I've been thinking lately about what we are. Human beings, I mean. We are precisely what we hate. Biological fluids, bile, hormones, histamine, cortisone, bacteria, semen, pus, excreta. If we could imagine the worst possible thing to happen to our bodies--perhaps being devoured alive by worms--everything about this that we loathe is already contained in what we are. We are a mess of chemicals and putrid substances. There are disgusting fleshy pumps in my stomach at this very moment excreting bile to digest the malformed, repulsive mess of food I ate an hour ago. There are a thousand species of bacteria in my large intestine living, breeding, multiplying, hatching. My testicles produce hormones that travel my blood to my brain, inducing a kind of lusty madness. I am overrun with bio-chemicals, pus-laden pimples & boils & cysts, a thousand repulsive organs sitting in gelatinous fluid and tissue and flesh. If I could try to imagine my worst fear--the most loathsome existence possible--I could not come up with any existence as repulsive as being what I am. Human. Oh, try as we might to elevate ourselves to majesty semi-divine, we are fundamentally loathsome things--made through and through of a thousand species of repulsive substance--and we shall never attain to what is Pure, Ideal, Divine--we will always be reminded that we came from our father's organ of excreta, mixed in with our mother's putrid insides, to produce something that ultimately cannot but hate what it is, whose highest aspiration is to be what it is not. We strive for the purity of Number, the sterility of Ideas; and we remain the filthy, dusky mess of flesh, every bit of it melting out at the edges into what it is not, nothing in it attaining to Plato's heaven, all of it rotten and either filthy with diseases, or brimming with breeding organisms when healthy.