Mortal Lessons by Richard Selzer

Author:Richard Selzer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mariner Books

THE BELLY

Consider the aweto—embodiment of dietary indiscretion—which caterpillarlike creature burrows beneath the earth of New Zealand in search of a certain seed for which it lusts unceasingly. So unbounded is the aweto’s craving for this seed that the aweto spurns all other nourishment, preferring starvation to any palatine concession. Ah, but no sooner has the hideous seed been found and ingested, than it germinates—sprouting, branching, growing with such zest as to quickly exceed the capability of the aweto to expel it in either direction. Soon the malevolent fungus can be seen emerging from the mouth of the aweto, elongating, dividing, thrusting spurs through the aweto’s brain. Now the aweto has the look of an anguished elk. It is thus, crammed and bursting, that the aweto dies, its corpse a mere fingerling upon the burgeoning meal-beast.

Let us properly go from the instruction of the aweto to the stomach in its abdominal residence. Let us go with fit trepidation, with all due ceremony, for we are entering upon imperial ground.

Here then is the abdomen, a vessel where secrets hatch, chemistries, dark rituals. Scan, please, from the twin sails of the diaphragm that catch the winds from the north, to the sturdy dinghy of the pelvis rocking atop the thighs. No shield protects the abdomen, no scale or plated deck. It is only soft flesh, the touchiest of parts—and studded with the sad small stump of the navel, pathetic twist, all that is left of the primal separation, knotted lest our animus leak from us with an obscene little noise.

Within row the organs, slaves in a galley. The stomach, that sacculent flared bag hung from the esophagus that drapes across the upper abdomen, tailing out into the intestine, is the brute who wields the lash. On its either side are the massive bulwarks of the liver and the spleen. They have not the stomach’s slither, its grind, but, fortresses, they stand guard, thunderous and glowering in their opposite diaphragmatic recesses. Sliding between, the ravenous stomach holds upward its open mouth. It is the least refined of organs, a fetid, rank, and gaseous trough that knows but the pressure of fullness, the cavernous echo of emptiness—a pink, moist, hairless creature whose call is a belch and who responds to its ingests with delirious contractions and metallic bleeping. It is, all in all, an uncouth performance. Devoid of dream and imagination, lacking the lambent finesse of the heart, ignorant of the sweet language of the sex organs, the stomach sweats and steams and grunts most happily.

But let no man snub his stomach. Come, be very very kind to the stomach. You had better.

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