Lungs
'Lungs' works well as in introduction to microanimismy thinking. It's an older piece, from 2022, that I still really like.
Listen to me well. This story is about lungs. There are two lungs, and they represent the exact amount of lung needed for a possessor of lungs to go about their day-to-day life. Biology works as a ratio, not a tally. Bilateral symmetry is an important hallmark of mammalian physiology: hemispheres of the brain, lobes of the liver. If you can figure out the quantity of the type of tissue you need does it really matter how that tissue is organized? Clearly, yes. If it didn’t, our liver, spleen, pancreas, and all nature of viscera would be copied from one side to the other. We could be neatly spatchcocked, slit down the front and opened like a book to reveal a glistening mirror image of ourselves.
But symmetry is arguably, mostly, a mathematical tool, and perfection doesn’t really exist even in mathematics. Biology is messy and dynamic, it’s a many-eyeballed angel in as much as, if you saw it, for real, you’d probably throw up on it and spend the rest of the evening apologizing. Symmetry is a helpful tool to a mathematician in the same way a hydrogen molecule is to a chemist. Biology happens, and observes. Makes notes. Picks the best thing. Tries again. Biology is very far from symmetrical, or perfect. And biology can be fickle. Two lungs, bifurcated, to make room for the heart and the other unsplittables. Lungs are an open system, they’re exposed to the whole wide world, and it’s quite a marketplace in there. This is true for all lungs — your lungs, my lungs. The ocean as lungs. The rainforest as lungs.
Lungs are gatekeepers of the incidental, and they remove ancillary materials on a wave of mucus. Inter-kingdom crosstalk moderates the immune system in these damp places: human, virus, bacterium, fungus. These microbial conversations are not a chorus. Often, there’s interference, and suppression. The mesenteric lymphatic system allows the members of these groups to move between the lungs and the guts, and vice versa, either bodily or metabolically, and that’s how we develop a gut-lung axis. There’s a lot to consider when comparing the consciousness with which we pick items to put in our mouths to eat, versus time spent thinking about what is draw in through the nose, the mouth, by virtue of breath alone.
There’s a hypocrisy of consumption there, in food vs. air. Possibly, it’s shared by all things in possession of lungs and a stomach. Breathing is automatic, unless you think too hard about it. Then, it becomes something else. It becomes a little less accessible, you get a little bit closer to the edge of what it means to be an alive thing. The air can betray you, if you have a sensitive system, if you happen to be participating in an epidemiological event motivated by a respiratory pathogen. Or is the air of other humans who betray us? The air can betray the microbial world! Air pollution can produce flavors of oxygen which render microflora deaded. For every barrier we can construct, there’s another alive thing that can climb over it. Barriers of vulnerability, barriers of mucus.
This feels inherently non-consensual. Breathing is necessary but it invites, through circumstance, dangers that might filter through the entirety of our bodies, through a network of signals and structures almost entirely mediated by microbial worlds. Microbial worlds that may or may not have knowledge of their host beyond a specific kind of cell, a specific interface. For every host who has ever wondered “does my microbiome care about me? Do the smalls wish the best for me? Will they help me?” — it’s a big deal to consider that of the many kazillions of bacteria, fungi and viruses that romp and colonize them, the vast majority probably doesn’t even recognize that the host exists as a complete entity.
Pause, and consider how it feels, to weigh that out in your hand.
Mostly, the biological things that offer us bodily aggression and harm, do not know us or see us. Mostly, the things that keep the world turning, and alive things alive — do not know the things that stay alive, they do not see the things that stay alive. So how does that feel, and how does it feel to consider that is absolutely doesn’t matter whether the hosts are known or not? Does it matter if we know the gods, does it matter if they know us? Certainly, if you’re lucky, the smalls are going to continue to be the smalls, administering all their myriad tasks and activities, whether you know them or not. Is this true of the gods? It makes sense that if we seek a relationship with the gods, we can experience a far more enriched and multifaceted connection with a deity that we make offerings to and have conversations with. We also may have deities in our lives or traditions which require attention, and will let you know about it if that requirement is not met. So, really, the smalls demonstrate more practically the quality of benevolence here. They will carry on digesting grass for cows and making vitamin K in our guts, but if we ignore our altar we might well fall out of favor with the being who lives on it, or even worse, experience their anger.
Gosh. Is this what worship does to a person?
There are so many universes in the biological realm. There is about 5.5 quadrillion tons of air in the world, and 90% of that is in the troposphere, the layer of the atmosphere closest to the surface of the Earth. The area above the mixed layer (directly next to the Earth’s surface in comparison), is expected by scientists to act as a sink for microbial life. That’s an extreme volume of microbial universe, up in the sky, that we can’t really be 100% sure exists or not because it’s at the limits of our technology to go take a look.
Perhaps that’s the single strongest demonstration we have to date that the smalls are analogous to God.
Regardless, that’s a lot of microbial universe, and it’s different from all the other microbial universes we might be aware of, because, it lives far above the surface of the Earth. Still related, though, to the ones who gather at lower levels, to the ones the hosts pull into their lungs. Related, because everything is related. Further godlike, some microbes in the atmosphere exhibit defined circadian rhythms and diel cycles, in a direct relationship with the sun. As the climate crisis progresses, the sky smalls will travel higher and therefore disperse across the globe father than before. More relationships will be built. These ones, close to God, represent the current most likely biological boundary between solid ground and space.
Close to Ground, we have the relatives, the ones who make the weather and come to the hosts, sometimes. Another microbial universe, a delicate amalgam of that terrestrial/celestial striation which is connected to itself by delicate strands and tendrils of evolution, and spatial and temporal dependability. Attached to itself, but also to the one that came before it. Could we ever know how the microbial sky was constructed? Ground up, or heavens down? It’s difficult to imagine that these two universes were ever isolated, that there was a defined coalescence event. Even in mathematically modeled microbial ecosystems, we can see that isolated communities recruit from each other — crucially, mostly, during times of weakness. The success, ongoing aliveness, of a given unit in this community is often, then, determined by other members of the community: dominant members can recruit the rare members of their group (heavens down), or, be recruited by them (ground up). But one universe can only be strong if the other is weak. Sort of puts a new spin on that notion of benevolence we spoke about earlier.
Closer yet to ground, the ones that hosts with lungs breathe in on a daily basis, a standing arrangement. Still a universe external to us, because lungs are an open environment. I could thread a piece of leather ribbon into your nose all the way into your lungs before I met a wall. Many of those ones will stay external, in large part to the chandeliers of mucus adorning the respiratory tract, providing hydration and protection. This mucus is the first interaction that our third universe has with a possible host, and mucus is complex — it mediates infectivity and attachment, and is multi-layered and peppered with proteins and sugars. Mucins, in particular, play key roles in infection, including immune response, mediation of lung injuries, all the way up to your chance of croaking from a bacterial infection.
While these surfaces act as border control for pathogens, the lungs are also home to a variety of commensal microbial life, and this is our fourth universe for the day. Those who call the lungs their home, or at least, those who understand this particular cellular and chemical environment to be where they belong, where they can do what they need to do. Again, this universe is connected to itself, and all previous universes, through thistledown spines of phylogeny and physical space. Connected to itself, all others, but also our internal universes, through the lungs, and affecting all processes therein. Which part of the host does oxygen not touch? You get the idea.
The personal relationship that lungs have with the microbial planes exists, at the same time, all the way up in the sky, where it cannot be interrogated, and in the exact, precise moment of inhalation, which becomes mundane when things are going according to plan. Here is a thread from the very edge of space, the edge of explainable, which we can follow into our own inner spaces. The biology here is a little more explainable, but mysterious nonetheless. And, immutable. Lungs must breathe, or they die, and the owner of the lungs die as a consequence. If the owner of the lungs is part of a tradition that understands life to be participatory, they might believe that they agreed to having lungs, and having to breathe, before they were born. Otherwise, one didn’t agree to it or ask for it — breath, that is.
However. The evolution of lungs was agreed to on the owner of lung’s behalf over endless seas of time, and much of that deal was brokered by microorganisms. Can you imagine the conspiracy of Life and Being Alive that went into the production of lungs — physically and emotionally designed to make room for the heart, who is, of course, the main collaborator of breath and breathing. The ancestors of extant smalls used their dead languages to pollute the earth with oxygen, which was the first step. But oxygen is a poison which damages DNA, and so sexual reproduction became a thing to mitigate that damage. The smalls took up residence in the cells of the bigs and complexity developed, largeness developed, specialized tissues and organs developed. The bacterial and viral composition of the soils and waters changed, and those who previously lived in volcanoes and swamps moved to the bottom of the sea, for the comfort and structure of hellish pressure and temperatures. Or, they simply faded away, were deselected.
The powerful, magical mysteries of Being Alive were bartered and gingerly designed on your behalf over the course of millions of years, and the smalls started it. They guided, through the echoes of those years, every fluid and tissue of your body, all the tissues and fluids of your ancestors, and the body of the trees and the rocks. Sometimes carefully, sometimes violently. The records of that are present in the genome of mostly every thing that has a genome today. This process continues: the smalls whisper secrets and solutions to all of their hosts. And when you fill the air, the whole world is your host. When you make your prayers to Osun at the river, the smalls live there, and they hear what you say. Your prayers are carried up to heaven by Igun, the vulture. But Igun carries the smalls on his wings, on his feathers, Igun uses the smalls to eat and be well. When you greet the sun in the morning, and all the holy beings of the sun, the smalls are there, luxuriating. When you receive communion, body and blood, you take in the smalls too. Jesus was not sterile. Who is carried in on the scent of incense and wood smoke?
An evolutionary conspiracy of Being Alive. The definition of which, of course, is the capacity to be dead. Lungs are a favored route for death, and the diseases that the smalls can being are familiar to many. Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO, removes the carbon dioxide in the blood and mechanically adds oxygen — bypassing the vagaries of influenza, systemic infection, even SARS-CoV-2. How long can we bypass the lungs? How long can we burn the rainforests? How badly do you need your dark, dark red blood re-oxygenated back to bright pillar box red?
So, breathe. Breathe in all the way from the top of the sky. You summon the divine with every draw, and maybe you didn’t even know that before. Breathe in from the very edge of space. Pull that celestial notion into you, use your belly. Each time you breathe in, visualize that part of the sky, and its welcome contents, coming incrementally closer to you. On your breath out, perhaps it moves away again — but not very far. It’s mostly coming closer, you’re invoking it! It’s a ratio, not a count. How much of that lofty world is close to you, compared to how much isn’t? Two steps forward, one step back.
Meet the smalls in this part of the sky — they’re fascinating, Icarus people. They live closer to the sun than any other person on the planet, and they’re good at it. They’re radiation tolerant, they dance and eddy over turbulences and temperatures. Introduce them to the smalls who live lower than them, shit, you could take them all the way to the bottom of the ocean if pressure is your thing. But maybe, you can just observe, with each deep breath (keep breathing) how the Icarus smalls and the surface-level smalls greet one another.
“Oh”, they say (maybe). “There you are. What’s it like to know the sun so well?”.
“It’s how we live, it’s not even a thing”, (they might respond). “What’s it like to know the earth so well, and all the alive things that rest on it?”
“It’s how we live, it’s not even a thing. Maybe it was a thing in the beginning.”
Breathe. Breathe in all the way from the middle of the sky. Use your belly, use your guts. Meet the earthly ones, the ones that are familiar to airplanes and snowflakes. Maybe they would ask you what you want, maybe they would tell you, that this exploration is an intrusion. Maybe they would just be curious to see you up there, carried by your breathing. Maybe they would invite you to live up there with them, and that might be tempting but altogether impossible.
“What’s it like to live in the sky?” You might ask.
“It’s how we live, it’s not even a thing.” There’s a darkness at the heart of that response, which might not be ours to know. But breathe, keep breathing, down to the surface where you always breathe. Use your stomach, use your ribs. The air is filling your lungs on both sides, symmetrical, perfect and not perfect. What does perfect need to be, other than maintenance of life? As you breathe, you may wish to consider who it riding that breath, who is barred entry. Breathe out. How long does a human breath last for a virus? Half a life? A whole life? A whole death? That depends entirely on whether or not a virus is permitted to create more of itself. There are lots of different versions of time in the lungs.
Breathe in, down to your pelvis, your bladder, your feet. You made it from the edge of heaven to the soles of your feet. Or, maybe you didn’t. Maybe it will take you your whole life to breathe in the sky, and to meet everyone on your way down. But in the story of the smalls, the lungs, and the breath contained inside them, is another heartbeat, it is an absolute requirement. Consider the machines that could replace them: the biotechnology that could be designed to make up for the mangled oceans and forests, the Abrahams who might take the place of un-written, forgotten religions and language. The ECMO machine that oxygenates our blood with no breath. No thread to the edge of heaven. None of the smalls who belong in those places. Sterile life, sterile Jesus.
That’s not how we live. That’s not a thing. That’s not how we live.