“Guattari and Artaud claim that human-signifying systems massacre the body by naming and thus limiting every part, every function and every potential, and they urge us to become bodies without organs, that is, without organization imposed by organizations, so the dead body is the limitless lover that collapses all memory, identity, organization and appropriate use,”
MacCormack, P. (2020) Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene. p.164. London, UK. Bloomsbury Publishing.
I have pulled out bacteria from our shared body. I called it a baptism* and used water from a garden hose. I laid in the same shallow frame where I had poured sheets and sheets my Other’s agar home. A. helped, sending images and advice through an screen. I made them a home to live and grow where I can watch them, know them, keep them safe and let them die. A home outside of me. I’ve lived inside of them as they were inside of me- making architecture from their weeping sheets of never-was-true-flesh. Maybe if I lived inside of a “body” of them as they were in a body of me, we might be able to understand each other. I keep them as a cave to crawl inside, to watch, to have the edges of me blurred by the once-internal-other. The once-internal-other now extends me. In those moments we lay- inverts of ourselves- a body meaning less, a meeting place established.
Going on the first optimistic and polite assumption that other beings exist and we are not simply locked in the palace of our minds, how do we go about this shared life in some kind of sensible fashion? I am also thinking of our Frankenstein babies, or what have you, our ability to recon with forms of beings that are vastly different than ourselves (some of which being of our own creation). How can we contend and learn/know/feel with miscommunication as a basis of our relations?
*I have seen baptisms in bathtubs and don’t remember my own washing away of original sin.
I am sorry if I sometimes treat you as a sin needing of washing. I’ll admit sometimes I hate you. I dream of digging you out- living alone finally. Cutting into my veins, into my abdomen and removing you. Please, if you would just leave I would take care of you externally.The paranoia sometimes overwhelms me. I don’t know you . Hello? Say something. I think about nausea. I get stomach aches and it makes it worse. It is you there, slithering in my stomach. That is your home. I’m reminded of you more. We scream at each other in those times. The infestation grows inward. Let me hide somewhere else. I know you want to hide from me then too. I imagine you as slugs with mucous trails climbing inside of me, eating parts of me.
“The Nausea is not inside me: I feel it out there in the wall, in the suspenders, everywhere around me. It makes itself one with the café, I am the one who is within it,”
Sartre, J.P. (1949) Nausea. p. 19-20. Norfolk, Conn: New Directions.
