What it is to be human?

Lavinia Fontana, “Portrait of Antonietta Gonzalez” (c. 1595), oil on canvas

A hereditary condition known as generalised hypertrichosis terminalis, leads to a covering of fur over most of the body. If a human being has this, it usually triggers a reaction in others that suggests that in some way the person has regressed into being an animal. It is though of no harm to the person that has it and in certain cases, can be a help, as the extra hair still does the job that it was genetically evolved to do in the first place, which is mainly to keep an animal warm and to protect sensitive skin from the sun's rays.

Hair is something most of us have and only in rare cases is someone totally hairless. Like all hairy animals our hair takes certain directions over the body.

Human: Hair direction: Front and back

Dog: Hair direction

The fact that other hairy animals also have directional hair, is something we rarely think of as a common denominator but it is for my drawing self, interesting to think about hair direction as an example of visual energy moving around the body.

The visualisation of imagined interoceptual awareness of fur sensations

Thinking about commonality can also be an entry into animist thinking; for instance you might try to imagine what it would be like to live within a fur clad body. Body hair also provides tactile sensory input by transferring hair movement and vibration via the hair's shaft to sensory nerves within the skin. Therefore we can like other animals, extend our sense of touch beyond the surface of the skin, into the space surrounding us, by using hair to detect air currents, the presence of insects or the close proximity of objects. However the resultant perceptual stimulus and/or interoceptual feelings engendered, are rarely picked out as being important to us. But for many animals this group of senses is vital and being more aware of how they operate, might enable us to have more empathy with other creatures.
The hairs of the skin not only function to prevent heat loss but also have important sensory functions. Recent work has now established that each hair of the skin has one or more of three types of mechanoreceptor ending. Each of these three mechanoreceptor types can detect distinctive information about skin touch, which is relayed to specific brain locations in a somatotopic fashion. (Somatotopy is the precise mapping of body parts to specific areas of the brain.) My interest in interoception, has meant that I have also tried to imaginatively visualise the feeling in the body/brain of a passage of air over hairy skin and how that in itself can become another body part. Feelings, I strongly believe, can be concretised as images. The flowing, twisting sensations in the orange/black image above being my imaginative immersion into what it might feel like to be a sensing hirsute animal. 

Our intellectual history reflects the constructing of an ever widening distance between ourselves and our animal nature, something that we have recently had to question. The more we mentally separated ourselves from nature, the less we were concerned with having any sort of empathy with the natural world. Now that we are more aware of an 'embodied' mind, the recognition that the mind is in fact shaped by the body and is inseparable from it, the more we are also becoming aware that the body is itself shaped by and inseparable from the environment it inhabits. The mental separation of ourselves from nature, has historically led to a using of the world's resources, as if we had no moral responsibility for them. We were able to 'other' not only animals but any humans who did not look like or act like 'us' and as we did so, we also used these other humans as if they were animals or chattel. In the past we set up all sorts of intellectual constructs to help with this, to justify our ability to use anything to further our own ends.

Slave traders were enabled by church leaders who perversely interpreted the Bible in such a way that slavery could be understood as guiding other humans out of the darkness of their mistaken ways and into Christian salvation. The separation was such that other humans were even stuffed and displayed in a similar way to animals. Until recently for 40 pesetas you could still buy a postcard of a stuffed human.

I wonder how the taxidermist thought of the task at hand when asked to work on preserving this 'specimen'? How did those theories of "scientific racism", such as the classification of people according to intellectual inferiority or superiority on the basis of skull measurements, affect the way that the taxidermist approached this task? Or perhaps the task was made easier because the taxidermist was Christian and he believed that his subject was a son of Ham? This idea had persisted for several hundred years, back in the 16th century, Gomes Eanes de Zurara, wrote that Africans were enslaved “because of the curse which, after the Deluge, Noah laid upon [Ham]… that his race should be subject to all the other races of the world”.

The Bible also of course had other things to say about this;

'And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let him have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.

Genesis 26 to 29

So we look like God, but who is the we? We are God faced. But what if God looked more like Fedor Adrianovich Jeftichew? What if the directional pattern of our hair was actually a sign from God? As an atheist my question is why is my hair directional, and what does this tell me about myself? It tells me that evolution is always ongoing and that humans are what they are for a brief period of time, the genetics of life ensuring there is always a better fitted form to the various life niches that are always opening out and that perhaps in the future we will need more hair to protect us from the sun's rays, and if so, future people might be very hairy.

The condition hypertrichosis terminalis is a genetic one and can be therefore passed on. 300 years after the time of Antonietta Gonzalez, Fedor Adrianovich Jeftichew was born with the same condition. Like Antonietta Gonzalez before him, he is nearly always presented in images clothed in the best raiments of the time. No one tries for instance to make him get down on all fours and show his naked body. The clash between smart clothing and an abnormally hairy face, seeming to tell us more about the nature of one of the processes of civilisation. We, the normal people, dress in a certain way, a way that signals we are 'normal'. Outward appearance, grooming, it is suggested, reflecting something about the state of the inner mind.

“Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy”

Perhaps we need a distorted mirror to work out what we really look like, or what we naturally look like. In the late 19th century Fedor Adrianovich Jeftichew toured the sideshows of Europe with his father, the ‘Wild Man from the Kostroma Forest’ and was then at the age of 16 taken to the USA by P. T. Barnum, where he toured under the name of “Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy”. He was told to make dog noises for the various audiences who came to see him, even though he could in fact speak three languages, and was like his father simply a man who had hypertrichosis, but also like his father he would have to live life as an outsider.

From: https://mybillie.com/

Hair is also gendered, men can easily become hirsute but women, when they have hair, are often expected to shave. Billie, a New York-based subscription service sells “razors built for womankind” and they have initiated 'Project Body Hair', which is 'A CELEBRATION OF FEMALE BODY HAIR…WHEREVER IT IS OR ISN’T.' On their website they state, "For the past 100 years, women’s razor brands haven’t acknowledged female body hair. Commercials show women "shaving" perfectly smooth, airbrushed legs. Strange, huh? But everyone has short stubble, long strands, or something in between. What you do with yours is up to you - grow it, get rid of it, or comb it. It's your hair, after all." A clear recognition that cultural norms are yet again shifting. Perhaps its becoming ok for a woman to be hairy. The popularity of werewolf teen movies, suggests that within popular culture the werewolf look is becoming socially acceptable.

Werewolf Girl by Terminotaur

As I looked into what was going on in terms of contemporary culture, I discovered that there was now such a thing as a 'furry artist', defined as 'a person who creates artistic works with the furry fandom in mind as the target audience, or who creates anthropomorphic art of interest to the fandom.' I was not really as aware as I should have been of how culture was changing. It is now totally acceptable to dress up as a dog and go out in public.

A typical image taken from a furry fandom website

A shaman is supposed to have the ability to speak with animals, and some of them have a belief that they can shapeshift into animal forms by using hallucinogens or a combination of dancing, drumming, and singing and I can see a role for a similar figure within contemporary culture. Clare Milledge in her doctorate thesis points out that the role of both the artist and shaman has 'always been to stand between two worlds: that of the visible and the invisible.' and that we 'entrust the artist to go forth into the realm of the invisible and return with a gift: the invisible transformed into the visible'.
As I try to chase down a role for an artist within our present society, there are aspects of shamanism that do seem to ring true, but perhaps acting more like an artist working as a mediator between things rather than as a priest showing the way. Mediation requires high levels of empathy, a thought which takes me back to that portrait of Antonietta Gonzalez.

The fact that Lavinia Fontana was a woman artist at a time when the profession was seen as male only, must have influenced the way that the Portrait of Antonietta Gonzalez was thought about. Both were women outsiders, both could demonstrate abilities equal to the men that surrounded them, but as the men had set out the patriarchal rules of the game, neither of them would ever really be accepted as equals. Antonietta Gonzalez is depicted as someone, who is indeed a someone. There is a recognition of a thinking mind in her direct stare and presentation of a written text that states something important about her. In many ways Lavinia Fontana's image is much more modern than the image of the Werewolf Girl. Antonietta Gonzalez is presented to us as a complex human being, one that like all of us is conflicted and has to survive the fact that other people don't know what is going on in your mind, no matter how hard you try to explain yourself. It is amazing when you realise that someone else has a real empathy with yourself, and I suspect those two women had seen something in each other that really chimed. Looking at a preparatory sketch, helps us to see that the empathy with the subject was not just a one off accident, as there is a similar feeling of total acceptance of Antonietta Gonzalez as a young woman and a clear recognition of the human being behind the hair,

Lavinia Fontana: Preparatory sketch for the Portrait of Antonietta Gonzalez 1594-95 Red and black pencil, brown ink on paper, The Morgan Library and Museum, New York

So how we can build on empathy as a way into being more at one with the world? I have recently been talking to someone about 'modes' of behaviour. Certain people look for particular patterns in life and others see different ones and both act accordingly. Some people realise this and accept the difference, whilst others think that their own mode is the right one and judge other people by how far they fail to operate in a similar mode to themselves. This causes a lot of confusion. Open this out and its easy to see how hard it is to have empathy with a dog or a bat or a tree or a mountain, all entities that we have to coexist alongside, but unless we really work hard, we may well fail to work in harmony with the world that we coexist with.

Trying to visualise my way into this set of thoughts, I made a drawing of myself wearing the white coat of the scientist, (its actually the white coat of the ceramicist, but who's to know?) and then added hair. Over the years I've had to come to terms with going bald, so it was a fascinating reversal. I'm nowhere as skilled as Lavinia Fontana in this sort of image making, but it was an interesting thing to do none the less. Fur is for most mammals not just a heat regulator, it is also a complex mass of sensors that attunes an animal to a constant awareness of its own speed of movement through space, the proximity of other objects that disturb the air around them, as well as changes in the weather. Hair helps attune animals to the world.

Feet and hands are still feet and hands when hairy

The popular press occasionally dips its toes into this area and when it does it often focuses on the cultural myth of the werewolf. Hypertrichosis terminalis is often called the 'werewolf syndrome'. Very quickly interest will turn to Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy, and a historical reminder of his career will be given. I was fascinated to see in one article an illustration of a poster advertising the appearance of Jo-Jo and his father at the Middlesex Music hall in England. They were however identified as Kostroma People from the forests of central Russia, a far more interesting description than P. T. Barnam's redefinition. 'Kostroma People' suggests that in Middlesex at least Fedor Adrianovich Jeftichew and his father were regarded as 'people' and not animals.

Another notorious figure with generalised hypertrichosis terminalis who had to endure the sideshow culture of the 19th century was Julia Pastrana. At the time she was billed as “the ugliest woman in the world,” or “the bear woman.” She was described as the link between mankind and the orangutang and was therefore also known as “the ape woman.”

Julia Pastrana

Victorian 'scientists' claimed that Julia Pastrana was a half-human, half ape hybrid. She was always advertised as half-animal, with many people regarding her as a type of ape. In reality she spoke several languages and by all accounts was an intelligent woman with refined tastes.

Julia Pastrana: The bearded lady, embalmed. Wood engraving

The cruel culture of spectacle was often all those who physically didn’t conform to an arbitrary ideal of beauty could expect. Julia Pastrana is on her death in childbirth, finally mounted and embalmed and put into a display that also included her dead baby, who had inherited the gene that carried generalised hypertrichosis terminalis. Which is why it is so fascinating to find that Lavinia Fontana's “Portrait of Antonietta Gonzalez” is painted without a hint of the sideshow. On the contrary, Antonietta appears inquisitive, happy, self-assured and gazes back, standing her ground, asking us, who are we to question her?

What it is to be human is constantly being redefined, but my personal definition is one that doesn't privilege human beings above other beings, we are just something that is conscious of being and in being so, we are aware of being alive.

References
Agramunt, J., Parke, B., Mena, S., Ubels, V., Jimenez, F., Williams, G., Rhodes, A.D., Limbu, S., Hexter, M., Knight, L. and Hashemi, P., (2023) Mechanical stimulation of human hair follicle outer root sheath cultures activates adjacent sensory neurons. Science Advances, 9(43).

Garland-Thomson, R., 2017. Julia Pastrana, the “extraordinary lady”. Alter, 11(1), pp.35-49.

Milledge, C. (2012) The Artist-Shaman and the" Gift of Sight: Sydney College of the Arts: PhD thesis Accessed from: http://hdl.handle.net/2123/9452

See also:

Why draw animals

Invisible worlds

What is a portrait

Seeing as drawing: Drawing as seeing