Are we offended by words, or by what words reveal about minds, like the still-wriggling tendrils of Sannakji? But there are no minds. I think that the brain, with all those thinking wrinkles, is a poor metaphor for what it does. The digestive tract has wrinkles but it has an input and an output. Digestion is more cybernetic than the brain. People are out walking their horrible dogs. No, they are horrible. At other times they are not horrible, years ago or on occasion. “I know it’s your passion, but is it profitable?” “I have to believe that it is, otherwise it’s too discouraging.” Sometimes people carry the output of their horrible dogs, in a bag between two fingers. In any case, digestion is a better metaphor for the horrible things people say. Everyone farts, but some fart more than others, and farts come in a wide variety of smells, still nonetheless similar. It is culturally prevalent to defecate in private. The movements of a creature of language come at a different rhythm. Thinking the unspeakable can go on for months. It moves in my journal, at a party, talking to myself, in a passing remark to a stranger, etc. This is where digestion is instructive: Shit can not be reabsorbed. The unspeakable is unspeakable until it isn’t. Sometimes it remains unspeakable until death but meanwhile it bends you. Anyway, shit in itself is not interesting. Its qualities tell you everything: What you ate, how well you digested it, if you are ill, etc. It is meaningless to say “everybody speaks” without also saying something about the threads running through their words. And here we are back to more tangled metaphors. From the first invertebrate with a tube running through it, a body has always been simple; food chains have never been simple. No. Bodies cannot be known fully, which is their great generosity; food chains are knowable and can be tracked and analyzed. No.
