Monday, December 6, 2010

I are We

An excerpt from “Into the Night”:


It's like I'm in the seventh grade again. It was a year dominated by a dense, school-issued microbiology textbook. I spent my almost every evening laying belly-down in bed, flipping through obtuse images of ribosomes and mitochondria. It was my first struggle to comprehend something that I could not see, and it led to an obsession. Lysosomes, cytoplasms, DNA. I knew there was some fundamental truth waiting behind the curtain of unfamiliar terms. Even when I was in school and should have been learning about David Copperfield and two-plus-two-equals-four, I instead stared blankly out the window and thought about cell walls, instead. TV, once such a great pleasure, became a dull escape. The only thing that could distract me from this obsession was a walk through the woods. The sight of a lizard still excited me, as did peeking under rocks and watching the insects scurry away in dizzied alarm.

Incidentally, it was during one of these retreats that I found the truth I had been looking for. Chasing a rabbit through the underbrush, I scraped my arm against a wall of briar. A moment later, the rabbit had disappeared, and I was left alone in those woods, bleeding from three deep, parallel lines. It wasn't terribly painful, sure, but as I watched the blood seep out of my skin, tears pooled in my eyes, regardless. It was in that moment that I realized this blood wasn't really my own. It was thousands of tiny lives, just like the cells I had been studying. I could see them clearly in my mind's eye, a tide of crimson bodies, pulsing to the rhythm of their own nuclei. And as they left my skin, emerging into a bright, unwelcoming world, they were rapidly dying of exposure.

This was the realization that my mind seemed so keen on ignoring. My blood, my skin, my teeth, my tongue—they were all alive in their own right. They ate, drank, reproduced, and interacted. They had their own DNA, their own volition, their own need to survive. At the same time, they had learned to collaborate. They had joined forces like the people of a nation, and in helping each other, they helped themselves survive.

But if my body was a trillion independent lives, then what was I? For the longest time I had identified myself with a face in a mirror. But now, everything was them. Even my thoughts were just the whispers of several trillion neurons. And this left me wondering, maybe there was no 'I' at all. Maybe there was only 'we.' 'I' was just an avatar, an identity created to simplify the complexities of our true nature: not as an individual, but as a society of cells.


The point is simple. When you look at me, you see Timothy, a man in his late 20s with black hair and hazel eyes. You do not see trillions of cells working in independent tandem. At our level of perception, this is only natural. We literally cannot see what I am made of. That does not, however, change my underlying nature. What are the implications of being not an individual, but instead a pluralistic society of liver cells, blood cells, neurons, and more? Does this change my responsibility to myself? When I engage in behavior that unnecessarily damages my member cells, such as smoking or drinking Coca Cola, am I breaking a sort of microbial Social Contract?

2 comments:

  1. Yes, you are. (breaking the social contract I mean)

    Cancer is a rebellion of member cells against the coalition.

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  2. Ha! I have no idea who you are, but you have the right idea. If only tumors could seperate themselves from the body and start new organisms. Then, everyone could be happy.

    ReplyDelete