The Paintskin Squeeze

A friend who owns a New York City apartment told me that he’s only responsible for maintenance “from the paint in.” I feel like the paint, squeezed between the physical and mental forces inside my body, and the social and physical forces outside.

Castle Village, NYC

In my friend’s apartment, the building manager has to fix problems with plumbing, windows, and the building’s exterior. The paint is the demarcation line between spheres of responsibility. 

I – my conscious self – feels like that thin skin of paint, sandwiched between two vast worlds.

On the inside of the paint is the furniture of my mental life and all the appliances of physiology and anatomy. Inside my skin are all the mysterious workings of my organs. I can control some muscles and my breathing, but most of my physiology, let alone the microbiome, is beyond my control. 

Even less under control is my vast unconscious mind: the pools and currents of childhood complexes; the dream maker who creates cryptic stories every night, only a few of which I remember; the inscrutable motivations that shape my behavior. These are like the people. with their individual and collective dramas, who come and go in the apartment, hardly interacting with the paint.

On the outside are the walls, plumbing, wiring, ducts, crawlspaces, and building structure that put a shape on my paintskin. The paint only “knows” the shape of its apartment; it is oblivious to the shapes and contents of all the other apartments, and all the other buildings, and all the other cities.

For my personal paintskin, the outside starts with the physical world: climate, geography, roads and buildings, the devices I interact with. More important, though, are the social forces pressing in. The individuals, certainly – not just family, friends, and acquaintances but also high profile people like politicians, celebrities, and content makers. However, I feel more pressed by the ones I struggle to see – the ogregores like political campaigns, news organizations, government agencies, insurance companies, health service providers, and Big Tech; and the more amorphous forces like norms, rules and laws, algorithms, markets, and socio-economic structures.

My personal paintskin consciousness is squeezed between two oceans teeming with leviathans. I feel like the hull of both a space station and a submarine:* the spacecraft’s skin holding in a bubble of air trying to explode into the vacuum of space, and the submarine’s shell, squeezed by tons of water trying to get in.

* This image was inspired by a passage in Alastair Reynolds' story "Zima Blue," first appeared in Postscripts, Summer 2005, collected in Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds (2016), p. 216:

Zima had the appearance of a well-built man wearing a tight body stocking, until you were close and you realized that this was actually his skin. Covering his entire form, it was a synthetic material that could be tuned to different colours and textures depending on his mood and surroundings. It could approximate clothing if the social circumstances demanded it. The skin could contain pressure when he wished to experience vacuum, and stiffen to protect him against the crush of a gas giant.