Faecal Offerings

I think of my intestinal tract as a gentrified neighbourhood. In an overzealous attempt, via copious antibiotics, to cleanse the place of parasites and other bacterial life forms considered undesirable, the terrain is no longer full of life. No art is made in this neighbourhood. No new, promising, vigorous life is likely to spore and grow.

There is no greater harbinger of how torn from the earth and dirt we are than the dying of the very bacteria that call our bodies home. Our mutualistic alliance with the bacteria that support our life, the dynamic, pulsing, multi-life supporting organism that we are, is being eroded. Has been eroded for some time in fact, by pesticides, overly sterile environments, antibiotics and the general contamination and toxification of the natural world.

The land is not the only thing being slowly poisoned. Our bodies are the site of a slow, surreptitious poisoning too. If we look to the state to parent us then we are being Munchausened by proxy and made to feel it is our own fault that we are not getting better.

I am trying to repopulate my intestinal tract, to build affordable housing, to make the terrain verdant and habitable - capable of supporting a multi-strain, diverse biota. My kitchen is a bubbling, burping laboratory of water and milk kefirs, kimchi, sauerkraut and sourdough starters - all of whom demand to be fed. They are a clamouring but silent biosphere over which I am mother. If I feed them, then one day they will feed me, repopulate my gut and so we are building our own miniature, symbiotic ecosystem. They need me in order to sustain their life and I need them to sustain mine. My intimate relationship with the microcosmic bacterial kingdom has forced me to draw a lamentable conclusion: that it is easier to kill than to create and sustain life. It took months to decimate my microbiome but years, a decade and counting, to rebuild.

My body, all our bodies, are precariously reliant on our relationship to dirt, soil, bacteria, fungus. What the techno-narcissists in silicon valley don’t seem to realise is that they are human too (at least for now, let’s not get into their dystopian, transhumanist vision of the future) and that humans like all living creatures are reliant on an interdependent web of other animals, plants, microbes and fungi. And that our decimation of the natural world will really be a decimation of ourselves. The belief that technological solutions are the answer to human impact on the climate has become so widespread that even environmentalist George Monbiot thinks we ought to be producing food in ginormous mega-warehouses. But what if the solution is far more simple, what if the answer is just below our feet. The gold is in the dirt. The thing so maligned and unwanted, and all the microbes that compose it, are our allies in saving ourselves for this glorious green earth if we can only come into a mutualistic relationship with them.

Ancestral knowledge systems acknowledged how precarious this balance was and followed strict guidelines and protocols to maintain a healthy relationship with the natural world. They understood their survival was inextricably woven with that of the other beings around them. Instead of scientific process, they used ritual, evolved over thousands of years, in order to stay in harmonious webs of interrelation. They followed each step meticulously, knowing full well that if one thing was changed it could entirely alter the outcome. A more gentle, intuitive way of working with cause and effect. They deeply understood webs of causality and our place in them, in ways we in our modern arrogance have become blind to. In our outlandish scientific experiments, we radically alter one facet of something and rarely think about potential ramifications. We have a try and see approach, throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks, trial and error. The problem with this is that the effect of these ‘errors’ plays out in the world and in our bodies. As with my doctor’s over-prescription of potent antibiotics and examples such as use of pesticides initially designed for chemical warfare on food crops, we have polluted our land and water systems and thus our bodies in countless acts of temerity and heedlessness.

I cannot squat down, heels on the ground, the arches of my feet so pronounced, from so many generations of genteel shoe wearers that I need insoles to support them. I can no longer consume sugars due to our abuse and overuse of them that shows up more manifestly in some bodies than others. There are a plethora of ways in which the modern world is degrading our body’s capacity to regulate various facets of its health and vitality. Most pertinently, I cannot keep my gut healthy without supplementation from probiotics, prebiotic powder, and literal faecal microbiota transplants in hospital once a year.

I am more of a symbiont than the average person. Or perhaps an unwitting experiment of a more deliberate form of symbiosis. I would not have chosen this. My body is pervaded with bacteria that are not my own, that did not pass down to me from my mother or get picked up naturally from my environment but instead were grown in bacteria banks or donated from other people’s intestinal tracts. I am grateful but I am also angry, angry it was necessary. I may be an outlier for now but this is where we are all headed if we don’t change our relationship with the microbial world.

In the first virtual world, (not the coming hellscape of VR but the world of concrete we built over the natural earth) we larp at being a new kind of creature that doesn’t need dirt or return to the earth. This world of abstraction from food supplies in which we are offered a perpetual smorgasbord of increasingly processed foods and infinite distractions is seemingly so unlike the natural world beneath that we have managed to convince ourselves its natural laws no longer apply. This way of being on the earth is unsustainable all the way down. It turns out that mother earth will only let us play so long at severed, soulless, hedonistic pseudo-humans before she will remind us of our unbreakable tie to the earth, the soil and the microbes that inhabit our bodies.

We cannot get away from soil without it killing us. We are earth creatures. As many indigenous groups spanning different continents and times have mythologised, we are clay people, born of clay and earth. The first man of the Abrahamic cosmology was even named Adam, from the Hebrew word adamah, meaning ground, earth or soil.

The poor fuckers who end up flying to Mars are going to have a rude awakening when the reality of living without soil-grown food, fresh air, gravity and bacterial-covered everything makes them sick in 2 generations minimum. We are earth creatures and cannot become creatures of sterility without it killing us, no matter how much the transhumanists wish that we could.

A rebelliousness is growing in me to resist the sterile, atomised anti-human life culture we are heading towards. It hit a tipping point the moment I realised I had begun to scroll and try to use a touch screen in my sleep. It felt like the last bastion of freedom, my own mind, was being invaded. I could feel what it would be like to have technology transplanted into my very mind/body and something in me recoiled. I don’t want to slowly and insidiously be transformed into something resembling a cyborg, sleep-walking towards a transhumanist future. I want to live in this body. Here. Now. No matter how uncomfortable sometimes it is. Disembodiment is a trap because it’s not ever truly possible, eventually you have to come back down, back in. These bodies are where we live and nothing is going to change that in the near future. The more we leave them temporarily to enter a virtual space the more when we return we will feel weak, dizzy and disillusioned.

So I am using my phone less. Communicating more with the people who are actually around me, my immediate neighbours and my friends who live nearby. Attending the local church despite not actually being a Christian but wanting to be in fellowship. I am eating real food only now, nothing processed. If I need something crunchy or salty I will eat real bread with real cheese and as I mentioned I am filling my body with as much fermented food as it will tolerate. I am cooking with local ingredients and foods that are native to this country. And I am getting dirty, walking barefoot when I can, usually in my local cemetery because it’s the green space that is available to me in my flat in the city, apologising to the inhabitants, hoping it isn’t sacrilegious and getting to know some of their names.

I am spending time with my grandmother who is also no longer earthside and currently exists as a rosebush or rather as ash in the pot where I planted a rose. In the mornings I take my tea outside and sit with her in my little back garden, I light a fire, write poetry, and pull a card.

Lately I am constantly pulling the card of the goddess Tlazolteotl. Almost. Every. Time. In a pack of 44 this seems statistically significant. She is the goddess of dirt and filth, sin eater, filth reverer, reveller in the black fertile earth. I wrote her a poem. The next time I looked at my cards, she had a droplet of water just below her eye. A perfect tear, with no water in the vicinity that could have caused it. You may not believe me, but it happened. I had heard of Virgin Marys weeping. Perhaps other idols weep too. Perhaps not, but I am choosing to believe that, as a friend of mine surmised, Tlazolteotl was moved.

That same morning I noticed my cat had shat in the flowerpot that contains my grandmother’s ashes. I instinctively got up to go and fish it out with a trowel. But I stopped. And left it where it was. If I am going to believe that dirt is sacred then this was not sacrilege but an offering. I laughed at the idea that it was like a faecal transplant for the rose bush (my grandmother). In a way it was. I am certainly grateful to those who offered up their faeces to me. It may well have saved my life.

So as I tend my garden with compost and cat poo, adding bug hotels and wild flowers and tearing up decking in favour of grass, and get to know my neighbours both human and non-human, I will people my body with many beings other than myself, and attempt to make my body a robust ecosystem, a diverse and densely populated neighbourhood again.