In Praise Of Onychophagia As Election Day (November 6, 2018) Approaches

The bloviating media will make November 6^th, 2018 the political equivalent of D-Day with the fate of civilization (as we know it) at stake. The Horse's A$$ in the Oval Office has already proclaimed the 2018 midterm election to be a referendum on... (wait for it)... him, even though his miserable name doesn't appear on a single ballot. So, that is your choice as a voter — civilization or him. If this is a (fair & balanced) wish for a Blue Wave to cleanse this nation of the filth of corruption, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap 'Zine]
Letter Of Recommendation: Nail-Biting
By Suzannah Showler


TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing

activity anxiety assiduously Assos beds believe best biting body boxer central Cleanthes clippers consider edge eventually example fingernails fingers gnawing gross habit hand human knowledge life lived lot matter medical method mind nail nail-biting philosopher quite raw recommend scraps shift something soul spectrum stop suggests talking teeth tidy told urge

created at TagCrowd.com

History’s first nail-biter of note was a Stoic philosopher, Cleanthes of Assos (ca. 330-230 BC). If you’re picturing him as a frail neurotic, idling in a life of the mind, try again: Cleanthes, who lived to be 99 and had nicknames like “Second Heracles” and “the Ass,” was a former boxer who funded his philosophy habit with a graveyard shift hauling buckets of water. The human body clearly mattered to him — in fact, he believed it could manifest the highest faculties of the rational soul. It makes a tidy, self-contained kind of sense that he was a biter, gnawing scraps of his own body in pursuit of knowledge.

I consider Cleanthes the patron saint of nail-biters. His example backs up my suspicion that nail-biting pairs best not with tension and anxiety but with the moody, concentric revolutions of meditative thought. The urge itself may be faintly animalistic, but answering it can give rise to the kind of mental wandering that makes us more human. It’s freeing and creative, more about process than results. If the point were only to shorten your fingernails, clippers would do — but clippers are regimented and mechanical, while nail-biting is, literally, a manual art. It’s personal, bespoke, precise: You have to bite just the right nail, just the right amount. The method is traditional, and the materials couldn’t be more locally sourced. It’s the ultimate handicraft.

My own career as a nail-biter stretches back more than 25 years, since the day I arrived in a first-grade classroom and discovered that my best friend had given up her religious thumb-sucking for something more mature. “Watch,” she said, bringing her fingers to her mouth and delicately working the edge of a nail with her teeth. It was both methodical and reckless, and I could see that it was powerful stuff. “You should try it,” she told me. I did. I still do. Sometimes I stop for a while and polish my fingernails fancy, drumming them with percussive importance everywhere I go. But this makes me feel bionic and overdeveloped, like some glossy future iteration of a human; it’s not quite right, and it never lasts. The armor chips and a nail cracks, begging for quick intervention. I always find my way back to biting.

I’ve come to believe that biting your nails has its virtues. I’m not talking about gnawing your fingers raw, leaving ragged scraps of keratin abandoned in exposed beds; I’m not talking about drawing blood. Like a lot of human activities, nail-biting exists on a spectrum, and as with a lot of spectrums, there is a tidy pot of pathology waiting at the far end. Problematic nail-biting is considered a body-focused repetitive behavior by the DSM-5; the medical term is onychophagia (roughly “claw-eating,” from the Ancient Greek). I don’t recommend you go there, and I don’t mean to make light. Even before we reach these medical extremes, nail-biting is often taken as indicating a level of anxiety we generally seek to avoid. Cartoon figures under pressure are always speed-gobbling their fingers, teeth chattering like wood-choppers. “Nail-biter” is shorthand for an election too close to call or the overtime clock running down on a tie game.

But just as the specter of hoarding shouldn’t rule out collecting as a hobby, not every nibbled nail should be judged by the end-stage diagnosis. Nail-biting is something most of us do idly, instinctively, in the most banal and stress-free of moments. A nail’s raw edge snags; you casually snip it with your teeth. It’s easy, natural and, you’ll have to admit, pretty satisfying. It’s an efficient way to prune yourself, claiming your shaggy, mortal body as your own. In its ideal form, biting your nails happens in a state of balance: between knowledge and intuition, human and animal, life and death. The trick is to stop short of neurosis and settle into something more like mindfulness.

Throughout my life as a nail-biter, I’ve often been told how gross and unhygienic it is. I consider this objection misplaced. Even assuming you’re not assiduously washing your hands, microdosing matter from your environment is actually quite good for you: Research suggests that childhood nail-biters may develop better immune systems and fewer allergies. It’s gross that there are pesticides in our food. It’s gross (not to mention psychosexually revealing) that adults drink milk intended for the infants of other species. At least your hand hygiene is within your control.

The central feature of being alive is that you eventually stop doing it. Parts of you are stopping all the time. Fingernails are one uncanny example: The living tissue chugs along under the skin, growing at about the rate of the earth’s tectonic shifting, pushing to the surface a plate of cellular runoff that’s always already DOA. Maintaining your fingernails is, like most grooming, a sloughing and shaping and tending of your body’s already-dead bits. You could approach the task with fussy metal instruments that look as if they belong in a scale model of a medieval torture chamber. Or you could do the simpler, wilder thing and use your highly serviceable chompers.

I’m not going to exhort you to start biting your nails if you’ve truly never felt the urge. My only suggestion is that you remain open to the joys of a more free-form, primal sort of self-care — an activity performed deliberately but at the whim of a lizard-brained curiosity. I’m saying that if you do it right, biting your nails isn’t a “habit”: It’s a ritual. # # #

[Suzannah Showler is a Canadian author who has written three books — a volume of cultural criticism and two books of poetry. She also writes long and short essays about un/real things, culture, and capitalism, Showler's work has appeared in Slate, The Walrus, Maisonneuve, LA Review of Books, The Toast, and Hazlitt.. She received a BA (English and contemporary studies) from King's College (NS), an MA (English and creative writing) from the University of Toronto (ON), and an MFA (creative writing) from The Ohio State University.]

Copyright © 2018 The New York Times Company




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..

Copyright © 2018 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves