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.
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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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