overseas tourist boards, who would take snapshots on their behalf for a modest fee and send them back. This would save prospective visitors a good deal of time, money and painful hobbling.
One of the many paradoxes of the United States is that it is both fleshly and ascetic, worldly and otherworldly. The nation is as metaphysical as it is materialistic. The will which drives you to accumulate goods also detaches you from them. It does so because all such goods are finite, and therefore imperfect. If the will gorges itself upon them, it does so with its gaze fixed steadfastly on infinity. There is something profoundly religious about consumer capitalism, which is one reason why the United States is among the most godly places on earth, as well as one of the most profane.
The balance between engagement and detachment, however, is a hard one to strike. In the States, it tends to tip on the one side towards total immersion, as people triumphantly consume seventy-eight hot dogs in two minutes flat, and on the other side towards a withdrawal from the flesh altogether. In a familiar narcissism, the body becomes an object you carry around with you like some priceless, sickeningly fragile vase. What to put inside it becomes as fraught an issue as what to put in your will. Many of the well-off eat sparingly, which is the only bond they have with the poor. You care for your body not because you love it, but as you might attend to some temperamental beast which is capable of turning on you and savaging you at any moment. There are those who react to being offered an aspirin as though they are being handed a tarantula.
Eating and drinking are acts of transgression, as the purity of one’s inner space risks being polluted by a messy material world. The body acts as the symbolic threshold between the two. Poised ambiguously between the two realms, it is fully at home in neither. The body is an ambiguous zone in any case. If it is what binds us to others, it is also what walls us off from them. You can let it run to seed, secure in the knowledge that the real you is buried deep within it (“What matters is what’s inside you”). Or you can punish and purify it by running thirty miles a day, converting it into a steel-hard instrument of your will. Either way, the true self is disembodied. It has no truck with the degenerate flesh. The real you is either so deep within the body as to be no part of it, or it manipulates it from a lofty distance.
On Purity and Poison
At worst, a fear of transgression can result in the misery and occasional tragedy of eating disorders, though there are many other ways of accounting for such ailments. It is not, of course, that all those afflicted by such disorders are possessed by the manic will. It is rather that, as Freud knew, there is a psychopathology of everyday life, in which the behaviour of those who are ill and unhappy serves to write large the malaise of a whole civilisation. Western civilisation as a whole has a pathological relation to the material world, of which food and the body are palpable signs. The metaphor of invasion is to be found everywhere in America, from eating to Al Qaeda. An American physician I know was taught in medical school that the way to make real money was to “invade the body.” What the British know as burglary is sometimes called home invasion in the United States.
That Americans are overweight is a stale cliché, but it is perhaps less hackneyed to note that one reason for this is their parochialism. Many of them have no idea that the planet is not populated by people just like themselves. Nor could some of them fit into the aircraft seats that might allow them to find out. Admittedly, it is not as though they would instantly shed a hundred pounds if they were to discover that everyone in Armenia or Montenegro is as skinny as Victoria Beckham. Even so, the fact that the United States constitutes a whole universe of its own may make people less troubled by the
One of the many paradoxes of the United States is that it is both fleshly and ascetic, worldly and otherworldly. The nation is as metaphysical as it is materialistic. The will which drives you to accumulate goods also detaches you from them. It does so because all such goods are finite, and therefore imperfect. If the will gorges itself upon them, it does so with its gaze fixed steadfastly on infinity. There is something profoundly religious about consumer capitalism, which is one reason why the United States is among the most godly places on earth, as well as one of the most profane.
The balance between engagement and detachment, however, is a hard one to strike. In the States, it tends to tip on the one side towards total immersion, as people triumphantly consume seventy-eight hot dogs in two minutes flat, and on the other side towards a withdrawal from the flesh altogether. In a familiar narcissism, the body becomes an object you carry around with you like some priceless, sickeningly fragile vase. What to put inside it becomes as fraught an issue as what to put in your will. Many of the well-off eat sparingly, which is the only bond they have with the poor. You care for your body not because you love it, but as you might attend to some temperamental beast which is capable of turning on you and savaging you at any moment. There are those who react to being offered an aspirin as though they are being handed a tarantula.
Eating and drinking are acts of transgression, as the purity of one’s inner space risks being polluted by a messy material world. The body acts as the symbolic threshold between the two. Poised ambiguously between the two realms, it is fully at home in neither. The body is an ambiguous zone in any case. If it is what binds us to others, it is also what walls us off from them. You can let it run to seed, secure in the knowledge that the real you is buried deep within it (“What matters is what’s inside you”). Or you can punish and purify it by running thirty miles a day, converting it into a steel-hard instrument of your will. Either way, the true self is disembodied. It has no truck with the degenerate flesh. The real you is either so deep within the body as to be no part of it, or it manipulates it from a lofty distance.
On Purity and Poison
At worst, a fear of transgression can result in the misery and occasional tragedy of eating disorders, though there are many other ways of accounting for such ailments. It is not, of course, that all those afflicted by such disorders are possessed by the manic will. It is rather that, as Freud knew, there is a psychopathology of everyday life, in which the behaviour of those who are ill and unhappy serves to write large the malaise of a whole civilisation. Western civilisation as a whole has a pathological relation to the material world, of which food and the body are palpable signs. The metaphor of invasion is to be found everywhere in America, from eating to Al Qaeda. An American physician I know was taught in medical school that the way to make real money was to “invade the body.” What the British know as burglary is sometimes called home invasion in the United States.
That Americans are overweight is a stale cliché, but it is perhaps less hackneyed to note that one reason for this is their parochialism. Many of them have no idea that the planet is not populated by people just like themselves. Nor could some of them fit into the aircraft seats that might allow them to find out. Admittedly, it is not as though they would instantly shed a hundred pounds if they were to discover that everyone in Armenia or Montenegro is as skinny as Victoria Beckham. Even so, the fact that the United States constitutes a whole universe of its own may make people less troubled by the
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