On the Swampy Nature of Embodiment and artist Tetsumi Kudo

I am thinking about the body today, nothing profound or new even, just simply its ebbs, flows, surprises, gaps, and randomly skipped beats. We (humans) live and move--for we must approach it this way or we wouldn't get much done, would we?--as if it is reliable, firm ground, the raft we know will be there if the waters get too rough. And we can rely on it, to some extent, and we can even take care of it (exercise, eating a good diet, etc.) to make it even more reliable, but at the same time we inhabit that strange space of not knowing when it may fall out from under us, when we may have to grapple to feel steady again. We may tend to perceive ourselves as whole, a single entity closed off from the rest of the world, but in reality we live in a constantly moving dance. Shape-shifting with the elements. A well-informed friend tells me the number of E. coli in an inch of my intestines outnumbers all the grains of sand in the Arabian desert. In this instance I am host, and, of course, this isn't the only example. Every time I breath my immune system engages in battle with all the germs and bacteria I inhale. Every minute I live bacteria dwells on my skin and my all-too-human material body is host once again. I am thinking about this and the fact that we are all made of stardust: even wilder is the fact that though my right arm and left arm contain start "stuff," the stars this stuff is from are most likely not the same. I have been studying and reading about the work of artist Tetsumi Kudo lately, and find he knew how to represent this body incredibly--as always moving, open to, and part of the rest of the world in an absolutely gorgeous (and often grotesque, which doesn't negate the gorgeous necessarily) way. Bodies become swampy and swamps give rise to flesh. Kudo also reminds us of our vulnerability--the susceptiblity of embodiment to the swampiness of the stars and the inevitability of decay. I'll probably write more about him later (his place in postwar art, his response to a new nuclear reality, his explorations of a new, horrific vulnerability), but for now I'll just leave you with these photos. And make sure to check out the link and more of the images online. Once I started looking, I found I couldn't stop.