Читать книгу Anatomic - Adam Dickinson - Страница 32

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at is an organ. It echoes with music and memory. Fat is a slowlyoscillating wave. It embodies the constancy of transition, cling-ing as a perpetually updated fuel reserve, an accumulationexpressing – through hourglasses, pears, and apples – the energybalance of a life being lived. Fat is a metaphysics conditioning expe-riences of reality. It regulates hormones and directs the transitionalmodalities of metabolic processes. Fat provides stability, padding,and insulation to equip a body in transition, moving through climatesand calories, catastrophes and capitalism. Fat feeds us, but Western-style commerce has afflicted many parts of the world with obesity.Children are filled with accelerated derivatives of excavated sunlightand profitably supply-chained processed foods. Fat is an archive ofthis historical moment. Military, industrial, and agricultural historybioaccumulate in adipose tissues. I have found one of the most widelydistributed environmental contaminants on the planet in my body:polychlorinated biphenyls, pcbs. Principally manufactured byMonsanto for industrial and commercial applications, these lipophilicpollutants collect like comment sections in the fat of creatures every-where. If we test for them, we will find them. pcbs constitute a formof writing in the Anthropocene, a recursive script where industrialinnovations find their way back into the metabolic messaging systemsof the biological bodies that have created them. As edits, as subtlerevisions to the hormonal cascades that precipitate bodily morpholo-gies and affective experiences of the world, pcbs are messages in thefat of our humanity.The first section of ‘Lipids’ appropriates language from The Handwriting Analyst’s Toolkit:Character and Personality Revealed through Graphologyby Peter West (New York: Barron’sEducational Series, Inc., 24.). Each of the eight stanzas successively treats the eightletters in the word ‘Monsanto,’ using language associated with the graphological analysisof each letter. Until it ceased production in 1977, Monsanto was the source of approximately99 percent of the pcbs used by U.S. industries. ––