In fact, it has itself journeyed in and out of the body. This suspended labyrinthine knot that acts as the means of entry to our interior is the very figure of the confusion of inside and outside. The wrinkled surfaces halfway along this tube, through which most nutrients will be absorbed, becomes the real entrance to the body when it turns into the small intestine that is implausibly looped around itself in our belly with 100-times as much surface as our skin. Source: University of Michigan Medical School. Primitive digestive tract in human embryo. This can already be seen when the primitive gut takes shape through a bilateral folding of the three- to four-week-old human embryo, transforming it from a flat disc into a three-dimensional body with the meandering tube of the digestive tract clearly defined in the middle, while the surrounding layers remain more indeterminate. After all, there are more bacteria in the gut than cells in the body, which is but a kind of accretion around the gut. Signals travel so continuously back and forth along the gut-brain axis that the immodest human brain is ultimately part of the digestive system, a bacteriological effect even. These microscopic outsiders are the ultimate insiders, and their work is directly connected to the brain. Who are we anyway? The real work of human digestion is carried out by trillions of bacteria, most of whom are from 4,000 or so species that have been around for millions of years, nomadic residents of our gut without whom we could not be ourselves. A huge proportion of cultural life is devoted to veiling the digestion that makes our life possible-a desperate campaign to remove evidence of the twisting tube of foreignness we are wrapped around. This relentless liquidity is masked by our clearly defined outer shape, which is itself but the fiction of an impervious capsule all too insistently manufactured by layers of clothing, technologies, representations, and social norms-supplemented by an ever-expanding universe of sprays, pills, syrups, rinses, wipes, lotions, suppositories, pads, sanitary products, fittings, filters, deodorizers, and ventilation systems that try to regulate the smell, sound, solidity, size, pressure, acidity, rhythm, and visible traces of our interior ecology. It would seem that nothing is more embarrassing, confusing, frightening, and yet transgressively alluring than the mainly automatic digestive system that builds us-the sound, smell, movement, texture, taste, and temperature of the continuously gurgling blur of outside and inside. Obsessive social, cultural, and psycho-sexual attention is paid to mouth, anus, and genitalia-input and output orifices-to remove any evidence of what is going on between them. The human is a fragile yet stubborn effect of digestion, a massive ongoing series of bio-chemical reactions that construct the illusion of a line between inside and outside. More precisely still, it is a fold that produces the very sense of an outside by constructing an interior seemingly detached from it. Our organism is never simply in the world but an intricate folding of outside into an inside. More precisely, digestion turns the outside into an inside. Rather, it is the part of the outside world that passes through us. The twenty-five feet or so of gut that passes from mouth to anus is not really inside the body. Less obviously, difficult, or even impossible to fully accept, the digestive system that builds us is, strictly speaking, not inside us. In fact, digestion makes possible all the ideas that supposedly make us uniquely human. Sucking, breathing, digesting, and excreting are an urgently good idea from the moment the original plumbing of the umbilical cord is disconnected. We build ourselves by digesting the world, swallowing solids, liquids, and gases to break down and filter them-retaining materials vital for survival and expelling the rest. Frank Lloyd Wright, “The Cardboard House,” 1931 1ĭigestion is construction, self-construction. Perhaps it is a form of insanity we have put into it. It is a marvel, we its infesters do not go insane in it and with it. A body in ill repair, suffering indisposition-constant tinkering and doctoring to keep alive. Any house is a far too complicated, clumsy, fussy, mechanical counterfeit of the human body… The whole interior is a kind of stomach that attempts to digest objects… The whole life of the average house, it seems, is a sort of indigestion.
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