Man and Organism
By WillSimpson
- 866 reads
The question of skin related illness, in my own personal case this is psoriasis. There is an affliction between my mind and body, on the one hand my mind wishes to face the challenges of the day and be reborn into them with full heart. But the organism which is my skin, the common cloak we all wear refuses to regenerate itself a fresh into this world and breaks out in patches of rebellion. My problems are unique to me and my life situation though similar to others, is in fact unique to my existence. I am the unique individual soul inhabiting this body. Yet I am similar to all others as part of the social collective. This is the place then that I shall begin to look for the root cause. A cause that may turn out to be a result of my own personal turns and decisions in life or a cause from the stars.
My anarchist belief's, though unique to me, are still not so far fetched from the mainstream thoughts of consciousness that they should root up cells that refuse to work in-line with the rest of the functioning skin organism.
My current life situation caught between two changing worlds, one world in which time has no meaning and stands oblivious to all. Another world in which time is constantly in flux changing and shaping, a time we have seen broken up into days, months, and years, a time seemingly endless. All these modes of thought unique to me, but there for others also.
My lost and broken love life's left in tatters through my own blind hungry rampaging wolf that destroys those who are too weak for real love. This is a personal affliction one through which I may never be freed. A wolf caught in a hunters trap, and the hunter is the great constellation Orion; armed with cupids arrows, firing them ruthlessly up into the night sky trying to catch a glimpse of that ancient woman who stands beyond all time and place, that transcendent spirit caught up in all men, the projection of most western marriages, she who must be obeyed. She who was there at the root of my skin affliction.
I was either 16 or 17 when I first noticed the red patches appearing on my skin. At 16 I had left home because of constant arguing with my father, I moved in with my good friend David and soon found it a rewarding experience. We started out in a 2 bedroom flat and soon found a small house. By this time I had fallen for a girl, or shall I say the wolf was in the trap, she was another close friends younger sister and it wasn't long before she was to bear my child at the tender age of 16 she fell pregnant and had George when she was 17. Before that though there was lots of chemical experimentation to be done. I was working to pay the rent and had fun doing it, but I was also lost with a girlfriend to support and a father to wage war with. At the time of the first symptoms I was not alone, Kate and David also began showing signs of psoriasis, at the time we put it down to cleaning products in the bath. As time stands that is the history I remember, if it was slightly different then the chemical experiments played a role in my memory but as far as I know there was nothing major going on that could trigger a lifelong skin rebellion. At this time I had no such anarchist thoughts, I was fresh out of school and socially conditioned just like the rest. I knew I wanted something more from life and expressed it musically with my now somewhat embarrassing alter ego MC Skill. I left writing at that point to continue on with my daily tasks to make some money, as a strange coincidence that I now only recall. I was outside the local public house doss. I call it this because it is not local to anyone in particular except the ageing alcoholics, it is the cheapest pub in town and its frequents are the down and outs of Middlesbrough, as it happens I was selling someone some cannabis, as I pulled up outside a frail old drunken lady happened to mention my psoriasis. This then began an amazing exchange between her and my affliction.
She told me she had it too, and began showing me in a drunken fashion all the different places it had manifest on her. This now takes my investigation a step further, if she has it, is it the same thing and what is our common fault?
As far as I could tell from my one and only instance in her present she was an alcoholic. She was also not too bothered by her alcoholism and her affliction.
She was in all manners of speaking in good spirits. One look though and you could see the demon this frail helpless sufferer kept secret. The same demons my father keeps, but would I be wrong in admitting my own addiction? I am a cannabis addict, in the sense that I have smoked it full time (by this I mean at least once a week and most weeks more) since the age of fifteen. Fortunately for me it is not a problem in my life so I have no need to classify it as a problematic addiction, but if I am honest to myself it is an addiction. I do not smoke tobacco on its own, however I do smoke joints regularly. This leads me to my next question, if there is a common link between addiction and psoriasis from this logic, then why don't other addicts suffer the same affliction?
This does not mean I am going to rule it out as a cause, but instead approach with caution and an open mind. My other thoughts fall into state of mind. I can see my own state of mind in retrospect and the fact I can function normal in social settings, so as far as I am aware my state of mind is fine. Stress has often been linked as a factor and certainly in my case it is a huge factor, except with one twist. In others I observe stress manifests itself in rash decision making and snappy moods, to the extremities of breaking down and depression. In myself I remain controlled over each of these affects, but when circumstances in my life appear stressful to the outside I am able to cope with them rather untouched by the usual symptoms of stress, except in my skin, whilst one man would be down with the rope ready to cast round his neck for the sake of losing all his material possessions I would happily look, laugh and walk on by, but the reaction in my skin would be a dragon like scale of an outbreak. This is certainly one factor for cause.
But looking at it another way, there are people who lose it all and reach the dregs of society and still manage to maintain a clean cut composure and hold no affliction in their skin, only the bags under the eyes give a glimpse of their suffering. It has taken me one day to ponder on these questions and the next day I will forget it all and start again. But for anyone reading and possibly suffering the same, ask yourself how John Merrick would of felt whilst his entire skeleton failed to follow the rules of nature and instead transformed him into what's come to be known as the elephant man. When we find the root of his rebellious natural skeleton we will find some deep knowledge about the collective human organism.
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