LITMIR.BIZ

      7 Taking Pains

      The soul is our capacity for pain.

      —Marina Tsvetayeva

      Going by human testimony alone, one would have to conclude that the chief reason behind alien abductions, the main impetus for their taking the trip and the trouble, is biological. According to the accounts that inspire summer movie fare and dominate the tabloids, aliens are fascinated by what makes us tick—or rather, by what makes us slosh, secrete, and expend ourselves on this out-of-the-way planet of ours. Thus it is principally for scientific intimacies that they snatch, transport, or absorb us aboard. Folks who claim to have been diagnosed and discarded by visitors from other worlds describe abductors that vary in height, hide, and hue. Their captors are as likely to amble as to ooze about their spaceships, whose interiors reportedly range in décor from stark Mondrian geometry to the sumptuousness of the Playboy mansion. Their communicative efforts run the gamut from mental telepathy to barnyard squabble to a din reminiscent of the mingled ring tones of cell users on the floor of the stock exchange. But whether they do their probing with paws, tentacles, or titanium rods, make no mistake: it’s our orifices they’re after.

      Verifying Hamlet’s nightmare, things rank and gross in our nature possess them merely. So as to sample our functions and our fluids, they insert and extract, siphon and scrape, filch, defile, and file away the blood, capture the excrescence and possibly the odd gland, upload the physical data, the scruff, the sludge, and the dung. By their reasoning, anatomy is all there is that matters about us. They do not sacrifice light-years to get our takes on the Poincare Conjecture or the designated hitter. They do not travel all this way to clarify foreplay, French cuisine, or Finnegans Wake, nor to elucidate punk culture, minimalist art, or the subjunctive. They have no interest in our sit-coms, our politics, or our gods. As to why we quail in fear or hunker down in love, forget it. Subtler concerns are for the sublunary—they are content to analyze our organs and glean our meat. Whatever shape aliens take, and whatever brilliance you’d infer from their getting to Earth at all, rumor has it that they are basically buzzards colluding over a carcass. They are anally fixated, intestinally tracked. When they come, they come for our guts.

      If you want to satisfy alien curiosity about human beings, you won’t have to share corporate secrets or surrender your soul. Their penetrations are literal, surgical, and will not be stayed by protests that there is more to you than meets the polygonal eye (if eye it is that confronts you). In this, more or less everybody who has fallen afoul of aliens and managed to return from their extraterrestrial incursions concurs. Argue between your agonies that you are altogether more complex than the gelatinous clinical staff can adduce through technology copied from the back lot of Industrial Light and Magic. Protest that people are more profound than their plumbing, that it is not enough to scoop out our slop to reckon the sum of us, that their lack of further curiosity about humanity insults us as much as their instruments do: those cries fall on deaf ears (if ears are what those alleged vegetal protuberances are). Say that the body may be the citadel of the self, but that architecture is hardly the whole. The heart contains a legacy of romantic connotations centuries long; the brain is the armature of a mind. None of that blather affects their conviction that you are your body only, and the point of the body is to invert it to get at its wet meld, much the way you delve past a lobster’s shell to get at the dinner inside. By your prostate, not your poetry, will they know you. Metabolism, not metaphysics, most deeply intrigues. No need to bandy philosophies, just bend over.