Stomach: Metabolism HQ

… it is necessary to know that the existential focus of mammals is the stomach. The human, no exception, is motivated to transform the world and itself by its stomach …

In the midst of the global panic, butterflies have occupied our stomachs, the most turbulent part of our interior digestive system. We are feeling the metabolic rift well inside of our own metabolic mechanism. Indian activist Vandana Shiva reflects upon ancient Indian texts known as the Upanishads and the focus on the internal process of digestion, which is reflected on the surface. "The very possibility of our being here, the very possibility of our living, is based on the lives of all kinds of beings that have gone before us – our parents, our mothers, the soil, the earthworm ..." Shiva goes on the explain the Indian sacrificial food-giving ritual known as yajna — worship. Giving light to the senses acting upon the network that keeps us alive. "[Yajna] is not the once-on-a-Sunday ritual, it is a ritual embodied in every meal, every day, all of the the time, reflecting the recognition that giving is the condition of your very being. You do not give as an extra, you give because of your interdependence with all of life, your interdependence both with human beings who make your life possible in your community, and with the non-human kith and family that we have." We can organize the stomach as a new ritualistic space for thought. Organization in the form of eating as a system for spiritual animation. In developing the yajna ritual it was observed that the sun drew up the waters with its heat and the vapours rose to the sky to form clouds, returning as rain, and the earth produced vegetation – a circulation between the sky and the earth. It was also observed that when fire burned, the smoke rose to the sky, leaving only ashes, and water heated in vessels also rose to the sky as vapour. So, the idea arose that material offerings to the deities in the sky could be made through fire. An extracorporeal form of metabolising is observed during this sacrificial rite, by outsourcing the digestive power to fire.

In Vedic thought, fire is found beyond the organism as a tool to communicate with deities, as the Yajna requires fire to digest food and bring it upwards. An interesting twist on the purpose of fire. Rather than solely for preparation of our own food, it also serves a spiritual purpose as a form of sacrifice, yajna. In Ayurvedic medicinal studies, fire is also found inside of the body as a metabolic agent — Jatharagni — digestive fire, burning within the lower digestive tract. They see a powerful force inside the human body, one that could potentially consume us. By digging out the buried cables that once linked everything to each other, we can execute a process of rewriting the conservative social contract. In feminist, anthropocentrism critic Donna Haraway's terms, it requires staying with the trouble in order to become-with. Other ideas of a multispecies existence exist within the Russian cosmism movement. This Bolshevik heritage, as Jodi Dean observes, “link[s] comradeship to a future characterized by equality and belonging, by a love and respect between equals so great that it can’t be contained in human relations but spans to include insects and galaxies (bees and stars) and objects themselves.” As Zdenka Badonivac phrases it: in the end, comradeship must include everyone. For Soviet constructivist artists such as Varvana Stepanova, Vladimir Tatlin, Lyubov Popova and Alexander Rodchenko the task was not simply to liberate the object from the capitalist regime of commodification and alienation, but to unleash the potential of the revolutionary (Communist) object as a subjectivity in its own right: a fellow agent – a comrade – in the construction of communist society." Along similar lines, Ayurvedic thought aims to invigorate the metaphysical prowess of metabolism and ingested matter. Such methods blur the lines between animate and inanimate beings; who we can converse with is no longer a question. As soon as there is interaction or discussion about it, there is already an active exchange, a rethinking of the (in)animate. Humans can bear the fact that they infect nature, but not that others infect their own culture. That would suggest the idea that other-than-human objects such as bacteria, cells, food, plastic and air are also actors in the theater of being. We are a meeting point and a home for many kinds, both symbiotic and harmful and the stomach as a central gathering place for ingested material can serve as a site for restarting the primordial soup and its connecting attributes.

← previous next →