The Body Politic

It seems a good day for revelations, so I’ll throw in my own, but they’re cheap. For the last few weeks, I’ve been taking life easy. I don’t have much to be concerned about– life is short, so I’m living to enjoy myself: to learn, to do projects, to spend pastimes in good company.

But to wank: I started thinking about the world while playing How Well Do You Know Your World, a very addictive game. It makes me realize how incredibly huge the world is. Every wiggle in the political and cultural boundaries of the world is a overflowing manifestation of the complexities of the whole of humanity, the rise of capitalism, the struggle of individual families, the ramifications of legends.

The universe is fractally complex. The closer you look, the more you see. From world, to city, to neighborhood, to house, to room, to bookshelf, to the grime in a screw head.

So too the body. The same politics that play out with the traveling American diplomat in a backwoods Near Eastern country happen between cells in every square inch of the human body. As I was giving someone a back massage tonight, I imagined that I was reading (in poor translation) the cultural history of the different cell colonies in her body. We are moldy outgrowths of walking spinal columns… but we’re also a billion billion individual histories, some defiantly protecting themselves from the encroaching central nervous government, some buying into its peculiar dream and finding their role in it.

Recently, I keep hearing people telling me (women mostly), “Well, it’s nice you been successful.” What is success supposed to mean any way, and what makes people think I have it? As a mind, I’m quite pleased with what I’ve got going, but I hope I don’t get very successful at it. As a body, I’m a repressive dictator. I praise what I want to hear, and if anyone steps out of line, I have them shot. But I’m resolved to be more democratic. I’m going to send diplomats and media agents to every community of my body and share my power with the local leaders they find.

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