was able to fill his sculptures "with this deep inner vitality, with the rich and amazing restlessness of life. Even the tranquility, where there was tranquility, was composed of hundreds upon hundreds of moments of motion keeping each other in equilibrium.... Here was desire immeasurable, thirst so great that all the waters of the world dried in it like a single drop." According to anthropologists, the lips remind us of the labia, because they flush red and swell when they're aroused, which is the conscious or subconscious reason women have always made them look even redder with lipstick. Today the bee-stung look is popular; models draw even larger and more hospitable lips, almost always in shades of pink and red, and then apply a further gloss to make them look shiny and moist. So, anthropologically at least, a kiss on the mouth, especially with all the plunging of tongues and the exchanging of saliva, is another form of intercourse, and it's not surprising that it should make the mind and body surge with gorgeous sensations. 1988: Summer in upstate New York passes in a slow, humid embrace. The big event this week is a convention of psychics meeting at the Ramada Inn downtown, to tell fortunes and swap stories. Classes and special events take place in nearby rooms, but for a small fee the general public can enter the main ballroom, and choose to visit one of the many booths arcing around the walls in a horseshoe, or browse through the parapsychology books laid out on bridge tables in the center of the room. There are palm-readers, numerologists, telekinesis and UFO specialists, as well as men and women perched over crystal balls and Tarot cards. One tall thin woman wearing a tie-dyed muumuu works at a large easel with pastels. Not only does she do "past-life regressions," she draws the incarnations, complete with "past-life guides," as she talks about them. Watching for a while at a polite distance, I notice that many of the local people seem to have Indian guides whose names consist mainly of consonants. Finally I decide on a palm-reader with a serious face and a bouffant, country-and-western hairdo, whose literature recounts her cavalcade of solved crimes and timely predictions. Giving her husband-manager twenty-five dollars for a short reading, I sit down across from her at a small bistro table against the wall. She is a middle-aged woman wearing a rabbit-skin bolero vest and a full skirt. What I'm really wondering is why notices were posted and invitations sent out at all: If it's a psychics' convention, shouldn't everyone just know where and when to meet? Taking my hand, she rakes it lightly with her spread fingers, then lifts it up close to her face as if zeroing in on a splinter. "You drive a red car," she says in a solemn voice. "No, a blue one ... ," I say, hating to disappoint her. "Well you will drive a red car in the future sometime, and you must be very careful," she warns. "I see a lot of money for you in December, but someone you work with will betray you, and you must watch out.... You're close to someone named Mary?" I shake my head no. "Margaret? Melissa? Monica?" "I have a mother named Marcia," I offer. "Ah, that's it, and you're very concerned about her, but she'll be all right, you don't have to worry." Now she presses the fleshy side of my palm and folds back the thumb, separates the fingers and peers closely at them. The hand is "the visible part of the brain," Immanuel Kant once said. She searches the flexure lines (creases made by moving the hand), tension lines (wrinkles that grow with age the way facial lines do), and papillary ridges (fingerprints), traces my head line, heart line, life line and fate line. Among our near neighbors, the apes, the heart and head lines are the same, but so mobile and powerful are our forefingers that they tend to separate the lines on most people. My hands are cool and dry. Palms sweat when we're agitated, in tribute to a time deep in our past when stress meant physical danger and our body wanted us ready to fight or flee. A tiny discoloration at the base of my second finger brings a nod of interest from the palm-reader. It's only a scar left from a rose thorn, nothing like stigmata, marks some Roman Catholics claim appear spontaneously on their feet and palms and bleed, reproducing the wounds Christ suffered on the cross. "You know someone who had an abortion?" the palm-reader asks. *** Throughout history, palm-readers have chosen the hand as their symbolic link to the psyche and soul, as their raft through time. After all, the hand is action, it digs roads and builds cities, it throws spears and diapers babies. Even its small dramas -- dialing a phone number, pushing a button -- can change the course of nations or launch atomic bombs. When we are distressed, we allow our hands to console each other by wringing, stroking, fidgeting, and caressing them as if they were separate people. At the outset of a romance, the first touch people share is usually the taking of each other's hand, while couples of long standing, moving through the world on their daily rounds, often hold hands as a tender bridge. Holding the hand of someone ill or elderly soothes them and gives them an emotional lifeline. Experiments show that just touching someone's hand or arm lowers their blood pressure. In many cultures, people fiddle obsessively with worry beads, polished stones, and other objects, and the brain-wave patterns this produces are those of a mind made calm by repeated touch stimulation. In these days of mass-produced objects, we treasure things that are "handmade." We think of manual laborers as working harder than desk jockeys, though it might not always be the case. Sometimes working hands seem to perform with a cunning and sensitivity that defies explanation. Lorraine Miller, though totally blind, works as a hair stylist at a beauty salon in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. A mother of five, Ms. Miller had always wanted to be a beautician, but the rigors of raising a family never allowed time for it. Later in life, blinded by disease, she decided to pursue her lifelong ambition. A hair salon in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, trained her to cut hair by touch, carefully feeling the shape of the head and the layers of hair as she cut them. In time, she touch-cut so well that they hired her. The tiny ridges in our fingertips, whose roughness makes it easier for us to grasp objects, are randomly formed, resulting in the unique swirling weather systems we call "fingerprints." The swirls run through a few basic patterns of whorls, loops, and arches, but combine in endlessly different ways. Not even identical twins have the same fingerprints, which makes guilt a lot easier to establish when it is necessary to do so. The idea of one's fingerprints being the ultimate personal signature isn't new. Thousands of years ago, the Chinese used the imprint of a finger as a way of signing a contract. When the FBI searches for fingerprints on a holdup note, they use a laser. The oily residue absorbs laser light and re-emits it at a longer wavelength. Forensic experts wearing amber goggles then filter out the laser light and see the fingerprints -- always a distinctive signature. A hand moves with a complex precision that's irreplaceable, feels with a delicate intuition that's indefinable, as designers of robotic hands are discovering. Because we use our hands so often for so many purposes, flexing, bending, gripping, pointing, stretching them millions of times, University of Utah Research Institute engineers have invented a glove to wear over a hand that has lost the sense of touch -- through the use of electronics and sound waves, it gives the wearer a sense of pressure, which is essential to being able to grasp. A wire leads from the glove to a tiny piston that is connected to a part of the body where feeling hasn't been lost, and the wearer feels hand sensations (in his wrist or forearm, for example) and learns to translate them into hand responses. The sensitivity of the fingertips reveals itself in the use of Braille, which now appears everywhere, from elevator panels to the faces of Italian coins. Braille can be read quickly, and people are always looking for better ways to use it. A recent study reported in Education of the Visually Handicapped suggests that Braille can be read more accurately and efficiently if the readers move their fingers vertically over the dots rather than horizontally, because the fingertip's touch receptors are more sensitive when used in that way. Handclasps and handshakes have served throughout history to prove the lack of a weapon and to pledge one's good faith, although shaking hands as a common greeting didn't really come into practice until the Industrial Revolution in England, when businessmen were so busy making deals and shaking hands on them that the gesture lost its special purpose and entered casual social life. A handshake is still a watered-down contract that says: Let's at least pretend that we'll deal honorably with each other. The hand has been symbolic of the whole body for some time, as in "I'll give you a hand," or referring to a worker as a "hired hand." Think of all the ways in which we touch ourselves (I don't just mean masturbation -- from manustuprare, "to defile with the hand"), but how we wrap our hands around our shoulders and rock as if we were a mother comforting a child; how we hide our face in our open palms to be alone to pray, or that they may receive our tears; how we run our hands briskly up and down our arms as we pace; how, with wide eyes, we press an open palm to one cheek when we're startled. Touch is so important in emotional situations that we're driven to touch ourselves in the way we'd like someone else to comfort us. Hands are messengers of emotion. And few have understood their intricate duty as well as Rodin. Here is how Rilke describes Rodin's artistry: Rodin has made hands, independent, small hands which, without forming part of the body, are yet alive. Hands rising upright, angry and irritated, hands whose five bristling fingers seem to bark like the five throats of Cerberus. Hands in motion, sleeping hands and hands in the act of awakening; criminal hands weighted by heredity, hands that are tired and have lost all desire, lying like some sick beast crouched in a corner, knowing none can help them. But hands are a complicated organism, a delta in which much life from distant sources flows together and is poured into the great stream of action. Hands have a history of their own, they have indeed, their own civilization, their special beauty; we concede to them the right to have their own development, their own wishes, feelings, moods and favorite occupations. In the sea of so-called healers who cater to desperate people, there are practitioners of "therapeutic touch," who claim to cure people of physical ills without actually touching the body, by running their hands at a discreet distance over a person's energy field. The ancient practice of "the laying on of hands" can be seen weekly on most TV sets in the United States. A preacher calls a sick or troubled person out of the audience, seems to intuit their problem without being told (charlatan-debunker Randi has revealed simple magician's tricks that are used), and then touches them on the forehead with such force it knocks them off their feet. They fall to the ground in religious ecstasy, stand up and claim to be healed. Throughout the world, shamans and medicine men perform similar rituals, seeming to draw the demon out of a person's body, healing them with an incantation and a touch. Touch is so powerful a healer that we go to professional touchers (doctors, hairdressers, masseuses, dancing instructors, cosmeticians, barbers, gynecologists, chiropodists, tailors, back manipulators, prostitutes, and manicurists), and frequent emporiums of touch -- discotheques, shoeshine stands, mud baths. Illness usually sends us to a doctor, but often we go just to be fussed over and touched. A doctor can't help much when one has a minor allergy, the flu, or some other small affliction, but we go anyway to be patted, stroked, listened to, inspected, handled. Monkeys and other animals engage in a lot of grooming, especially of the head. The ancient Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians wore elaborate coifs that required the steady attendance of hairdressers, but this voluptuous touching eventually went out of fashion and didn't reappear until after the Middle Ages; the professional beauty salon didn't come into vogue until the Victorian era. Gynecologists do the most intimate professional touching of all, and few situations are as awkward for a woman as having a male gynecologist she's never so much as said hello to walk into an examining room, lift up the sheet, and set to work. Such a blase attitude hasn't always been the hallmark of a gynecologist's calling. "Three hundred years ago he was even on occasion required to crawl into the pregnant woman's bedroom on his hands and knees to perform the examination," Desmond Morris observes, "so that she would be unable to see the owner of the fingers which were to touch her so privately. At a later date, he was forced to work in a darkened room, or to deliver a baby by groping beneath the bedclothes. A 17th-century etching shows him sitting at the foot of the labour bed with the sheet tucked into his collar like a napkin, so that he is unable to see what his hands are doing, an anti-intimacy device that made cutting the umbilical cord a particularly hazardous operation." The most obvious professional touch is the massage, designed to stimulate circulation, dilate blood vessels, relax tense muscles, and clean toxins out of the body through the flow of lymph. The popular "Swedish" massage emphasizes long, sweeping strokes in the direction of the heart. The Japanese "shiatsu" is a kind of acupuncture without needles, using the finger (shi in Japanese) to cause pressure (atsu). The body is charted according to meridians, along which one's vitality or life-force flows, and the massage frees the way for it. In "neo-Reichian" massage, which is sometimes used in conjunction with psychotherapy, the practitioner strokes away from the heart in order to dispel nervous energy. "Reflexology" focuses on the feet, but, like shiatsu, also attends to pressure points on the skin, which represent various organs. Massaging these points is supposed to help the corresponding organ to function better. In "Rolfing" the massage turns into violent, sometimes painful manipulation. Although there are many different massage techniques, some formal schools, and much philosophizing on the subject, studies have shown that loving touching alone -- in whatever style -- can improve health. At Ohio University School, one researcher conducted an experiment in which he fed rabbits high-cholesterol diets and methodically petted a special group of them; the petted rabbits had a 50 percent lower rate of arteriosclerosis than similarly fed but unpetted rabbits. A Philadelphia experiment studied the survival chances of patients who had had heart attacks. Examining a wide spectrum of variables and their effects on survival, the experiments discovered that the variable that produced the strongest effect was pet ownership. It made no difference if the person were married or single -- pet owners still survived the longest. The idle stroking of our pets that is so calming and can be done almost subconsciously while we do something else or talk to friends or work has a healing effect. As one of the experimenters said: "We raise our children in a nontactile society and have to compensate with nonhuman creatures. First with teddy bears and blankets, then with pets. When touch isn't there, our true isolation comes through." Touching is just as therapeutic as being touched; the healer, the giver of touch, is simultaneously healed. Despite our passion, indeed our need, to touch and be touched, many parts of the body are taboo in different cultures. In the United States, it isn't acceptable for a man to touch the breasts, buttocks, or genitals of a woman who doesn't invite him to do so. Because a woman tends to be shorter than a man, when he puts an arm around her shoulder her arm falls naturally around his waist. As a result, a woman often ends up touching a man's waist and pelvis without its becoming a necessarily sexual act. When a man touches a woman's pelvis, though, it immediately registers as sexual. Women touch other women's hair and faces more often than men touch other men's hair and faces. Females, in general, have their hair touched more by everyone -- mothers, fathers, boyfriends, girlfriends -- than males do. It's taboo to touch a Japanese girl's nape. In Thailand, it's taboo to touch the top of a girl's head. In Fiji, touching someone's hair is as taboo as touching the genitals of a stranger would be in, say, Iowa. Even primitive tribes, in which men and women walk around naked, have taboos about touching parts of the body. In fact, there are only two situations when the taboos disappear: Lovers have complete access to the body of another person, and so does a mother with her baby. Many of the encounter groups that blossomed during the sixties were little more than organized touch sessions, often "aided" by drugs, in which people tried to break down some of the social inhibitions and taboos that left them feeling pent-up, rigid, and alien. There are also gender and status taboos. We look at, talk with, and listen to all sorts of people every day of our lives, but touch is special. Touching someone is like using their first name. Think about two people talking in a business meeting: One of them touches the other lightly on the hand while making a point, or puts an arm around the other's shoulder. Which one is the boss? The one who initiates a touch is almost always the person of higher status. Researchers observing hundreds of people in public settings in a small town in Indiana and in a big city on the East Coast, found that males touch females first, that females are more likely to touch females than males are to touch males, and that people of higher status generally touch lower-status people first. Lower-status people wait for the go-ahead before they risk an increased intimacy -- even a subconscious one -- with their presumed superiors. At Purdue University Library, a woman librarian goes about her business, checking out people's books. She is part of an experiment in subliminal touch, and knows that half the time she is to do nothing special, the other half to touch people as insignificantly as possible. She brushes a student's hand lightly as she returns a library card. Then the student is followed outside and asked to fill out a questionnaire about the library that day. Among other questions, the student is asked if the librarian smiled, and if she touched him. In fact, the librarian had not smiled, but the student reports that she did, although he says she did not touch him. This experiment lasts all day, and soon a pattern becomes clear: those students who have been subconsciously touched report much more satisfaction with the library and life in general. In a related experiment staged at two restaurants in Oxford, Mississippi, waitresses lightly and unobtrusively touch diners on the hand or shoulder. Those customers who are touched don't necessarily rate the food or restaurant better, but they consistently tip the waitress higher. In yet another experiment in Boston, a researcher leaves money in a phone booth, then returns when she sees the next person pocket the money; she casually asks if they've found what she lost. If the researcher touches the person while asking for their help, touches them insignificantly so that they don't remember it later, the likelihood that the money will be returned rises from 63 to 96 percent. Despite the fact that we're territorial creatures who move through the world like small principalities, contact warms us even without our knowing it. It probably reminds us of that time, long before deadlines and banks, when our mothers cradled us and we were enthralled and felt perfectly lovable. Even touch so subtle as to be overlooked doesn't go unnoticed by the subterranean mind. _______________ 1. What a curious and deprived life the Dionne quints lived. Born in Ontario, Canada, they were seized by the government and put in a kind of zoo. So they lived in a sterile room behind bars. At one point their mother, who wasn't allowed to touch them, stood in line with the other paying viewers. Only after a lawsuit was she able to get her children back. None of them grew up normally. 2. Mother tells me she once hooked a rug out of old shirts, torn underwear, and my father's socks, all slivered up like apples and plugged into burlap with crocheting tools. She must mean the black-and-floral slab that surfaced like a raft on the basement floor, ice-cold and ugly with ammonia where the stray dog we took in for the winter had worms. It's not so much the rag rug itself I have frozen in my memory as its spongy feel. After thirty years I can still fetch back that revelation of acrylic squoosh. 3. A "lock" of hair is a winding and twisting thing, according to its origin in the Indo-European leug-; a fascinating root at the heart of the word locket (in Old English "a bending together, a "shutting") as well as the Latin idea of luxuriance, extravagance, and excess (originally of plants growing in wild and unruly profusion); the Latin word for to wrestle (people bending around each other), as well as to struggle (people trying to twist and fasten events); the German word for the vegetable leek (because of the leaf shape); and even the Germanic word luck (when fate twists obliquely). 4. Touch is being used successfully as a substitute for hearing. Varying numbers of gold-plated electrodes are attached to a stimulator belt, which is usually worn on the abdomen, arm, forehead, or legs. A deaf child is taught that particular sounds have particular skin patterns. Then the teacher asks the child to create sounds that will produce the same pattern on the skin. This works especially well with words like "sue," "do," "too," "new," which are difficult for deaf people to lip-read. These "tactile vocoders," as the devices are called, can't transmit the: entire speech code yet, but they can be used very effectively in conjunction with lipreading. The children using them read at levels much higher than those who just lip-read. In Dr. Kimbough Oller's, program of tactile vocoder use at the University of Miami, the ultimate goal is one day to substitute the sense of touch for the sense of hearing. 5. The Ebers papyrus, a sixteenth-century Egyptian medical handbook, refers to opium as a painkiller. The ancients understood that opiates dulled pain, but it was only recently that people began to understand how. In the fifth century, Hippocrates was using willow bark, from which aspirin is derived. 6. Not only humans kiss. Apes and chimps have been observed kissing and embracing as a form of peacemaking. 7. Last-kiss scenes appear in Ovid's Metamorphoses (VIII, 860-61 ). Seneca's Hercules Oetaeus, and Virgil's Aeneid (IV, 684-85), among others, and in a more erotic form in the writings of Ariosto. 8. It used to be fashionable in Spain to close formal letters with QBSP (Que Besa Su Pies, "Who kisses your feet") or QBSM (Que Besa Su Mano. "Who kisses your hand").
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