The Long Intestine Of Life

From the Ted Smart Visual Dictionary

There's an old joke about sausages. If a sausage is just meat stuffed into an intestine, what do you call the man stuffing his face? When you eat a sausage, you become the sausage. You're just putting it right back into a different intestine. It's one big recursive intestine, going back to the dawn of life.

Intestines and anuses are the plumbing of life, which we don't plumb too deeply, beyond laughing at the sounds they make. The intestinal ecosystem is, in fact, a world unto itself. If you truly spilled your guts, you'd find enough surface area to play a racquet sport; some sources say a full tennis lawn, others half a badminton court. There is, indeed, a flurry of activity in your intestines, trillions of beings dwell inside. We truly do contain multitudes, not just voices in our heads but gurgling microbes in our midsections.

The human body preserves an aquatic and anaerobic ecosystem like the ancient oceans, before photosynths caused runaway climate change the first time. Every human avatar reproduces an atavistic 'safe space' for ancient gods, as you could reasonably call effectively immortal bacteria. We are each a refuge for the anaerobes genocided in the Great Oxygen Holocaust of 3.5 bya (never forget). They live on in our guts and butts, which create their own climate. It's entirely plausible that all human culture is just a container for bacterial culture, that we are just spaceships for microbes to walk about on land. Indeed, if you measure the DNA and RNA inside and outside your body, human being is a rank minority. All of your hopes, dreams, and fears are really just engineering tricks to keep the spaceship walking, eating, pooping, and reproducing; ie to keep the gravy train running. When you die the passengers just board a new one, through insects and other intestines. If you look closely and unsentimentally, that's how the sentient sausage is made.

If you look at the internal anatomy of most animals—from sea urchins to spiders to rats to cats to you and me—it's mostly the same packaging. I have been looking at this because the neighbors were throwing out an old kids Visual Dictionary and I've been reading it (shout out மிமி பாடி). This old Dorling Kindersly book has internal diagrams of innumerable creatures that all, after a while, look the same. It's interesting for a while and then boring, because it's all the same picture. The same intestines wound in different ways. We're obviously made in the same sausage factory, for the same reason.

Almost every visible lifeform takes the same form, a long tube containing and protecting a controlled environment, either just a sac or a more ingenious sac called an intestine. I was looking at a huge variety of animals, and there's not much internal variety. It's like looking at different types of cars, with different internal combustion engines, all indiscernible to an outsider. Indeed, in Sinhala the word for hunger is fire in the belly, as in internal combustion. We say bada gini, meaning fire god (Agni) in the stomach. The sacred and the profane, the truth really speaks to us from both ends if we listen.

This mortal life we consider so precious and special, we're really just a ride for immortal microbes to hitch and move on. Every form we consider life are really just cars for microbes, and we don't consider the microbes at all. But does a car consider its humans? To any alien looking down on our world, it certainly looks like cars run the place. Roads occupy most of the real estate and they literally run over humans. Appearances can be deceiving, and human superiority is really just self-deception. Human arrogance isn't a sign of actual superiority, it's just a superiority complex borne of ignorance. Human arrogance is a feature not a bug, it is—in fact—a feature for bugs. Our vain belief in our solitary existence in fact preserves an entire ecosystem in our guts and butts. Our deep motivation to not die keeps trillions of higher beings living comfortably in the deep of us. Bacteria even gets us to take them into space, thinking we're the serious species while pooping into a vacuum cleaner. We are not a serious species at all.

All of human culture is just a fart in the wind compared to the bacterial culture which makes us human fart uncontrollably. Every fart is a deep sign that we are not in control and never have been. We can't even control our bowels, what are we even talking about, controlling the world? God tells us the truth with trumpets and we just laugh at it. Joke's on us.

Humans are just pedestrians to bacteria like horses are equestrians to humans. Both man and horse are used by other creatures to walk about on land, we are all beasts of burden. If you look at both horse and human, they're just different adaptations of the same intestinal architecture. There's no greater difference between the two than between Ferrari and BYD. Just because we “Build Your Dreams” we think we're special, but how do we know the dreams aren't building us? As the reluctant sage Zhuangzi said, in the third person,

Once Zhuang Zhou dreamt he was a butterfly, fluttering about joyfully just as a butterfly would. He followed his whims exactly as he liked and knew nothing about Zhuang Zhou. Suddenly he awoke, and there he was, the startled Zhuang Zhou in the flesh. He did not know if Zhou had been dreaming he was a butterfly, or if a butterfly was now dreaming it was Zhou. Surely, Zhou and a butterfly count as two distinct identities! Such is what we call the transformation of one thing into another. (2:49)

Humans are just a bunch of sausages thinking we're sages. But he who eats the sausage becomes the sausage, this is the eternal law. Creation is just one big sausage factory, with different casings for different use cases, that's all. We think we're superior cause we eat and beat our kin, but we share the same design and ultimate destiny, Allah shows us enough signs before we reach the destination. Pleasing life reminds us of disgusting death every day, providing both memento mori and memento lavatory. We soil ourselves every day before turning into soil permanently. Everybody shits but only humans think we are the shit. I could go on, the signs are everywhere, I am but a humble messenger of the sacred within the profane, a philosopher of farts. We should know humility from our daily humiliation in the toilet, but we laugh at the idea. But he who laughs last laughs hardest, and the bacteria eventually devour us all.

As the sage of rage Logan Roy said, “You bust in here, guns in hand, and now you find they've turned to fucking sausages. You talk about love?” Indeed, all talk about love, all sublimated expressions of love as art, what does it mean? You go out for dinner, you date, you mate, you get married into one flesh, farting into the same sofa cushions. Then you reproduce another sausage link in the chain and become part of its digestive process for decades. It's all just a long line of spaceships stretching out from the primordial ocean, preserving the exact conditions for anaerobes to walk about on land. If you look at internal anatomies in a random kids book, it's all just variations on a theme. If you see how the sausage is made, we obviously come from one sausage factory, from one creator if you will. It's quite ingenious, really. Djinns and Agni speak of the same phenomenon. Billions of species live and die, but trillions of microbes keep living through every mass extinction. They find some temperature controlled vehicle that delivers nutrients automatically and hitch a ride on it. As the king said in King Learjet (Succession), “Why? Because it works… Oh go on, go on, fuck off, you nosy fucking pedestrians.”