~by David Aiken~
Sometimes we are just lost. Not
necessarily in the “real” or outside world, but internally—in our thinking. It
would seem, 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 (better not to ask).
Then there are outies, which also, according to the same source, express a
diversity of functionalities, from trampoline, to microphone, to doorbell. Just
for the record: it certainly seems more than obvious that the hyperlinked source
of this information is not really in the business of information about the bellybutton, but rather of working through all
of the ramifications of the third-grade imagination and the one-track mind on
this subject.
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| Albrecht Dürer Adam & Eve (1504) |
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. According to Aristophanes’ account of things: 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, and, 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 present Reflection.
Rather,
what really interests us is the immaterial
bellybutton, which constitutes our internal
center, and acts as the North Star set in the firmament of our-Selves. 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.
Many
philosophers have had this insight, from Heraclitus to Plato to Nietzsche. But
the 20th century Irish poet Yeats showed great good sense, and also true
philosophical insight, when he poetically articulated this metaphor-idea as a general
truth about the world. For it is an insight that tells us the really-real story
of our bodies – that things fall apart; there is no center, and even if there
were, as Yeats famously versed in The
Second Coming, it still would not hold.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
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| Omphalos |
The prototype 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 discovered by archeologists in Delphi at the oracle of Apollo. The Omphalos represents the original Axis
Mundi, which is not a materiality of any sort, but rather an invisible, a
supposed axis that permits us to align and therefore to orient strata of meanings
about the World.
According
to Kathleen Freeman (in Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers, Harvard University Press, 1983),
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.”
The concept of the Omphalos went on to have a very fruitful
career in the history of Western ideas with Mircea Eliade, the Franco-Romanian philosopher
of religion, who identified the immaterial Omphalos
of the world with man’s collective unconsciousness. This Jungian twist is not necessarily
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 or noetic kind of dwelling, i.e., the kosmos, the world first “seen,” then tidied
up and organized by human thought and language.
So why are we
interested in reflecting on internal bellybuttons, on the axis mundi condensed to fit the individual’s inner cosmos? 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 visible language for our eyes and
ears. When we realize that our life, both material and immaterial, happens in
the midst of concentric rings moving out and 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 or axis, further away, and
therefore less immediately imposing. This is not some new truth about human
imagination that needed to wait on a contemporary anthropologist to be
discovered (cf. Mary Douglas, Thinking in
Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition, Yale University Press, 2007).
It is important that
we 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 environments.
As
both material and then as an intellectual location of the individual, the bellybutton
allows us to pinpoint our position within the cluster of relationships and
gridlines that crisscross the map of our Life; it helps us to determine where
exactly our-Self is with respect both to the earth (physis), and to the world fashioned by our understanding (kosmos). On this very special interior map, however, there is no true and
unmoving North Star. There is only us standing alone at a very odd omphalos-shaped corner where Earth and World
intersect. This is the intersection of History’s 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 wayward Corner.
 |
| Omphalos |
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 from the Self outwards we very deliberately invert, both
philosophically and psychologically, the normative and natural order of
embracing our world. This World-Moment seems to be inviting us to rethink the Self,
not as an entirely separate reality, but rather as an integral piece of the
surrounding world. We are asked to consider a dissolution of the Self into the
interests of the whole. Welcome to the Lost & Found.
(Reprised from an
original essay posted 051212).
References:
·
William
Butler Yeats (1865-1939), The Second Coming.
·
http://www.dilekkutzli.com/omphalos.html; cf. Joseph R. Shafer, Literary Identity in the Omphalos Periplus
(DE: LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, 2011)
Further Phrontisterion reading:
