The Mystery of the Visible

Adam's Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form
by Michael Sims

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This book is not about my personal experiences, but one of them inspired it. Like most people with a functioning body, I take a number of activities for granted trivial actions such as raising my head and feeling sensation in my fingertips. That is, I blithely did so until a few years ago. Then I dislocated a cervical disc and suffered ongoing neck and back pain until, after sudden paralysis in my left arm, I underwent a discectomy. My neurosurgeon told me that mine was one of the worst herniated discs of the thousand-plus on which he had operated. Pride in uniqueness didn't alleviate my pain during the two weeks I spent mostly flat on my back. To bolster his advice that I hold my head up as little as possible, the neurosurgeon provided a vivid image. He said that the human head is roughly the size and weight of a bowling ball and that the spine labors like the stem of a sunflower to carry such a burden. Not wanting the poor overworked stem to snap again, I followed the doctor's orders. I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling.

Desperate for some kind of intellectual activity, I began thinking about the human body. I found that I could rest a legal pad flat on my chest and write without having to watch the words appear, if occasionally I worked the pad to a wobbly upright position to see if my palimpsest of notes was decipherable. During much of my convalescence, I whiled away the hours scrawling free association under such headings as "Ears" and "Navel" and "Toes." Beside me on the bed the pages accumulated. Pliny's remark about King Pyrrhus's restorative toe stirred memories of Margaret Fox and the founding of American spiritualism. Houdini's cues to his assistant reminded me of Darwin's pointed ears. I could not envision Neil Armstrong's carefully arranged photo op of pressing his boot into moon soil without also seeing the row of ancient footprints that Mary Leakey unearthed at Laetoli. And every time I tried to raise my head, I remembered how much of our back pain scientists attribute to an awkward bipedalism the once horizontal mammalian spine wrenched upward to support the aspiring head and free the greedy hands, leaving the old vertebrate nerves and their armor crowded too closely together.

Soon I realized that I had begun my next book. When I could sit up again, I dived into research about the body. Each source led to new discoveries. In time I consulted experts. Because I am as interested in culture as in nature, I could not help noticing that many of our cherished myths about the body began with an imaginative response to its natural history. Nothing excites my imagination more than the border habitat where the two fields interbreed and form strange hybrids. For this reason Adam's Navel is itself something of a hybrid.

There are many ways to approach the study of the human body. Medical specialists examine the great administrative systems that govern bodily departments: skeletal, muscular, nervous, digestive, respiratory, cardiovascular, endocrine, lymphatic. Paleontologists burrow after the hard evidence of our ancestry. Sociologists, psychologists, reflexologists every species of -ologist manages to apply a theme to the body. Athletes sculpt themselves into works of art. Books address self-image, attractiveness, sexual performance, grooming, nourishment, exercise, the sinfulness of the body, and the possibility that your soul previously inhabited a different vehicle than the one that so preoccupies you now.

Because none of these approaches covers my particular interests, I follow my own itinerary in Adam's Navel. I journey down the human body male and female from head to toe, one region at a time. I take as my model a curious style of poetry that arose in France in the mid-sixteenth century. At the instigation of an exiled poet named Clément Marot, a group of prominent writers began composing blasons anatomiques poetic tributes to the individual parts of the female body. Such celebrations of body parts had their antecedents, including Petrarch's odes to the eyes of his beloved Laura in the 1300s and a salacious tribute to the breast by the later Baldassarre Olimpo da Sassoferrato. What was new was the French poets' attempt to apply this kind of admiring ode to body parts of lesser symbolic rank than the window of the soul or the nurturing bosom. Consequently the poets faced opposition. "What could be serious in the context of Laura's expressive, inspiring eyes," writes historian Nancy J. Vickers, "became absurd when applied to a random tooth or toe." Moreover, the blazons usually addressed the body part directly, a pose that sounds rather silly when speaking to the elbow. And yet, as Vickers explains, had Marot written a traditional homage to the entire female form, he would not have opened up such fertile and controversial poetic territory. Soon there were blazons in praise, laudatio, and counterblazons in blame, vituperatio, expressing the spectrum from adoration to revulsion.

In a sense Adam's Navel is an updated version of blazons and counterblazons, focusing largely (but not solely) on how the cultural history of the body reflects its natural history. Although I resist the kind of personification in which the blasonneurs indulged, I address our ambivalent regard for the vehicle comic and tragic, divine and mundane that carries our aspiring consciousness from cradle to grave. Our feelings about the body still range from laudatory to vituperative, as will be amply demonstrated when we zoom in for blazonlike close-ups and examine the many separate yet interdependent parts of the body. I like to think of them as the mutinous citizen describes them in Coriolanus:

The kingly-crowned head, the vigilant eye,
The counsellor heart, the arm our soldier,
Our steed the leg, the tongue our trumpeter. . . .

Actually I omit the counsellor heart. I keep my attention on the outward form of the body. "The great mystery of the world is not the invisible," quipped Oscar Wilde, "but the visible." Rather than exploring the hidden lungs and heart and bones, I look at the parts of the body that are visible daily to each of us the shape of the overall face, the mouth and ears and eyes and nose, the shoulders and arms and hands, the chest and breasts, the abdomen and navel and waist, the genitals, the buttocks, the legs and feet. These areas nicely map into three distinct regions, each reflecting a different aspect of our evolutionary history: the head and face, the arms and torso, the genitals and legs. These divisions are not merely reductive intellectual constructs. They represent evidence gathered from various sources the anatomy and physiology of contemporary humans, comparisons to our primate kin, and fossil remains of our extinct ancestors. Each of these areas of the body remembers its past differently. Each inspires different cultural responses. In this book they are discussed in three parts: "Headquarters," "The Weight of the World," and "A Leg to Stand On." These titles embody both the natural history of each particular region and a powerful metaphor inspired by it.

I chose the route downward from the head to the feet for two reasons. First, it appealed to me as narrative, a journey rather than a system. Then I remembered that each human being actually develops in the same progression. In a newborn infant, the first feature of the freshly minted body to come under the baby's control are the eye muscles. Gradually she achieves awareness of and control over the rest of her facial muscles and arrives at the popular milestone when deliberate smiling makes its appearance. Then the neck muscles come under her influence; her head no longer lolls to the side. Eventually the torso and trunk become part of the baby's sense of herself. Uncontrolled arms and finally even the legs are recruited to serve with the rest of the body, changing from clumsy appendages and chew toys into precisely manipulated hands and carefully placed feet.

Alas, many topics could not be included in this limited space. I omit, to name a few, teeth, breast augmentation, beards, weight gain and loss, the elbow and knee, and the huge topic of racism and skin color. During my journey down the body, however, certain landmarks demanded inclusion the vigilant eye, for example. Often I realized that I was writing this book the way that I like to travel, by stopping wherever something piques my curiosity. My foray into the splendid weirdness of the human toes, or my ode to the eyebrows, I mean as examples of the black-hole density of the marvelous packed into even the humblest of topics. In both cultural and natural history, no part of the body lacks a story.

© 2004 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Michael Sims has written about science and culture for newspapers and radio, and for magazines ranging from American Archaeology to Creative Loafing. He is also the author of Darwin's Orchestra: An Almanac of Nature in History and the Arts and Adam's Nave.