Touch and Feel

Touch and Feel – by Peter Tidmarsh*

The Wholey Grain

Our skin knows the world is an all-you-can-feel buffet.

But while some hold out for the ideal mouthful others search for it.

The ideal texture is satisfaction and this is finger food from the bazaar, the weirder the better.

Let fingers devour. What is exploring?

Starts with a word play on whole grain and the holy grail to get to "wholey grain"

Whole grain being itself a play on "grain" that you can both feel in a piece of wood and eat.

Introducing the main theme: the connection between feeling and eating. The Whole grain is therefore a full experience of touching something, that is enriching, like good wholesome food.

The poem's playful alliterative link to the legendary cup of Christ is reaching for something else.

Our skin knows – this is the idea that our sensory experience is more diffuse than we commonly realise. Some of our sensory experience is very concentrated in or near our brain, where we tend to think of ourselves as residing. Vision, hearing, tasting, smelling are all brain senses, or at least head senses, while touch is the outlier, the one that still represents the body. (this idea is reinforced elsewhere when we consider Proprioception and – to some extent Vestibular).

The Idea then is that Touch is something that your body knows better than you do, that mind and body are somewhat at odds with one another, or at least not in perfect harmony. Our skin knows things that perhaps we don’t, or we forget or overlook.

Our skin therefore experiences the world differently to “us”, and the poem describes this as an all-you-can-feel-buffet, which makes me think of opportunity and appetite.

Next the poem moves to the meat of the subject. People are different. The readers may be more familiar with fussy eaters, than people who are Tactile Defensive, those that Hold out than those that Search the tactile seekers, the greedy and this is the point of the metaphor. We will return to this idea, but the poem has set up two extremes.

The next line retreats from these extremes to the pleasant goal, a balanced and healthy diet including exciting and even exotic textures all which can be safely consumed.

It suggests that exploring can be local, perhaps a childhood phrase "let your fingers do the walking" travelling over interesting textures is then a kind of exploring.

Let fingers devour then lands rather strongly. The Author always wants to stay close to his core market, the Severe and Profoundly disabled. Devour is meant to shock, it is meant to refer back to the extreme. The author is aware of self injurious behaviour, and hopes that readers will be able to use simple textures to satisfy a frightening urge.

Does the grain/grail resonance joke land? I think its meant to be about the search rather than the item, how in the myth we are meant to keep looking despite hardship and disappointment, to keep exploring hopefully and alliteratively it rides for free, which is a win.

*TFH’s MD wrote a series of strange poems over a few manic weeks, in which he thought about little else, but the immersive experience of play. It was a strange and luxurious phase that recognised the need for elaboration, which I am now attempting.