Sometimes we are just lost. Not
necessarily in the “real” or outside world, but internally. It may be, though,
that the Human Mind-Body comes equipped with its own built-in navigation system,
in the form of the modest bellybutton, which can help us to get back home again
if we just stand still long enough to pay attention.
The umbilicus, the navel, the
tummy-button… the (seemingly) commonplace bellybutton, is actually much less
anodyne than it might appear at first blush. There
are in fact many denizens of the bellybutton world. There are innies, which,
according to at least one
source, may serve a variety of interesting purposes ranging from storage
space (our own personal lint containment center…), to a handy way to tell twins
apart (who’d a thunk?), to a drinking glass (don’t ask). Then there are outties,
which also, according to the same source, express a diversity of
functionalities, from trampoline, to microphone, to doorbell. Just for the
record—it does seem rather clear that the hyperlinked source of this information
is not really in the business of information,
but rather of working through the ramifications of the 3rd grade imagination
and the one-track mind.
That said,
however, the belly button has not only been an inspiration for humor; it has
also been a source of controversy. In
the throes of newfangled evolutionism, for instance, the nineteenth century
understood that the bellybutton was central to understanding a great mystery
about Adam and Eve. If Adam
was like all men, and the Apostle Paul does remind us that Adam was our “father”
according to the flesh, then Adam must have had a bellybutton; but this would also
imply that he had a pre-history that is neither recorded for us nor suggested
in the biblical texts, and which in fact even flies in the face of the Edenic
narrative. Eve, of course, did not partake in divine equality and is therefore
let off the hook; she could not have had a bellybutton of her own to
contemplate because she was drafted from the rib of Adam. Unless of course she
did. Imagine the nightmare for the Renaissance artists, who must have struggled
with the idea of how to depict an Adam and Eve who looked like our human
ancestors, but who were not, logically speaking, inalienably endowed by their
Creator with all that our post-natal humanness implies.
And then,
of course, there is also the controversial viewpoint expressed by the Greek
comedic poet Aristophanes who, in Plato’s Symposium,
reached the epitome of his humoristic glory, and erotic insight, with his discourse
on Eros. Aristophanes imagines original man as a sort of one-eyed jack, only plumper,
joined in the middle with heads on both ends, who was prone to insolence toward
and undue aggravation of the Gods. Says Aristophanes: when
the Gods reached the end of Their collective rope with these tiresome human trouble-makers,
Zeus directed Apollo to slice them all in half, creating a bunch of one-eyed,
one-legged folk, each fully sexed and hopping around looking for their other
half to rub up against, but, failing that, certainly willing to rub up against
just about everything else. But this was only the beginning, of course, because
the Greek Gods also seemed to be artistic in Their creative problem-solving
with respect to humans (the problem was how and where to tuck in all the skin
left over from the cutting and slicing of the original human); so reads the
Jowett translation:
Apollo was also
bidden to heal their wounds and compose their forms. So he gave a turn to the
face and pulled the skin from the sides all over that which in our language is
called the belly, like the purses which draw tight, and he made one mouth at
the centre, which he fastened in a knot (the same which is called the navel);
he also moulded the breast and took out most of the wrinkles, much as a
shoemaker might smooth leather upon a last; he left a few, however, in the
region of the belly and navel, as a memorial of the primeval state.
And so the knotty (naughty?) history of the curious bellybutton
began its meandering journey through the world of men.
The physical bellybutton, however, this
very material center of our bodies, is not exactly the subject of this
Reflection. Rather, what really interests us is the immaterial bellybutton, which constitutes the internal center, the North Star of our-Self. We reflect in
metaphor, of course, for the Self is not precisely a thing, nor does it “have”
precisely a center. There is no true center of the Self beyond the physical location
of our bodies standing behind their very-physical bellybuttons at any given
moment. Our Self is not defined by some “What”
that is at our core, but rather by all the stuff that moves directionally away
from, or toward, the locus
“where” this body (center, ego, self)
lives… everything is going in every direction to or from this locus, this ambulatory
GPS point in the center. Yeats saw this metaphor-idea as a general truth about
the world, which also necessarily tells the story of our bodies – that things
fall apart; there is no center, and even if there were, it still would not hold.
The model
for this idea of the immaterial
bellybutton, which was understood originally to be the bellybutton of the
world, comes from highest antiquity, from the Greek omphalos, which was found in Delphi at the oracle of Apollo.
Plutarch tells us that Epimenides of
Crete, sage and epic poet (early 5th century B.C.), “refuted the [original
mythological] story that eagles or swans setting out from the ends of the earth
met in the middle at Delphi, the so-called Omphalos): There was no Omphalos, either
in the center of the earth or of the sea. If any there be, it is visible to the
gods, not visible to mortals.”
This concept went on to have a very
fruitful career in the history of ideas with Mircea Eliade, the famous philosopher
of religion, who, in a very Jungian theory, identified the immaterial omphalos of the world with man’s
collective unconsciousness. This is not inconsistent with the greater Greek
worldview, however, which saw the material world, the earth, as a physical type
of dwelling, a physis, but the
immaterial world that is created by the interpreting mind (Descartes’ later imaginando or the imagination), as an intelligible
kind of dwelling, the kosmos, the
world “seen,” then organized and tidied up by human thought and language.
So why are we interested in reflecting
on internal bellybuttons? Perhaps just to give ourselves some perspective so
that the next time we are throwing stones into a pond in our external dwelling in order to watch the
concentric rings, we remember that with our mind’s
eye we are actually also “seeing” that in those very physical rings the
metaphor of our internal
dwelling-life is also being writ, but just in a visible language. When we
realize that Our Life, both material and immaterial, happens in the midst of
concentric rings moving out away from us, then we also begin to understand certain
organic relational truths – that things that are closer to us are inevitably more
relevant to us, and why it is also and necessarily true that things in our more
remote rings “feel” less relevant to us. To be sure, things remote to us are
not in and of themselves less important, they are just ex-centric to us – more
removed from our center, further away, less immediately imposing.
It
is also important for us to keep our Internal
Bellybuttons turned on and tuned in for all sorts of relationships
(personal, interpersonal, and other), because relationships are, well,
relational or perspectival. There is no such thing as neutrality. Points of
view, both for the philosopher and the psychologist, begin with the Self/I;
then they expand to include the immediately surrounding environment.
The bellybutton, both as a material and
then as an intellectual location of the individual, allows us to pinpoint our
position within the cluster of relationships and gridlines that crisscross the map
of our Life, to determine where exactly the Self is with respect both to the earth
(physis), and to the world fashioned
by our understanding (kosmos). On this very special map, however, there is
no true and unmoving North Star; there is only us standing alone at a very odd Corner
where the earth and the world intersect. This is the intersection of the Lost
& Found, where sometimes we find the Self we seek, and sometimes we lose
it; but the truth is that all the
possibilities of our life meet and crisscross at that Corner.
The
bellybutton is the fulcrum of the individual’s mooring, the starting point at
the interior of the circles from which he is able to see his world, and then to
create it. The bellybutton therefore is as interesting as it is important. It
is interesting because of the onion-skinned
nature of our reality, which means that according to our Will and Whim we can
flip, or invert, the various layers of interpretation and meaning. This is one
reason why Art, in all of its forms and manifestations, intrigues us so;
because both conceptually and materially, Art asks of us that we should apprehend
truly, that we should actually see
both with our body’s eyes as well as with our mind’s eye, the world as
transformed, as turned on its head. Human perception of the material world is
essentially a bellybutton type of experience, because it is centered upon and framed
around the mind’s activity of reality-construction.
We
live in a rather curious moment of human history, a moment when the world has
become small. The big, wide ‘World’ has been transformed into global village,
which in turn demands from us that we very deliberately invert from the Self
outwards, both philosophically and psychologically, the normative and natural
order of embracing our world … where we are asked to include the Self rather as
an integral piece of the surrounding world… where we are asked to consider a
dissolution of the Self into the interests of the whole. Welcome to the Lost
& Found.
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