The Disintegrators

A human being partially disintegrating, then later reintegrating at another location, also known as teleportation, has existed for around 100 years. It is not as fast as we see in science fiction television shows, or the disintegration as apparent.

Planes, trains, automobiles. A human being can only travel at a certain speed before they disintegrate. This is because the soul of a human being can only travel at a certain speed. And at that speed, only for a short time. The maximum speed is around 30 miles per hour. 

The most unhealthy and unnatural means of high-speed travel is probably the airplane. 

One can protest that whatever a human being can create is natural and real. But deep inside we know this is nonsense. 

Airplane travel is a helpful technology, if you want to live far away from the things that you need. It is very helpful, and profoundly unnatural. “Jetlag” is typically attributed to a change in what they call a “timezone” (another bizarre concept) but jetlag is actually the phenomenon of the human soul catching up with a person. 

The way a soul works is a mystery to me, but I do know that a soul needing to catch up does not mean that after air travel you are entirely without your soul, nor do you have to wait at your destination for it to catch up at the speed of man, or horse. But something is not right, and you are not all there. Through air travel, you have disintegrated somewhat. 

Under certain conditions, the spirit of a human being may be able to endure speeds of up to 80 miles per hour, but these are exceptional circumstances. For your spirit to keep pace at such a high rate of speed, your best bet is to ride a train. Open-air freight train riding is more dangerous, but your soul may be able to keep up more easily. The more observable and immediate the environment, the more able a person is to endure these high speeds. The healthiest and most natural means of high-speed travel is probably horseback riding.

Once I looked into a picture, split into many pictures, and it took my picture. It was for a university class, on a thing called “zoom.” Many of us have become familiar with “zoom” recently. The reason we know about “zoom” is that it spread because of a disease. I am not talking about the disease that actually killed beloved friends and family members, the one we called  “coronavirus.” I’m talking about the other, not unrelated disease. The one we saw more on the computer than any place else. Then it echoed back and forth and back and forth between people and computers, people and computers, as if the type of virus you find in person or computer could suddenly become the type of virus you find in the other, back and forth and back and forth, like two mirrors in hell facing one another. Some kind of recursive demon thing insisting on itself, seemingly forever.

So because of the mirror virus demon and contagious madness that followed, I had to look through the lagging sputtering picture mirror, stare into the zoom, in order to learn from the university. 

The class was about the medieval concept of the human body. How the medieval person thought of their body and the bodies of others. On the screen there were frames within frames, faces looking at themselves looking at faces. I sat in a little room at a wooden table. Behind me were two gothic style wooden frames leaning on the wall. They were salvaged from a church organ that had been pulled apart, from a church that had been pulled apart. In every class that day, people in the frames on the screen asked if the gothic frames behind me were real. They thought the gothic frames might be a fake background. More frames within frames. I would reach over and rock one back and forth to show that they actually existed in my apartment. 

When the class on the medieval concept of the human body started, I wanted to smoke a cigarette. Students were expected to leave their cameras on. It was very important to be present while we were not present, to look at ourselves looking at the mirror. I sat in my chair at the wooden table and looked over the top of the computer. I could see the bathroom across the hall. My husband slept in the next room. The broom leaned against the wall by the stove. I leaned out of frame to take quick drags from the cigarette. How rude it would be, after all, for a person to smoke in front of the forever mirror of the disembodied. 

Medieval man knew that he was his body. He knew that the prayer of the heart meant the heart, the literal beating heart. He knew that he was his very own body and self. For a person to believe the outrageous proposition that God came to earth and was fully God and fully man, being born and walking around, changed everything, transfigured everything, and even the illiterate peasant who didn’t understand the theology still lived and breathed the way it touched all of his world. This knowledge was a given, and it did not stop at the fingertips but extended to all material things. Every created thing was rich with meaning, and everything, every piece of every thing, everything built and painted and created spoke to him of God, no matter what it said, even if what it said was not very nice. Food, sex, family, war, death, these things were read and experienced by medieval man in such a way that the difference in worldview to our own is practically psychedelic to try and conceive of. The notion of the body as a temporary pile of debris lugging around a sophisticated computer is modern in its transhumanist yearnings, and ancient in its gnosticism. But the spirit is not trapped inside the body like the stale air in the microwave at a bad office job, waiting to escape, and the medieval experienced himself as an integrated being. There are traditions today that still know these things, and ways to have eyes to see.

The professor invited us to share why we were taking the class, and how we thought medieval man may have regarded “the body.” Answers covered political theories and suggested revisions of history, but not one mentioned the physical human body. 

I told her I wondered what the medieval man would think of the name of the class itself, “The Medieval Body,” since it seemed medieval man did not experience his body as being a separate thing from his own self. Blank looks and polite nods. One face within the frames corresponded with the sound of laughter that came from the speakers, and a voice:  “okay, but I mean, we are basically just meat puppets piloting our brains, though.” The laughter multiplied and the professor nodded.

I closed the hell mirror in on itself, went outside, and smoked the rest of the cigarette. I finally dropped out about a week later. When we moved, we took the train.