Boils, scabs, blemishes

How many skin care products clutter the shelves of those voids of customer service called "drug stores"? Every hair upon your head may be numbered, but not they.

But what is the anxiety - or anxieties - to which they correspond?

In our green youth, an old voice, alien, and yet seemingly inborn, whispers that spotty swains shall know no prom. Who's to blame?

For the dark spot on the x-ray, the swollen womb of the botfly parasite.

We knew all along that the Elephant Man was not an animal, didn't we? He was what a popular Austrian poet called "Unheimliche".

Cain and Abel, the doppelganger. So much duplicity, story-telling and finger-pointing. Currencies of a diabolic economy.

The insinuations of an unclean conscience. Original sin. That only the kid clean of blemishes could be sacrificed to God implies that before God (and therefore, before all those pious others), imperfection not only exists, but exists as an artifact. The sick body represents a poisoned legacy. There is always the insinuation that not only is the victim complicit in his fate, but born toward it, repeating a primal scene. And paying for it. (As to scapegoats and unblemished kids, it seems less than debatable who gets the better end of the deal - the perfect sheep, and God's blue-eyed boy Abel, pay heavily for the honor. The other goat and other guy get sent off marked with a pestilence into the desert toward an uncertain fate, but to live, to pass the worm down through generations. Lord of hosts, indeed.)

London, hive of empire, has been described as a "great wen" (a cyst swollen with rancid oil) for centuries. Out of the strong came forth sweetness, or something (civilisation, wot).

“Last night dreamed of the boil on my cheek. The perpetually shifting border between ordinary life and the terror that would seem more real.” Some times a zit is just a zit, but what about this time? Franz Kafka suggests something emerging, something black and threatening on the border of perception, something feared to be basic, underlying, constituent. The fruit from a tree we were born to pluck (Etz Khayyim), a fate unfolding as though written in a book.

Metamorphosis. The man sleeps in the child like a cankerworm. Has a frightful strangeness come into the world, or by some transformative misfortune to which we have yielded (a career of small deceptions, adulthood itself?) have we learned to perceive it, to recognize its priority?

In Gotthelf's The Black Spider, a boil forms on a peasant womans's cheek, on the spot touched by a kiss that sealed a desperate bargain, by which she must compromise herself to deliver her village. The thing swells and burns until it vomits a race of spiders that ravage the land. The host and the parasite are one: the woman dissolves into a single, a venomous spider that returns from generation to generation to punish the unmindful, the vain, the forgetful.

There are less unsightly traces of the theme in Javier Marias's idea of "the Dark Back of Time", and in his recurrent explorations of adultery and impersonation.

Samuel Beckett, it is reported, suffered frequent flare-ups of boils in his early years as a struggling writer.

Dennis Potter's singing detective, haunted by his own skin - a squamous palimpsest of a terrible, revenant past - discovers himself as both culprit and victim. Potter himself suffered throughout his life from horrible attacks of psoriasis.