I wrote a long essay for Extra Extra Magazine on behaviour-altering parasitism, Whitmanian multitudinousness, etc. Below is an excerpt. To read the whole thing, buy a copy here.
1.
Mainstream philosophy and science at least since Aristotle have held to the view that each living body, under normal circumstances, should be inhabited by no more than one soul. If you don't care for talk of souls, exchange that word for “individual”, and the point still stands: sharing bodily space is abnormal, a sign of pathology, to be corrected by flushing the worms out of your entrails, or by mulesing your sheep against flystrike.
It was this prejudice against mutualism that delayed by several years widespread recognition of the true nature of lichen: not a moss, not some low liverwort, but an intrication of two very different kinds of being, of fungus and algae, the former hosting the latter, as near as we can make out, farming it if you will for the miraculous calories it photosynthesizes out of pure light.
We continue to act surprised even though in truth this is the regular course of things. The human microbiome is home to over 5000 known species of microorganism, without which many basic bodily functions, notably digestion, could not continue. The baleen of a whale's mouth constitutes a marine ecosystem more comparable to the biodiversity of a kelp forest than to a single animal's body part. Biology furnishes us with abundant empirical examples of a truth that logic and metaphysics, in the form we have inherited them, still require us to reject on a priori grounds. If you do not wish to appear irrational, do not learn too well the lessons of natural science.
Consider Walt Whitman, who did not mind being suspected of irrationality, and whose rejection of the law of non-contradiction --“You say I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself”-- occurs not at all far from his rejection of the idea that each body has room for only one self: “I contain multitudes,” says the poet.
A vision of multitudinousness, somewhere between Whitman's ecstatic polydaimonism and a protobiological theory of symbiosis, has always been around to countervail the mainstream view. In the Renaissance the occult thinker and physician Paracelsus entertained the idea that each bodily organ might be governed by its own subordinate soul, a little “kinglet” as these were sometimes called: the cardianax for the heart, the gastrianax for the stomach, and so on. The alchemists, among them Paracelsus, supposed that in bodies in general there must be “subordinate forms”, such as the form of silver that may, experiment proves, be reobtained after dissolving it in aqua fortis. The water seems to have no properties of silver, and yet the silver must be in there somewhere, hidden in the properties of water, for how else could we get it back from its solution?
And what seems evident for ordinary forms in chemical mixtures, is all the more so in the organs and subsystems of living bodies. A century after Paracelsus, G. W. Leibniz speculated that when a worm is bisected, a previously subordinate helminthine soul rises up and comes to dominate in the newly liberated body. Before its separation, the soul was already there, but it had no power to move the larger worm, as there was another soul with more power keeping it down. Leibniz speculated that every living body is in fact an infinite ensemble of such subordinate souls, each one of which might, under the right circumstances, come to dominate an independent body of its own. “Vice-gerents” is the term Ralph Cudworth used to ridicule the idea of such subordinate spiritual forces in bodies, for which a rough contemporary equivalent might be “assistant managers”.
These representatives of the counter-tradition spoke of souls whereas, again, we feel more comfortable with “individuals”, and they invoked infinite numbers of such beings whereas we have lowered that back down to vast quantities. But with these small adjustments made, the counter-tradition has plainly proven to be the correct one, even if we remain sentimentally attached to the “one body, one spirit” formula. We still consider the acknowledgment that hands and faces are swarming with microbes to be impolite in most contexts, and this variety of biophobia has its spiritual counterpart in our effort to convince ourselves that Whitman is just waxing poetical and not capturing any real truth about humanity when he invokes his own multitudes-- that multiple personalities are the stuff of freaky fictions, that within the space of our own bodies, the ego has no amigo.
2.
When we are compelled to acknowledge the truth of our cohabitative condition, we comfort ourselves with the thought that at least we ourselves maintain motor control over the body, while the others are just along for the ride. But this may turn out to be as illusory as our earlier insistence on our exclusive occupancy of our bodies.
There is a fluke, the Dicrocoelium dendriticum, whose most stable home is the liver of sheep and cattle. But how does it get there, and how does it spread its offspring to still other livers of other livestock? It passes its embryonated eggs out in the faeces, which are soon ingested by a snail, who excretes the cercariae, or free-swimming larvae of the fluke, in a great slime ball that is in turn consumed by an ant; several hundred of these cercariae move down into the ant's gut, but a single one of them seizes onto a nerve center beneath the esophagus and takes control of the ant's bodily actions. Throughout the day, the ant is allowed to go about its usual ant tasks, but when night falls the fluke steers its host up to the top of a blade of grass. If the fluke is lucky and the ant unlucky, they together will be devoured by a ruminant; if the fortunes are the reverse of that, the ant will return to its colony for another day at dawn.
This is an unusually elaborate multispecies transit, but the part that is most surprising to us, the zombification of the ant, is not nearly so rare as we imagine. Certain species of wasp effectively enslave cockroaches by transmission of neurotoxins, to cite another well known case, and when the Sacculina barnacle inserts itself, in the larval form known as a “kentrogon”, inside the body of a male green crab and transforms it, the crab, into what appears to be a female, this is all part of a broader scheme to help it, the barnacle, find a mate of its own. One wonders whether pleasure enters into the experience of either the host or the agent at any stage of the one's penetration by the other. This is, after all, an initial phase of an extended sex act, one rather different from our own in important respects, but like it at least to the extent that it is generally difficult to get in there, where we long to be, inside the other. Nature rewards us with euphoria when we finally do manage the maneuver, and if eros is a trick nature plays to get even calculating beings such as ourselves to see to our own succession, why should an analogous sensation not be supposed as the force that sends such a dim packet of appetite as a barnacle larva in search of a suitable slit in the joints of a crab shell?
Moving rather closer to home, there is good evidence that the Toxoplasmosis gondii parasite has figured out how to use mice in order to get inside of cats: first it enters the mouse brain, and drives it crazy, rendering its motions erratic and making it easier prey for any nearby feline. At least some researchers have considered evidence that human beings may wind up with T. gondii on the brain as well, driven mad by a parasite delivered by their beloved pets. “Crazy cat lady syndrome”, the condition is disparagingly called. Whatever the case may be, seizing another organism's motor control is only the most obvious way to get it to do your bidding. “What if the domesticated maize plants are just using us to spread themselves around the world?” This is a “whoah” question, to be asked by adolescents, perhaps on drugs, in the same spirit in which they might ask whether the universe is a holograph. But it is no less serious for that, as we easily see if we substitute other species whose autonomy matters rather less to us than our own: “What if the algae are just using the fungi in their perpetual lichenous embrace?” And the only answer is: of course they are.
Fungus does not even have a motor control system, and yet the algae get everything they want out of it. And we human beings find ourselves moving our bodies --not because of externally imposed control, but because of what we take to be our own willed actions-- in ways that cumulatively contribute to the continued domination of the vegetal kingdom by a few harvested monocultures. We move our bodies to the store for some Doritos, for example, doing our part to maintain the economy that maintains the ecology that, for now, allows us co-conspirators, the human and the corn, to enjoy our planetary condominium.
The corn, I mean, has found a way to seize upon our brains that is well adapted to their particular complexities. Unlike the ant with its 250,000 or so neurons, which we can practically see the lancet fluke playing like harp strings, the human brain has around 100,000,000,000 of them. This is what enables us to envision the future, or to envision several different futures and to act in accordance with the particular vision we prefer. In the short term such a vision might involve popping out for a bag of tortilla chips. In the longer term, and the one we like to imagine more elevated and noble, it involves a sort of self-fashioning, a guided and teleological process of becoming who we feel ourselves, potentially, to be.
Here, too, I suspect, we are doing the bidding of others, in a way that might not be totally distinct from these other varieties observed throughout nature.
3.
Since childhood I have played a game with myself, though by “game” I do not mean to suggest that this is something unserious or trivial to me, in which I imagine that someone I have known in the past, an ex-girlfriend or a grade-school teacher, or some historical figure, Emily Dickinson or Thomas Jefferson, suddenly, for a reason they do not themselves understand, begins perceiving the world from my point of view as I go about my daily life in the here and now.
Sometimes the reason for the visit is plainly vanity on my part. I can recall when I was in graduate school in New York, and I took a weekly trip to 158th Street in the far north of Manhattan to see my kindly if condescending psychiatrist, and as I walked from the subway to the hospital I summoned the spirit of some person from my earlier life, back where I had come from, my town of trailer parks, of dogs on chains and rusted cars on jacks, in the Central Valley of California, someone who had expressed to me in one way or another that I was destined to live out my days in that same town, there with them; and yet now here I was, in New York! I recall being annoyed, and quickly averting my eyes, whenever they landed upon a parked car that had commuted in across the George Washington Bridge from New Jersey and brought that state's less impressive license plates with it, lest my visitor see the plates as well and be left with any doubt as to where I now resided.
O vanity. A good number of my visits, I am happy to report, have been motivated by the nobler spirit of curiosity. Sometimes when I am in airplanes I summon the ghost of Leonardo da Vinci or G. W. Leibniz into my body, and I think about what they are seeing through my eyes, and about how long it will take them to understand what is happening: that we are within an artificial device, flying far above the clouds, just as they had dreamt might someday be possible.
These then are two sorts of occasion on which I am visited: those on which I “show people,” as in the phrase, “I'll show you!” which I can practically hear echoing in my mind when I am visited by my ninth-grade shop-class teacher, Mr. Disney, who did everything he could to keep me moving along the usual school-to-prison pipeline, but now finds me thirty years later a professor of philosophy at the University of Paris and a somewhat esteemed author, whose writing has been used as the sample text on Japanese university entrance exams, and who has a main-belt asteroid that bears his name; second, there are those occasions on which I invite someone I admire from the historical past to see things as I see them, and to allow me to reflect upon big questions, upon the nature of history and time and progress and consciousness.
There are two more principal occasions, moving as we are from the more frivolous to the less, from vanity, to curiosity, to, now, consolation for loss. I sometimes invite people I have loved over for a visit, over to my body, into my body. I want to show them that I am alright, or that I am not alright, I want them to sympathize with my plight, with my situation, to be drawn in so far from forgetting me that they become me, or at least come to share the same space as me, the same proportions of motion and rest.
In truth I have not worked out all of the details of the cohabitation. The visitors have no power to move my body, at least not directly, but they do have full access to all my sensory experiences, and that includes the sense of touch, and so also the feeling of a faint itch of the big toe, or of a newly formed axillary bead of sweat making its way down the flank, or innumerable other such emblems of embodiment. Yet the visitor would nonetheless retain, I generally think, all of her own thoughts, she would be able to see and hear and feel the world from within my body, determine for herself whether sharing my body is a drag or a turn-on, and in general to contemplate and wonder at this as herself. I doubt such a scenario is even coherent: if my body with its sense organs were to become her body, necessarily my brain would become her brain, and she could hope to preserve no thoughts of her own.
Neural integration between visitor and host is not the only problem. Sometimes my visitor arrives from the present, and sometimes from the past (again, generally uncertain of how he or she has made this voyage, either in space or in time), from a moment of my own past in which I knew her. It is at least as impossible to travel in time as it is to share another person's perceptions while keeping the rest of one's own cognitive apparatus intact, so let us not be sticklers for consistency.
The fourth and final sort of visit brings us, from vanity, through curiosity, through the longing for sympathy (literally: together-feeling), to something like veneration. I am visited by my late father, who sometimes arrives straight from his 1970s moustache-man phase, and sometimes from whatever sort of afterlife he is currently enduring. He checks in on me, sees how I'm doing, registers with surprise the progress the internet has made over the most recent years. When he is there I adjust my behavior, I go out of my way to use the new apps I think he would have liked, I try to conduct myself confidently and move through the world like it is mine. It is a bit embarrassing to have him in there, occupying the space often also visited by old lovers, if that is what we must call them. But I imagine he is understanding, and able intuitively to grasp the spirit of our cohabitation: a thought experiment motivated by filial piety, not dark fantasies of unspeakable incest.
But this is casuistry, for in truth our identity with our progenitors, discoverable in our very genes, is not altogether different from the identity for which we long later in life, which sends us out in search of whatever degrees of bodily interpenetration are permitted to us, within the limits of our anatomy and the strictures of the law. Both of these varieties of identity, the one we share with our parents and the one we seek out under orders from eros, are sometimes called, rightly or wrongly, by the name of love.
I am visited by my grandparents too, who have been dead long enough for their presence to be experienced, by me, as at least partially hybrid with the visits conducted in the spirit of historical curiosity. But I also want them to see what their descendant has become, how he moves so fluidly through the streets of Paris as if he belonged here. Their presence gives me the feeling of possession of a compound soul, as it were, a supercharged soul that is not just mine, that is not self-made, but is transduced across the generations.
This is of course a variety of what is properly called “ancestor worship”. In a culture that has little place for such a thing, I have spontaneously channeled my experience of it through the naive therapy of imagined sci-fi scenarios and through what the psychoanalysts would no doubt call the “symptoms” imbued in me by “the father”. But this diagnosis makes the experience both more serious and less interesting than it really is. Creatures infest one another: that is the general rule that governs all of living nature. They get up inside one another, lay their eggs, instill their legacies however they can. Is it any wonder then that the dead stay with us the way they do?
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To keep reading, buy Extra Extra Magazine here.
If you haven't read it, a fascinating paper on parasites and how they may have shaped the evolution of the human brain, directly on topic I think:
https://slatestarcodex.com/blog_images/parasite_study.pdf
With a review worth reading here:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/08/19/maybe-your-zoloft-stopped-working-because-a-liver-fluke-tried-to-turn-your-nth-great-grandmother-into-a-zombie/
Posted by: Picador | September 12, 2019 at 06:07 PM
You're making connections I often longed to make. A wonderful piece! Somehow it's fitting to encounter this as an *excerpt*. But I'm looking forward for more to come.
Posted by: Martin Lenz | September 17, 2019 at 03:35 AM