Worm at the Core
A brief lecture on purity, basic biology, and basic ecology from The House of Forbidden Knowledge's Professor Emeritus of Undead Physiology, on brief loan from the University Library's archives
Inside the thing that you want is a thing that you don’t want that makes you not want the thing that you want.
Ruined. Tainted. Fouled. Impure. Stained. Adulterated. Diluted. Polluted. Alloyed. Degraded. Sullied. Contaminated. Filthy. Infected. Infested.
Some religions, some cultural traditions, are fairly big on purity. But you have to know that purity is only a requirement of something to be exploited as a resource—like a chemical reagent or an ingredient for a product or culinary project—or as breeding stock for those breeders using inbreeding to isolate desirable traits despite the weaknesses that also arise. Purity is solely a factor in items of economic or scientific value.
Certain types will tell you that they’re talking about a metaphorical purity, perhaps a sexual purity or a behavioral purity, a life free from sin…to which I can only respond that they’re talking about obedience, not purity, and they’re trying to be emotionally manipulative about it by saying that Daddy frowns and finds you disgusting if you have been disobedient.
This kind of obedience—a compliance with directives counter to your own strongest desires and drives—is of value only to authoritarians because it affects your value as livestock should the authority claiming ownership over you be interested in trading or selling you to another authoritarian. So again, purity, for livestock.
The last line of defense for the purity-as-a-core-value crowd is going to be hygiene. “We’re talking disease prevention,” they’ll say. “Short-term self-denial for long-term benefit.” Remember there’s a lineage for this kind of thinking that goes back to a theory of illness that involves curses from deceased ancestors for taboos broken by the living, and promises of fire and brimstone from the heavens for your village for harboring an idolater from a neighboring tribe, where disobedience, in theory, puts you and your whole tribe at risk.
This theory of existential risk is still popular in “Gayness Attracts Hurricanes!!!” pulpits.
But cleanliness and food safety have been separate concepts from (behavioral) purity for many thousands of years—until it was revived yet again by authoritarians trying to preserve the trade value of their hypothetically biddable, never-before-mounted daughters and virginal sisters, just to reduce the danger of them having the thought, “Enh, I’ve had better,” after an experience with a future master/owner.
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So. About that “juice cleanse.” That diet to “pull out toxins.”
Toxins in one’s food are a real problem. There are very few things that one can eat that can be digested completely and be completely incorporated with no waste. Even if all of the constituent elements of what one eats could in theory be converted into more of the dining life form in question, if the proportions are wrong, anything extra builds up until and unless it can be discarded. And then there are actual toxins that are of no use in any concentration and possibly detrimental in any concentration, typically in the form of heavy metal content from runoff from mining spoil or industrial waste or pesticides contaminating topsoil.
Wastes build up from everything eaten or imbibed in large quantities, especially with an unchanging diet, even with a “cleansing” or “purifying” diet. Nothing you eat or drink will magically turn to soap or bleach in your bloodstream. If you have a varied diet, no particular surplus will build up too quickly, and one’s liver and kidneys, should they still be present and functioning, will do any actual detoxification that needs doing.
Purified blood would just be water, wouldn’t it?
You are not, nor will you ever be, pure. Every facet of your existence, no matter what your state might be, depends on you being a chaos of springs and gears of different sizes, different substances, different natures, no two of them identical, all enmeshed in every possible dimension, some winding up while others wind down. If you were pure anything you would be an unchanging and unchangeable crystalline lump.
If you were pure, what kind of pure thing would you be?
Animals on earth are chains of amino acids strung together, amine to carboxyl group, into long polymers of protein strands trapping water and grease into various textures and densities of mucus and jelly draped on a foamed mineral framework. These textures form fat and meat and gristle and sponge and skin and rubbery cartilage and tofu-like brains and stretchy membranes and rubbery tubes and pouches of ooze and sweat and slime and gore and piss and festering fermenting shit-in-the-making made from the captured colonies of other life we keep penned in our guts to turn the life we eat into food for us, most of which is waiting to digest us as well the instant we stop moving.
Every surface in contact with the outside world is coated in a frustrated invasion force, just milling around and waiting for an opening. Lungs and sinuses and digestive tract and blood and lymph are full of visitors and tourists and squatters, and you need all of these things, including the invaders, to be you.
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So, again, pure what?
Are you pure because of what you eat? When everything you eat is similar enough to yourself that it hardly matters what you eat—animal, vegetable, fungal—as long as the microbial and parasitical load that comes along with it is one your immune system is trained to handle? As long as we can cope with any venoms or toxins it might carry just to discourage those who would eat it? As long as it doesn’t have too much hair or too many scales or splinters that you don’t have intestines long enough to handle because you’re just not that desperate for calories?
Are you pure because of who you interact with, when every human on earth is more closely related than every finch on earth or every dog on earth or every giraffe on earth or any other wild plant or animal to speak of? Humans have been so very hard on their more distant relatives that there is exceptionally little genetic variation left—when compared with any other species—and yet the shining monsters of the pulpits still preach “racial” purity in whatever codes are most acceptable.
Are you pure because of your adherence to the precepts of your religion, when no modern religion on earth is recognizable to any of its adherents from 500 years ago, or 200 years ago, or 100 years ago? Religions are notorious for changing their rules overnight when the organization is threatened with a crisis that would disband it. Religions are organisms, and organisms adapt or die out. How can your belief or behavior make you pure when the basic principles themselves come and go, when you don’t even share a language or any significant bits of daily-life culture with the originators?
Purity is a bludgeon for authoritarian livestock breeders to wield. A whip to control wayward daughters.
The very idea of purity is poison to a living mind. Instead of purity, what you need is a healthy relationship to the world around you—the world of living things and dead things and everything in between, a healthy relationship to each of the things, large and small, that are crawling inside of you and just outside on the surface, everything whose exhalations you breathe with every breath, whose piss you drink and who drinks your own, who wallow in your filth and who create the filth that you in turn wade through every day of your life.
If you have been taught to desire holiness, to lust after separation, someone should finally tell you that no such thing is possible.
What counts as a healthy relationship? Acceptance of the fact that the worm that you see at the core of the apple you’ve just bitten into is merely the worm that you can see, just the one that’s large enough for you to make it out with the naked eye, and that it’s probably as good for you to eat as the rest of the apple itself, including all of the tinier worms and creatures you can’t see that you would have eaten anyway. Acceptance that the worm is exactly what you are to other people who suddenly discover you in a place they wanted all to themselves, sitting there quietly breathing air and drinking water and eating food and taking up space that they wanted for themselves. Acceptance that a worm in the apple means that the worm judged the apple as acceptable and merely got there first. Acceptance that a world that has apples, even God’s Own Perfect Garden, could not have apples unless there were also worms, because worms are mandatory in a thriving ecosystem that would have healthy apple trees.
A healthy relationship means seeing how things actually are instead of seeing only what you think ought to be there and ignoring everything else. It means not accepting a simplified childish coloring-book view of the world as if it were reality. It means making room for things to be the way they have to be—and making sure things that impinge on you aren’t allowed to exploit you or subvert your will without some form of true compromise.
It starts with knowing that you are the worm and that you belong in the apple.