Treat the following text as your own skin.
Pull
Don’t hesitate...
Layer by layer, you will explore that you are not fully in control of your body - don’t worry, don’t be afraid.
You are growing, mutating and depend on others - constantly. Being sensitive to this, I hope you will protect and care for both of you.
Accept the invitation of this guest, become comfortable inside your shared body. We welcome you to review this relation of bodies through a chimeric lens.
I can still see it.
Looking down to my belly a small but significant reddish-purple circle is visible. Depending on my body temperature it changes its colours from red to blueish in cold times.
I can still feel it.
When I focus on this momentum than a phantom pain overcomes me.
This embodied experience between a tick and me left a stigma:
On my body and in my memory.
A guest stayed overnight, slept in my bed and ate from my flesh, without my consent. I can still feel the imprints even if it is not there anymore. The visit left an embodied expression and impression.
Therefore, I have to learn more about the intruder in the first place: their behaviour, desires, and wounded parts.
After many failed attempts to
remove the mouthparts of the tick,
I have decided to visit the doctor.
Unsurprisingly, he spoke the
language of ab-jection:
“It does not matter if you pull out
the tick’s body one by one. It is just
important to get everything out as
soon as possible!”
Interspecies communication is vital. The tick can die from the absence of a host. To avoid the hostility of the host, the tick’s saliva contains anaesthetics that keep the bite from stinging and blood thinners to prevent clotting. Additionally, to minimize the risk the tick copies some of the cells of the surrounding tissues. They transform their own body, changing hostility into hospitality, and exchanging outside for inside to ensure our survival...
My
subsequent
bodily reaction
to this information
was to reach for a tweezer
to pull the tick out. After
many failed attempts, I had
to make use of a needle to open my
epidermis in order to reach the anchored head.
This mechanical reaction to the stickiness
of the tick made me aware
of how my emotions
are also
fundamentally
attached to
my
body
The tick is an interference in a system. Just like parasitism is part of every relation, the noise makes the system work. No system is without its flaws, errors, accidents. Every system has its parasite, an agent “who has the last word, who produces disorder and who generates a different order” (Michel Serres). Whenever a parasitic agent takes over and overturns a system, more diversity and complexity are created in that act.
This productive tick/noise may reveal the liveliness of a system and thus its fragility. The penetration of my skin followed by an exchange of body liquids and stickiness, made me realize that my body is permeable.
‘next to’.
Para measures a difference between a reduction and, on the contrary, an expansion of space.
Get rid of it!
Fast!
Faster!
Don’t twist the body!
Don’t squeeze the body!
Aim for the head!
THE HEAD!
The tick transforms their common environment, which is ‘my’ body, into their private shelter by introducing a bodily gesture - saliva, a smell of their own. Their extension inwards causes an expansion outwards: while they saturate themselves with my blood, their abdomen grows while mine shrinks.
The tick becomes into existence through my body.
Does this mean....
Colophone
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Crary, J. (1990). Techniques of the observer: On vision and modernity in the nineteenth century. Cambridge, Mass: MIT.
Crawford, C. (2015). Body Image, Prostheses, Phantom Limbs. Body & Society, 21(2), 221-244.
Hatley, J. (2011). Blood Intimacies and Biodicy: Keeping Faith with Ticks, Australia Humanities Review (50). 63-75.
Haraway, D. (2008). When species meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Leder, D. (1990). The absent body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (2002). Phenomenology of Perception: An Introduction. Taylor & Francis Ltd - M.U.A.
Serres, M. (1982). The parasite. London: The Johns Hopkins Press.
Shildrick, M. (2002). Embodying the monster: Encounters with the vulnerable self. London: SAGE.