A scrotum moves on its own—adjusting itself in some stage of excitement. The nape of a neck grows a drifting crop of its own hair. A lifted arm allows an underarm some access to the larger world. Seen directly from below, the balls and hoses of male genitalia dangle next to the split cheeks of a bottom. A womb manages the pressure of concentric stretching bags of fluids and moving solids.
Humans are sad creatures somehow, with rigid skeletons and tense, stringy muscles giving shape to bulges and tentacles that are marooned in different parts of the body. Separated as they are and stuck off in pockets of skin, these bulges, rarely acting in concert, exercise their limited sentience in stiff and routine performances.
The organism has the potential to be so much more cephalopodic, with a nervous system distributed across its surface area and a shape that is a fluid negotiation of salinity and electricity. There are other ways of moving, touching, and sensing in a body filled with countless overlapping trial-and-error processes. But for humans, surrounded not by water but by less viscous air, it seems that gravity is turned up way too high. The whole body tends to sink and fall or need constant propping up in chairs.
Another of the body’s knobby outcroppings, the one that houses the brain, puts eyes and mouth in close proximity. Privileging visual evidence and lexical expressions, it is very good at calling the names of things with shapes and outlines that are positioned in front of it. The body rocks back and forth, advancing forward and absorbing this nominative, mostly two-dimensional world, and it likes things that reinforce a preference for vision. This is what humans usually seem to be, at least so far. ...
