Universal Bodies

I had this thought today while running off to make lunch before 6 P.M. rolled around. It was kind of an irrational thought, so rationale being what it is and people being who they are, I had to go back over it and rationalize it or at least understand why my first compunction was this "wait, what a minute" moment.

Beginning, I thought that I had to figure out why making lunch before six was such a big deal. My own busted food schedule aside, I figure it would probably help the rest of my body organize itself if I did adhere more closely to a strict three ring circus of various food stuffs and the thought of organizing that part of myself lead me to lean toward thinking that further organization would probably bleed from that, through my mouth and then back out of my mouth again into positive work gains. Too technical. Losing interest. Start over.

What struck me was (without all the junk that lead up to it) that the spacing of meals is pretty much universally accepted. You eat when you wake up because you haven't eaten while you were sleeping. You eat around the middle of your day because you've been doing stuff and were probably too busy to cut something up, jam a stick from it's gullet to it's anus and throw it over a spit, or gather something, or you haven't eaten since you got up because it's taken you all day to find and kill enough somethings to skewer, fill a basket (and your tummy), or snag in a net of some sort. Then you eat again before you go to sleep because after you ate earlier you had to do other things that made you tired and things that make you tired also tend to make you hungry and you don't want to be kept awake by the sound of your stomach digesting itself.

So by and large everybody eats a few times a day because when you're not an animal with a stomach that can digest anything (fresh, rotten, bones, pure cellulose, tree bark, whatever) it takes energy to pick and choose and being able to pick and choose and possessing delicate (by comparison) faculties also means you have to spend the time and energy to do so and protect your fragile microcosm. It's easy to understand.

In rushing to make lunch I realized that it doesn't matter what you call it or why. Your body knows what's up. You can cram food into your face at 7 P.M. if you want, but your body knows that what it's eating should actually be dinner and will be processed as such. Your mind can convince you that you should eat again before you go to bed, but depending on what you ate you probably shouldn't and your body knows that. You can make breakfast at dinner time, but it's still, in principle, dinner, no matter what you want to call it. Granted it is all bound by your sleep cycle, so if you sleep for ten hours whatever you eat in the three equidistant spaces of the next fourteen hours will be breakfast lunch and dinner. And that's important. So I guess it wasn't as horribly irrational as I originally thought. If I missed the lunch window I would be feeding myself an extremely early dinner and would run the risk of having to eat again before bed and wake up not hungry enough to eat breakfast and basically start on the slippery slope of a digestive apocalypse. Gastrocalypse, I call it.

Then I started thinking about how simple it is to understand something as universal as why and when people eat and it really got my goat that people can understand the need to put food in their mouths, but they can't understand something else as equally simple and universal as basic human rights. Or maybe human rights are not as simple as eating. Oh wait they are. If you deprive someone of food, you should be able to understand what that deprivation does to you and by extension what it likely does to another object of similar mechanical and chemical make up and necessities even if you don't count that object as a person. I mean if kicking a dog with the wrong part of your foot hurts your foot a little, you should be able to assume that a dog, made out of similar material as you, probably felt it too. Not that I would ever kick a dog. I love dogs. Slightly more than people sometimes.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, it's baffling the body of things that are universally understood and the body of things that are still, however many generations and iterations of human beings later, up for debate and challenged and I don't think that my own work will help to make those things that should be universally understood about the collective human organism and illustrated and painted and constructed about it will help to further clarify or cement those universals. My body of work to date is teeny tiny, though larger than it's ever been, and if I want to help (and I do, just a little) I have to not die yet. I'm in the first few thousand hours of work toward mastery well enough to make clear every attempt at expression and the induction of clarity and there's still work to be done if people are going to eat three meals a day with any kind of universality.

Slightly selfishly, if I were to die, I feel like I would be ashamed of my body of work. I feel today like I've only begun to fill a thimble and I need several buckets if I'm ever going to put out the fire inside me, let alone across the borders and city limits of my body's ends.

///Susumu Hirasawa - "Condition Boy" ...delusions of an alternate and terribly grand universe are