Phenomenology for beginners

Katie and I were walking home from Halesowen yesterday, having just done a spot of shopping and eaten a rather dense subway sandwich, when Katie started talking about the physical act of walking. It was much along the lines of that old Camus quote about absurdity hitting a man in the face as he turns a corner; Katie realised how ridiculous walking is. The mechanics of it just don't fit. It's awkward and uncomfortable looking, maybe even a little stupid.

It's strange that she mentioned it because these sorts of reflections often come to me for no good reason. When things are isolated and seen in a context that makes them as close to "what they really are" as possible, they seem utterly bizarre and alien. Walking was a good example- I utterly agrred with her. When seen from the outside, walking involves us stretching up to our full height and extending our limbs forward into an ungainly lurch. There's a constant propelling or dragging, or both, that makes you wonder what we're really up to. To me it always makes me think about the awful shape of the human body; an extended strip of meat with a lump at the end that pivots and commands. Body horror isn't restricted to the menstrual cycle and child birth- it's found in something as simple as looking at the grain of your fingernails or realising that you have miles of tubes tightly packed under your skin.

My two personal freak-outs of this kind are always language and worms. Worms are a weird one because we tend to see them as the polar opposite of humans, but we've got a lot in common. If you think of a worm, it's basically a tube with a mouth and an arse. It's sole aim in life is to pass stuff from its mouth to its arse via its body. It doesn't actually do anything else of note. It doesn't have eyes or ears or limbs. It's not even a snake. In fact, a snake is just a worm with other facial features and a few clever gizmos (poison, rattle, crushing mechanism, etc). And then a lizard is just a snake with legs. There really isn't much to this evolution lark- you can easilly see the genealogy of it all unfolding. Anyway, my freak moment comes when I think of myself in relation to the worm. I seem to have way more than the worm does. The only thing we share is a mouth and an arse and the tube that connects the two. Then in some horrible Deleuzean moment I always end up thinking to myself- what if all of this (the eyes, ears, rational thought, thumbs, emotions) are just an elaborate safety suit protecting the tube that runs from my mouth to my arsehole? Worms don't have one, so they live underground and just keep munching. And for all my jobs, qualifications, CD collections, twitter accounts and dreams of rock stardom, the thing it all comes back to is eating a meal and having a shit.

Now, one might say that I do all of this because I can and the eating and shitting is simply to sustain my life so that I can do all of the impressive thinking and creativity. However, the cart is well before the horse. If that's the case, then why doesn't the worm have anything else to do? Isn't it just the case that over time we become more elaborately decorated worms? And once we became so impressively decked out, we started to think that our mind was the most important aspect of our lives, that our enjoyment amounted to something more than simply a process of digestion. The worm is in all animals- they all have that tube from mouth to arse- and so, perversely, I see them as our closest ancestor, way beyond apes. Less of a parent than a grandfather with so many offspring that you can see him reflected in your millions of cousins.

Language is the other one. As soon as you isolate a word, it loses its meaning (that's bog standard Wittgenstein in many respects) but it also just sounds ridiculous. Lump. Camel. Held. Ink. Eye. Felt. Shin. Whelp. They just don't mean anything. They sound like onomatopoeia for a blob of inert substance hitting pavement. Link them together and they mean something. But then, doesn't that make their meaning slightly illusory? It freaks me out.

Anyway, none of this has anything to do with what I actually believe. I don't think we're closely related to worms or that our sole process is to eat and shit. Nor do I think that language is simply nonsense with the illusion of meaning (my thoughts on both of these subjects are a little more subtle and complex....I hope). It's more about the utter lack of seriousness, meaning or vivacity that things have when you really focus on them. When bracketted off, things become too unusual to comprehend. Just a thought really.