Read A Natural History of the Senses Online
Authors: Diane Ackerman
A Natural History of the Senses (19 page)
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 acapuncture 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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
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).
*
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.
*
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.
*
Not only humans kiss Apes and chimps have been observed kissing and embracing as a form of peacemaking.
*
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.
†
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”).
aste
Those … from whom nature has withheld the legacy of taste, have long faces, and long eyes and noses, whatever their height there is something elongated
in their proportions. Their hair is dark and unglossy, and they are never plump; it was they who invented trousers
.
Anthelme Brillat-Savarin,
The Physiology of Taste
The other senses may be enjoyed in all their beauty when one is alone, but taste is largely social. Humans rarely choose to dine in solitude, and food has a powerful social component. The Bantu feel that exchanging food makes a contract between two people who then have a “clanship of porridge.” We usually eat with our families, so it’s easy to see how “breaking bread” together would symbolically link an outsider to a family group. Throughout the world, the stratagems of business take place over meals; weddings end with a feast; friends reunite at celebratory dinners; children herald their birthdays with ice cream and cake; religious ceremonies offer food in fear, homage, and sacrifice; wayfarers are welcomed with a meal. As Brillat-Savarin says, “every … sociability … can be found assembled around the same table: love, friendship, business, speculation, power, importunity, patronage, ambition, intrigue …” If an event is meant to matter emotionally, symbolically, or mystically, food will be close at hand to sanctify and bind it. Every culture uses food as a sign of approval or commemoration, and some foods are even credited with supernatural powers, others eaten symbolically, still others eaten ritualistically, with ill fortune befalling dullards or skeptics who forget the recipe or get the order of events wrong. Jews attending a Seder eat a horseradish dish to symbolize the tears shed by their ancestors when they were slaves in Egypt. Malays celebrate important events with rice, the inspirational center of their lives. Catholics and Anglicans take a communion of wine and wafer. The ancient Egyptians thought onions symbolized the many-layered universe, and swore oaths on an onion as we might on a Bible. Most cultures
embellish eating with fancy plates and glasses, accompany it with parties, music, dinner theater, open-air barbecues, or other forms of revelry. Taste is an intimate sense. We can’t taste things at a distance. And how we taste things, as well as the exact makeup of our saliva, may be as individual as our fingerprints.
Food gods have ruled the hearts and lives of many peoples. Hopi Indians, who revere corn, eat blue corn for strength, but all Americans might be worshiping corn if they knew how much of their daily lives depended on it. Margaret Visser, in
Much Depends on Dinner
, gives us a fine history of corn and its uses: livestock and poultry eat corn; the liquid in canned foods contains corn; corn is used in most paper products, plastics, and adhesives; candy, ice cream, and other goodies contain corn syrup; dehydrated and instant foods contain cornstarch; many familiar objects are made from corn products, brooms and corncob pipes to name only two. For the Hopis, eating corn is itself a form of reverence. I’m holding in my hand a beautifully carved Hopi corn kachina doll made from cottonwood; it represents one of the many spiritual essences of their world. Its cob-shaped body is painted ocher, yellow, black, and white, with dozens of squares drawn in a cross-section-of-a-kernel design, and abstract green leaves spearing up from below. The face has a long, black, rootlike nose, rectangular black eyes, a black ruff made of rabbit fur, white string corn-silk-like ears, brown bird-feather bangs, and two green, yellow, and ocher striped horns topped by rawhide tassels. A fine, soulful kachina, the ancient god Maïs stares back at me, tastefully imagined.