by Lael Ewy

We must live with our multiple natures: doers of murders and planters of trees, savers and spenders and planners and pyros. Reapers and sowers of grain comingle in the bodies of herders and butchers. Perhaps our dis-integration with our world is part of our collective obsession with the disintegration of our bodies: witness CSI and zombie porn, extreme piercing and the Saw films. This casting off of flesh, its objectification, is not merely medical; it’s the privilege of a mediated, medicated class: it isn’t us this is done to but our bodies. We associate ourselves more with “the economy,” the “needs” of “the market” than with the rumble in the tummy, the long, slow putrefaction of the flesh.

Civilizations that can afford a leisure class can also afford dualism, and it is no coincidence that Plato came up with it. When there are slaves to do the work, a citizen is free to float into abstraction, to contemplate himself and render “self” a non-substance. His pulchritude might grow, but he begins to feel his self become lighter than air, buoyed up by all the sweating hands below.

Baudrillard noted that the Americans were becoming hyper-real, and our distancing from bodily work has only enhanced that sensation. The factory itself is an abstraction of the work done in a workshop, the home. The bourgeois factory owner has alienated not merely his factory workers from their labors but himself and his entire class from the meaning of making—the thread from the weave, the silk from the worm. To think of chicken flesh as part of the living chicken is to be burdened in some way by the moral weight of her death, but it is also to know where you fit in a way that merely consuming a chopped, processed, pressed, breaded, fried “nugget” cannot. Vegetarianism is an informed choice in this case, and both the vegetarians and the subsistence hunters deserve our respect at least because they have bothered to think about what they are doing. It’s a step toward integration, toward tasting how we are ultimately dirt.

I’m reading about the Hadza now, in National Geographic. They are one of the last African hunter-gatherer groups—one of the last in the world, really. They have no permanent dwellings and keep no time. They share most possessions and own just enough to carry with them. They have no war. The Hadza help us realize that most of what we do is affectation, that most of what we consider civilization is frivolity, frenetic activity masquerading as pride.

We build monuments to our egos because, having jettisoned real relationships with our world, we realize, instinctively, that we have nothing left. This leaves us in existential crisis: our egos will die with us, and then how will we remain in the chain of symbols we have created to replace the particularities of securing our own water, shelter, food. And so we build monuments: buildings, companies, highways. These exist as evidence of how many others our wealth or our power command, and thus they’re little more than the stains left by the piss of the alpha dog. The advertisements and papal bulls, the memos and edicts and laws are little more than the snarls that prove one’s place in the pack. And so we show we’re not all that different from the canine, whose common names we throw around as epithets.

Our monuments are not forever. In geological time they are just as fleeting as a scent mark They are monoliths, postulations of a singleness of nature that we wish to make myth: Washington as a founding leader, Napoleon as the spirit of conquest, Lord Nelson as the new Poseidon. But each was also a mouth and a gut, and acre of skin and a pair of lungs. Each shat and blew gas and cultivated sniffles and sores. We are all all of those things, and we are by virtue of bodily existence. We are such as products of the germs we fight and the cold that chills us. We are our scars and disappointments and tired limbs. I am not willing to say that we have no souls, but that our souls comprise our bodies as well; our souls dwell with our cells and their interactions with baked potatoes, phytochemicals, ultraviolet waves, chill winds, softly whispered prayers, the mitochondria chugging away.