In “The Elizabethan World Picture: A Study of the Idea of Order in the Age of Shakespeare, Donne and Milton,” the British historian E.M.W. Tillyard describes “the Great Chain of Being.”
There are many forms this concept has taken since Elizabethan times, but, as you can imagine, one of the most common places God at the top, followed by mankind, animals, and finally one-celled creatures like the paramecium at the bottom.
Many contemporary neuroscientists elevate consciousness. Monists, who don’t hew to the notion of mind/body, may concede that consciousness is one of the great unsolved problems, while still hewing to the idea that it’s a biological process, say, like eating or breathing.
Down from that might be cognition, micturition (and enuresis), defecation, ejaculation, lactation, peristalsis, ovulation, and menstruation.
Burps, flatulence, and vomiting, or “heaving,” are country cousins.
There is diarrhea, also known as Montezuma’s revenge, but also logorrhea, which is diarrhea of the mouth.
But what about language? You know the kind of babbler who takes the air out of a room? Some people make noise so they don’t have to face their thoughts. On a more sophisticated level, there are figures of speech, metonymy, synecdoche, simile, and metaphor. Language is a bodily process and even has a cortex that accounts for it.
The Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman wrote “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.” You have surely encountered the student who returns from his junior year abroad so transformed he has trouble negotiating his mother tongue. The English is halting. He sounds like someone who has gotten off the boat the way the Trinidadian-born writer V.S. Naipaul describes himself in “The Enigma of Arrival.”
“Go with the flow” is an expression that derives from another bodily process. Men with enlarged prostates take Flomax to facilitate this one.
Mikhail Sholokhov was the author of “And Quiet Flows the Don.” Emigration and immigration, which involve traffic flow between countries, are bodily processes simply by virtue of all the people involved.
Perambulation is another bodily process attendant upon the movement of bodies and one which has begotten the scholarly discipline of psychogeography — and a host of adherents, including W.G. Sebald, author of “The Rings of Saturn.”
“And so it goes” is the expression Kurt Vonnegut uses in “Slaughterhouse-Five” to account for another bodily process, death.
Francis Levy, a part-time resident of Wainscott, is the author of a recent short-story collection, “The Kafka Studies Department,” with illustrations by Hallie Cohen.