RESEARCH ABOUT THE BODY UNCOVERS AN ALIEN NATION

by Andrei Codrescu

The body is a struggle. When you're young you have to slap it to keep it down. Later, it starts to creak and fill out and you have to take it for checkups and walks and defumigate it. It's an instrument of pleasure operated by the brain that can turn into a torture instrument at the snap of a virus. Viruses surround the body in tight, military formations. Any chink in the armor and they are in, consuming the thing. Viruses are our well-organized, intelligent enemies, which is why we can never "go back to nature" as the hippies would like. Viruses come from outer space. They are invaders that have adapted nature; we are at war with them.

Now there is worse news. The body, it turns out, is a shelter for aliens. Each major organ, the liver, the heart, the lungs, etc., is an alien being from a different part of the universe. Each of them has a completely different constitution and purpose. The heart, for instance, has its own weather, including electrical storms, which mimics the weather of the planet it came from. At some point, these aliens decided to cooperate in order to survive and wrapped themselves into a sensitive skin with pain sensors for protection. They elected the brain to lead them and they set themselves in motion inside a so-called "human body."

We know perfectly well that when we carry this "human body" around, we are bearing the burden of something slightly strange. But we rarely suspect that we are shlepping around an alien collective. We rarely think of ourselves as an anthology of outer-space beings, an anthology of extraterrestrials.

Yet, this is what we are, according to the latest research of the SD (Samuel Dorfman) Institute in Phoenix, AZ, where scientists were able to record the "consciousness" of separate organs. The electrical and magnetic data from these organs were translated into images that revealed their home worlds. The liver, for instance, had an active memory and, one supposes, a certain nostalgia, for a dark purple planet where liver-like creatures moved around a soft city lit by two suns. The heart projected a world that could be the interior of the sun where hearts leapt through electrical clouds. The lungs were dreaming of a water planet where many lung-like creatures were gathered around oxygen-spewing geysers, drinking and singing.

Dr. Stile Hunt, a senior researcher at the SD Institute, theorized that the organs in our bodies are working toward the goal of returning to their home planets. The close cooperation among them, which gives us the illusion of owning our bodies, is only temporary. When the organs will work out precisely the manner of their return, they will leave the shell, shedding the protective skin. What happens to us then is still a matter of conjecture. In my opinion, we will be free but also sad. Whoever we are.

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Poet Andrei Codrescu is editor of the online magazine Exquisite Corpse. All Things Considered, Jan. 11, 2001, © 2001 National Public Radio, published with permission.