Organ-isational issues

I finally saw 'Nine Songs' this week, and can confirm that it really is the opposite of erotic. There are many reasons for this, most of which have been covered in some slavering detail by the critics. In my case, the thought that put the 'un' in 'un-erotic', from the very first scene - or at least as soon as I saw Margo Stilley in profile - was: where does she keep all her organs? Not just her, thin people in general. And then I was completely distracted by the realisation: I have no idea of the location of most organs in the human body (or the feline, canine or bovine body, for that matter). Is this something that people know, generally? Do you? I mean, we could all point to the stomach, we know where our lungs and our intestines are, vaguely, and if you watch enough Buffy sooner or later you can tell if the stake is going in at the right angle. But the spleen? The gallbladder? The pancreas? The liver? Do you, hand on heart (ha!), really know where your ovaries are? One of my first memories is having my kidneys pumped full of dye and seeing them on the x-ray screen, and yet still I had a false memory of them being in a place where they really aren't (although apparently some people do have one kidney in their pelvis). Is it just me? Do they teach you this in Biology? On Thursday mornings when the Catholic kids are having catechism? At least we know where our skin is.....right?

'A body lives in three dimensions only at the envelope of the skin. The "Euclidean" space of the body is a membrane. The membrane isn't closed. It folds in at the mouth, ears, nostrils, eyes, anus, urethra, vagina, and pores. The mouth connects to the stomach and intestines to fold back out the anus. This is one leaky "box". [...] Even the skin isn't really three-dimensional. It just acts as if it were. It creates a three-dimensional closure effect by regulating movements into and out of the space-filling fractal it twistedly envelopes.' Brian Massumi: 'Parables for the Virtual' (Duke UP, 2003), pp202-3