We’re all Cannibals!
Examining the disillusion of the clean and proper body
Corey King
I’m currently working in the food service industry while at the same time studying abjection and transgression in the films of David Cronenberg, and I’ve noticed that most people are far too paranoid about keeping their bodies clean and proper.
For starters, there is no such thing as a clean and proper body. You are, from top to bottom, from the inside out, an ecosystem crawling with life that you, and others around you, support. Some of these organisms even help you (so it’s not a one-way situation). We are not the top of the food chain: cows eat plants, humans eat cows, microscopic organisms eat humans, and so on. Everything on the planet is connected. Most of us don’t mind the fact that we eat other animals, but what is apparently hard for many people to swallow is the fact that most of us ingest human skin on a daily basis (unless you’re some sort of hermit or wear a breathing mask to school, and even then I’m certain that at some point you must have). Even vegans eat people.
I was shocked earlier this week to learn that the proper procedure for dealing with a single strand of human hair falling into an ice bin at work is to clean out all the ice, sanitize the bin, and then refill it with fresh “un-tainted” ice. The reason I find this to be a ridiculous procedure is because tiny pieces of dead human flesh fall off all our bodies all the time. This means that unless you eat at a restaurant where the people wear biohazard suits, you’re likely eating and drinking a little bit of human at every meal.
Constantly eating people is not a shocker for me: I understand that my body is neither completely mine nor completely in my control. (My body has broken wind many times without my express permission.) I realize that when I breathe in a crowded room the air which was once in any number of other people is now in me. If you’re reading this before class or while riding the bus, take a look around and see what kind of people are sharing the air with you, what people have small parts of what was once “theirs” inside of you. I’ve taken this as a given in the nature of existence since I first learned in kindergarten that most dust is dead human flesh. What I didn’t realize till recently was that most people are disgusted by the notion that they consume human flesh regularly.
If you’re worried about flesh, it gets much worse when you consider that the water you drink may have once been urine (cleaned out and filtered presumably, but the fact remains that something that I once pissed out may have been part of your most recent beverage). The universe works in cycles. Someone may have been out in the bush in the Whiteshell some time back and he or she may have needed to fertilize the forest while out on a long hike; you may have walked along some time later and eaten the berries that fed off his or her crap. It’s not disgusting or disturbing: it’s the way things have worked and survived for millions and millions of years.
Nature works tirelessly to use and reuse everything it can. Eventually you and I may make up a later generation’s oil supply. Who knows, we may even power vehicles of the future. Nothing is yours exclusively. Everything is part of everything else. You can’t completely control your body (though you can influence it). You can’t even control your thoughts: because you’re reading this sentence, I’ve played a role in altering whatever you may have been thinking of in the absence of reading this (thanks for reading, by the way).
I presume this article may disgust some people (who I suppose are merely afraid of the nature of things), but you need to know that fish lived in the water you swam in last summer and that fish piss and shit, too. There is recycled death and excrement everywhere. We try to control it (or more likely control our thoughts about it), but it’s impossible to stop, so get over it. I eat bits of people and so do you. I’m not saying that now you’re free to axe down the next tasty looking lady and eat her. I’m saying that regardless of your liking it, you came from the sticky sperm-invaded womb of your bloody mother and that, while in her womb, you shared all the systems and cycles of her body and, now that you’re outside of her, we’re all sharing with each other and the rest of nature constantly.
I’m not trying to disgust you, I’m just trying to say that life exists in the abject and disgusting, and because of that it is beautiful. Nothing is abject; it only appears that way to the unaided eye.
