Trypophobia
I have a hole that goes to eternity, in my face.
For decades now I've had a slight blemish on my cheek; I've never really worked out what it is; some kind of grey lump, the kind of thing people don't seem to particularly stare at, but which gives the general impression of an aging face, like liver spots or small moles; it was just part of me I accepted. But recently I changed my diet and it too began to change, to harden and catch when I rubbed my face. This was a surprise, given our relatively stable time together, but I accepted it would probably get worse as the years progressed1.
Then, yesterday, I spent the afternoon, as I am sometimes want, enjoying a sauna2. When I exited, I found the blemish had transformed unpleasantly; it was now septic yellow, stringy, reaching with tiny tentacles out away from my body like some foetid anemone3. As I was booked for a meal shortly afterwards I thought I'd better do something with it, so tentatively I tried to cut it back to the skin with a small pair of scissors. While entirely painless, it was, nevertheless, a good deal tougher than I imagined it would be. And so, after some frustration, I began to attack it with more vigour, until, to my horror and surprise, it popped from my face, a plug, maybe half a centimetre long, leaving a small neat hole in my cheek. This seemed, on inspection with a torch, to be bottomless, and yet it didn't bleed, nor even hurt in any fashion. I can't tell you how disturbing I found this; I couldn't help but gingerly pull at the entrance, angling the torch this way and that to shine it deeper and deeper in, with the hope of hitting the bottom – but to no avail4. Feeling shaken, and not a little sick, I went to my reservation, but found it hard to concentrate on anything other than the hole. The smooth elastic entrance was much smaller than the original blemish, yet I found it hard to believe no one stared at it. I wanted to scream "waitress! how can you ask me what I want to eat – can you not see, I have a hole in my face!" I wanted them to call someone: a physician5, no, a physicist – someone who understood that the nature of reality had changed; that would recognise that the world had shifted on its axis and a new universe opened up; that there was a hole in my face that reached down into some other dimension, some dimension attached to flesh, but not of the flesh, from which nothingness crawled, and from which the blemish had taken its sustenance these many years. My only recourse was to alcohol – so I drank, and drank copiously.
This morning, after a long night of terrors, the hole had closed a little. I need to find some kind of cocktail stick or toothpick with which to probe it, for I must prove what in my heart I know: that I could push any thin object into it, without ever hitting the bottom6.
21 Sept 2024
Notes:
1 As Camus says, in a rather over-gender-specific manner: "Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face!" (La Chute; 1956).
2 My love of saunas is without end. I seek them out whenever I travel, for, along with second-hand bookshops, they give an instant and intimate insight into any town or country. I have been in them all: from Japanese onsen to Germanic mountain saunas; engaged with Löyly in Finnish sweat lodges and felt the deep clean of a Turkish bath in Istanbul; sat in the sulphurous heat of Iceland, and to chatting with oversized Russians in the secluding fog of sex club steam rooms. There is no better way to spend a day, short of lying in bed reading.
3 I have often felt that the extra thick hairs that you occasionally find sprouting, stiff, from your body, but which are easily plucked, are, infact, some parasitic entity that has evolved a strange camouflage – though what their strange life cycle is, I could not begin to tell you.
4 I was reminded of a moment of equal body horror when, as an eleven year old suffering from terrible eczema, I had absent mindedly picked at the scabs on my hand with a compass during a maths lesson, only to accidentally pierce the skin and find there was nothing but void below, for as far as the point went in. It points up that dread Eliot so succinctly expressed: "The eyes are not here / There are no eyes here / In this valley of dying stars / In this hollow valley".
5 Doctor Burroughs? Doctor Burrows? Sensi Ito?
6 It is almost as if the nothing is an intrusion of the super-real: the discomforting truth of the Buddhist śūnyatā, or worse, anattā, the nothing behind reality, behind us all. In some way there being nothing there is more disturbing than that most disturbing of parasites, the guinea worm.