Introduction
The Form Complete
Of physiology from top to toe I sing,
Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the Muse,
I say the Form complete is worthier far,
The Female equally with the Male I sing.
Walt Whitman
Neanderthals YawnedNeanderthals yawned. Tutankhamen cried. Eleanor of Aquitaine belched. No doubt Murasaki Shikibu combed her hair and Askia Muhammad liked to prop up his feet. The pages of Louis XV yearned to sit down. The armies of Montezuma stubbed their toes, scratched their heads, blinked their eyes, and chewed their food; they bled when wounded and laughed when tickled. All of these people experienced their greatest pleasures and worst pains through their bodies. Throughout history how many lovers have caressed and how many war victims have writhed? Like us, they feared more than anything else the multitude of ways that the body could come to harm or even perish. Their mythologies, like ours, imagined a resurrection of the body because consciousness without it is inconceivable.
Despite the variety of cultures around the world, every human being reenacts the lives of the billions who were born and died in bodies like our own. On a metropolitan street you can see the diversity of humanity represented all around you. There are women and men and girls and boys of every size, shape, and color—different skin tones and facial contours, variations in eye shape and hair texture. Each of us has one body, and each of us comes from a culture that tells us what to do with it. In the same crowd there may be Orthodox peyot and skinhead pates, straightened hair of African origin and curled hair of European origin, artificial fingernails and painted toenails, tailored beards and pierced navels, false teeth and tucked necks, shaven legs and unshaven underarms, plucked eyebrows and rouged cheeks, enlarged breasts and reduced noses, calves taut in high heels and earlobes stretched by jewelry.
So much tinkering with the body exemplifies our ambivalent but creative response to it. The German film director Wim Wenders captured the joy and confusion of having a body in Der Himmel über Berlin (released in the United States as Wings of Desire), in which bodiless angels tire of their eternal voyeurism and yearn for the experience of being alive in a corporeal form. Inspired by both Rilke’s poems and the director’s own feelings about a divided Berlin, the script by Wenders and Peter Handke conveys a passionate longing for the sense of touch that humans take for granted. The angels hunger to grasp a pencil, caress an ear, stretch their toes, feed a cat, even to acquire blackened fingers from reading a newspaper. “Instead of forever hovering above,” says one angel, “I’d like to feel there’s some weight to me . . . to end my eternity and bind me to earth. At each step, each gust of wind, I’d like to be able to say, ‘Now!’ ” After his first night of making love with a woman, he says, “I know now what no angel knows.”
Daily we wallow in the luxurious physicality for which the angel yearns. The human body perceives the world through its senses, and there is no sense but touch. Through your body the world touches you. You taste chocolate and champagne when their molecules caress your tongue. You hear music when sound waves play the tympani in your ears. You smell coffee because tiny particles of it float through the air and touch the receptors in your nose. Photons enter your eyes and enable you to see the color of sunlit leaves. And there is the sense that we officially call touch, which enables you to perceive the difference against your skin of the wool of your jacket and the cotton of your shirt, or the texture of the luggage you’re carrying, or sunshine on your closed eyelids.
The slow evolution that eventually created the body of Homo sapiens—the first animal, as far as we know, to contemplate itself—is a wonderful story. Every part of the body attests to gradual change over long periods of time. One of the Zen-like side effects of the natural sciences is the big-picture perspective of biological time. As we scurry around atwitter with the fad or crisis du jour, we forget that we are as subject to nature’s laws as are the slime mold and the dodo. Even religious fundamentalists concede that, like other creatures, we select mates and reproduce our mutual characteristics, from the father’s height or eyebrows to the mother’s bone structure or skin tone, and that, in turn, our children choose mates and reproduce, further varying the pattern. What they are reluctant to admit is that this process has been going on for an incomprehensibly long time. We have changed, and we are changing.
When this realization becomes a part of your everyday thinking, you begin to see the bodies around you differently. They blur and shift before your eyes. Faces morph from one shape into another like those in computer-generated films. And you begin to realize that the human body is composed of malleable clay. Long before cosmetic surgeons approached it as a work in progress, nature was whittling and sculpting the body to adapt it for many different environments. Every inch of the human form bears the stamp of nature’s restless creativity. We have prominent noses and large buttocks. We stand upright on two legs. Our ears are situated to gather sounds and triangulate their location, and our navels mark us as placental mammals. We seem naked when contrasted with our hirsute relatives, but actually we have a great deal of hair on our bodies—much of it still clustered strategically to harbor scent.
Yet we are not content with such hard facts, no matter how impressive they may be. “The meaning of things,” observed Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, “lies not in themselves but in our attitudes toward them.” The human mind perceives the world in symbolic terms and never stops exercising the imagination. As a result, much of culture consists of fictions that endow natural processes with symbolic importance. There is no better example than our reaction to the talents and limitations of what we have variously called a machine for living, the temple of the soul, and our mortal coil—the human body. Every part and function of the body plays its symbolic role. In Islam the fingers of the open hand symbolize the Five Precepts. The instability of flame was represented by fire deities without feet. A haircut, a sneeze, even trimmed fingernails could mean a diminution of the vital force of life. Created in our own image, gods took their cues from the human form. Atlas carried the world on his shoulders. The mighty Strenua aided humanity with her muscular arms. Samson’s hair was seen not as a protein substance produced by follicles in the scalp but as a conduit through which God bestowed some of his own strength upon a mortal.
Like a sketch under a painting, the natural history of the body guides the composition of our faded mythologies and our flourishing preoccupations. Whatever social subsets may claim us, whatever abstract groups court our allegiance, we are also primates, mammals, and vertebrates. However, before reason won its small role as explainer of phenomena, superstition assigned every part of the body its own Just-So “explanation,” even such aspects as disfigurement, beauty, disease, and ugliness. The result is a sizable portion of our shared culture. With myth and art—and, more recently, with science—we have tried to answer through the body the three questions that Paul Gauguin once used as the title of a painting: Where did we come from? What are we? Where are we going?
The Mystery of the Visible
This book is not about my personal experiences, but one of them inspired it. Like most people with a functioning body, I take a number of activities for granted—trivial actions such as raising my head and feeling sensation in my fingertips. That is, I blithely did so until a few years ago. Then I dislocated a cervical disc and suffered ongoing neck and back pain until, after sudden paralysis in my left arm, I underwent a discectomy. My neurosurgeon told me that mine was one of the worst herniated discs of the thousand-plus on which he had operated. Pride in uniqueness didn’t alleviate my pain during the two weeks I spent mostly flat on my back. To bolster his advice that I hold my head up as little as possible, the neurosurgeon provided a vivid image. He said that the human head is roughly the size and weight of a bowling ball and that the spine labors like the stem of a sunflower to carry such a burden. Not wanting the poor overworked stem to snap again, I followed the doctor’s orders. I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling.
Desperate for some kind of intellectual activity, I began thinking about the human body. I found that I could rest a legal pad flat on my chest and write without having to watch the words appear, if occasionally I worked the pad to a wobbly upright position to see if my palimpsest of notes was decipherable. During much of my convalescence, I whiled away the hours scrawling free association under such headings as “Ears” and “Navel” and “Toes.” Beside me on the bed the pages accumulated. Pliny’s remark about King Pyrrhus’s restorative toe stirred memories of Margaret Fox and the founding of American spiritualism. Houdini’s cues to his assistant reminded me of Darwin’s pointed ears. I could not envision Neil Armstrong’s carefully arranged photo op of pressing his boot into moon soil without also seeing the row of ancient footprints that Mary Leakey unearthed at Laetoli. And every time I tried to raise my head, I remembered how much of our back pain scientists attribute to an awkward bipedalism—the once horizontal mammalian spine wrenched upward to support the aspiring head and free the greedy hands, leaving the old vertebrate nerves and their armor crowded too closely together.
Soon I realized that I had begun my next book. When I could sit up again, I dived into research about the body. Each source led to new discoveries. In time I consulted experts. Because I am as interested in culture as in nature, I could not help noticing that many of our cherished myths about the body began with an imaginative response to its natural history. Nothing excites my imagination more than the border habitat where the two fields interbreed and form strange hybrids. For this reason Adam’s Navel is itself something of a hybrid.
There are many ways to approach the study of the human body. Medical specialists examine the great administrative systems that govern bodily departments: skeletal, muscular, nervous, digestive, respiratory, cardiovascular, endocrine, lymphatic. Paleontologists burrow after the hard evidence of our ancestry. Sociologists, psychologists, reflexologists—every species of -ologist manages to apply a theme to the body. Athletes sculpt themselves into works of art. Books address self-image, attractiveness, sexual performance, grooming, nourishment, exercise, the sinfulness of the body, and the possibility that your soul previously inhabited a different vehicle than the one that so preoccupies you now.
Because none of these approaches covers my particular interests, I follow my own itinerary in Adam’s Navel. I journey down the human body—male and female—from head to toe, one region at a time. I take as my model a curious style of poetry that arose in France in the mid-sixteenth century. At the instigation of an exiled poet named Clément Marot, a group of prominent writers began composing blasons anatomiques—poetic tributes to the individual parts of the female body. Such celebrations of body parts had their antecedents, including Petrarch’s odes to the eyes of his beloved Laura in the 1300s and a salacious tribute to the breast by the later Baldassarre Olimpo da Sassoferrato. What was new was the French poets’ attempt to apply this kind of admiring ode to body parts of lesser symbolic rank than the window of the soul or the nurturing bosom. Consequently the poets faced opposition. “What could be serious in the context of Laura’s expressive, inspiring eyes,” writes historian Nancy J. Vickers, “became absurd when applied to a random tooth or toe.” Moreover, the blazons usually addressed the body part directly, a pose that sounds rather silly when speaking to the elbow. And yet, as Vickers explains, had Marot written a traditional homage to the entire female form, he would not have opened up such fertile and controversial poetic territory. Soon there were blazons in praise, laudatio, and counterblazons in blame, vituperatio, expressing the spectrum from adoration to revulsion.
In a sense Adam’s Navel is an updated version of blazons and counterblazons, focusing largely (but not solely) on how the cultural history of the body reflects its natural history. Although I resist the kind of personification in which the blasonneurs indulged, I address our ambivalent regard for the vehicle—comic and tragic, divine and mundane—that carries our aspiring consciousness from cradle to grave. Our feelings about the body still range from laudatory to vituperative, as will be amply demonstrated when we zoom in for blazonlike close-ups and examine the many separate yet interdependent parts of the body. I like to think of them as the mutinous citizen describes them in Coriolanus:
The kingly-crownèd head, the vigilant eye,
The counsellor heart, the arm our soldier,
Our steed the leg, the tongue our trumpeter. . . .
Actually I omit the counsellor heart. I keep my attention on the outward form of the body. “The great mystery of the world is not the invisible,” quipped Oscar Wilde, “but the visible.” Rather than exploring the hidden lungs and heart and bones, I look at the parts of the body that are visible daily to each of us—the shape of the overall face, the mouth and ears and eyes and nose, the shoulders and arms and hands, the chest and breasts, the abdomen and navel and waist, the genitals, the buttocks, the legs and feet. These areas nicely map into three distinct regions, each reflecting a different aspect of our evolutionary history: the head and face, the arms and torso, the genitals and legs. These divisions are not merely reductive intellectual constructs. They represent evidence gathered from various sources—the anatomy and physiology of contemporary humans, comparisons to our primate kin, and fossil remains of our extinct ancestors. Each of these areas of the body remembers its past differently. Each inspires different cultural responses. In this book they are discussed in three parts: “Headquarters,” “The Weight of the World,” and “A Leg to Stand On.” These titles embody both the natural history of each particular region and a powerful metaphor inspired by it.
I chose the route downward from the head to the feet for two reasons. First, it appealed to me as narrative, a journey rather than a system. Then I remembered that each human being actually develops in the same progression. In a newborn infant, the first feature of the freshly minted body to come under the baby’s control are the eye muscles. Gradually she achieves awareness of and control over the rest of her facial muscles and arrives at the popular milestone when deliberate smiling makes its appearance. Then the neck muscles come under her influence; her head no longer lolls to the side. Eventually the torso and trunk become part of the baby’s sense of...
