The Flaying of Marsyas

                It took some of us decades to become comfortable in our skin.  Others knew, in the early haze of individuated consciousness, that such comfort would never be theirs to have.  Skin is the surface that can be skinned.  I cleave to my skin so it is not cleaved from me.  Acute proprioception comes and goes, and sometimes it’s like the world stops spinning or I start.  It was no accident that when Marsyas picked up the lyre, he got lost in the music he made with it.  Apollo wasn’t having it, as Apollo is wont to do.  And the response – why do you tear me from myself? – is what the sad young under-employed semioticians like to sit and ponder over, till the coffee grows cold and all the good drugs have wormed their way down to bedrock.  You don’t have to be 25 and stupefied, though, to trace that mercy-seeking plea across the play of surfaces.