Not Good at Eating

 After much badgering over the past few months, my sister finally talked me into watching Kpop Demon Hunters on Netflix this week. I had to grudgingly admit, by the end of it, that I had enjoyed myself. It was pretty good and quite fun—even for someone who went in prepared to dislike it. 

One scene toward the beginning, though, struck me as an odd choice. The three main characters are taking a plane ride to get to a venue for a show. A flight attendant brings them their midday meal, and they fall upon it ravenously. "Carbo load!!" they shriek, before stuffing their faces with gimbap. 

"This seems like some kind of eating disorder content," I thought to myself. Perhaps the message is supposed to be empowering or to reinforce a positive body-image. It's meant to communicate something like: "see, even these stick-thin pop stars binge on carbs every now and then; you don't have to be ashamed of it." 

But that's all consistent with what the "pro-anorexia" or "proano" people put out on social media every day too. They say: "Go ahead! Treat yourself! You don't have to feel bad. Indulge! Binge!... Just made sure you purge afterwards. Just made sure you tape your mouth shut for the next week!"

The movie, after all, is plainly promoting a certain paper-slim body ideal. Showing those characters binging without losing their skin-and-bones appearance seems likely to set up unrealistic expectations—and therefore to promote spates of over-eating, followed by self-punishing and shame-filled abstinence: the typical eating disorder cycle. 

I never had one of these disorders myself, so I can't claim to know exactly whereof I speak. 

But there was certainly a period in my life when I struggled to eat. 

For me, it had nothing to do with body image—but rather with a crippling social anxiety in my first years of college. I had my own "freshman 15," you could say—except in the opposite direction. That's at least how much weight I lost in that first year, rather than how much I gained. I've never been as thin since. 

Mealtime in the dining hall, in that first year of dorm life, was agony for me. The thought that had wormed its way into my nineteen-year-old brain was how mortifying it would be if I suddenly threw up in the midst of a shared meal, in front of all these strangers—whom I had to live with and wanted to impress. 

And, as Des Esseintes once put it—in Huysmans's À rebours—"The very fear of this malady will end by bringing it on, if this continues." (Howard trans.) My constant dread of throwing up in public gave me a knot in my stomach at meal-times that very nearly resulted, on several occasions, in prompting precisely the scene I feared. 

At the very least, it was not good for the appetite. 

At some point after college—back when I still made a point of catching up every week with the new literary articles collected in Arts & Letters Daily—I recall reading about Bertolt Brecht's similar lifelong digestive struggles. 

He even wrote a poem about it—"To Eat of Meat Joyously"—which starts off with a paean to the pleasures of food, yet ends with an odd and dangling confession: "I say that, I who / Am not good at eating," he writes. (Willett/Manheim trans.)

Here was the first literary hero of mine who had identified this apparently simplest of tasks—common to all mortals—as the enduring struggle that I too had found it to be. I was not a good eater either. 

And it was in Walker Percy's novel The Moviegoer that I encountered one potential source of my existential angst about digestion. 

One of Percy's characters is said to struggle to eat simply because the task didn't seem important enough. Every act of his life needed to have some intellectual or spiritual justification. To do something merely for the sake of living—merely because it was necessary to survival—seemed so base and animal. 

Eating, in other words, is something that brings you down "To that dread level of nothing but life itself"—as Hugh MacDiarmid once called it—the animal life of mere respiration and digestion, without spiritual or intellectual flight. It may be a necessary precondition of those higher functions—but how frustrating that it should be so!

Time spent eating, after all, is time not spent reading or writing. 

This is why "Soylent"—and other bottled, "eat on the go" liquid meals—held a great fascination for me when they were first introduced in my twenties. (Though my one-time experiment in eating nothing but this product for a day ended in defeat. I ended up going on a "carbo load" of my own—in which I ransacked a whole box of Ritz crackers.)  

Huysmans's Des Esseintes—whom I've already mentioned—explored another solution. In his constant effort to etherealize and aestheticize himself—to reduce life to nothing but a series of artistic sensations stripped of any somatic context—he eventually resorts to the rather extreme expedient of taking all of his meals anally, in the form of an enema!

I guess Des Esseintes too, then, could be diagnosed with some sort of eating disorder. As could Percy's character. As could Brecht. As could I. 

This quest for escape into the spiritual realm—to be untethered from the needs of the mere body, the mere fleshy envelope—is of course at odds with the doctrinaire materialism of Brecht's worldview. This is the man, after all, who famously declared in the Threepenny Opera: "grub first, morals second." 

In Brecht's confession, then, that he had never actually been a good eater himself, I feel we have been allowed a momentary glimpse into the central paradox of his character. 

It has always struck me, after all, that Brecht is at heart a great moralist; a great humanitarian; even a great sentimentalist, whose works have a fine tragic sense and the ability to wring the heart. 

Yet in the realm of theory, he constantly proclaimed his violent repudiation of all these things. He castigated sentiment and humanitarianism as bourgeois vices. He mocked self-sacrifice. He claimed that the moral and spiritual life is always secondary—mere superstructure—whereas bread is fundamental. 

Yet, this same man who forever trumpeted the claims of "grub" in his official ideology was—in reality—a man who could barely eat. He was a man who found it difficult to so much as take a meal. 

In spite of himself, he was a spiritual being. And this is what one most notices throughout his work. In the midst of his constant overt rejection and repudiation of humane sentiments, he is actually full of little else—his poems and plays have extraordinary emotional and moral force. 

At some point I got over my own digestive struggles. I'm not sure exactly what did it. I stopped caring so much about what other people thought of me, I guess—and stopped being around them often enough for the amount I still did care to be a problem.

I started eating on my own schedule, rather than that of a dining hall. 

There's that immortal scene in The Ginger Man, when Sebastian Dangerfield strips and falls in a college cafeteria, spilling an entire tray's worth of food. The very same thing happened to me in freshman year one time—an incident that did not improve either my social anxiety or my digestion. 

Part of the solution for me, then, was simply not being in a college dorm anymore, after a certain age; not being on a "meal plan." 

I clearly would not have lasted long in the military. 

Still to this day, though, I feel in some way that I am—like Brecht—"not good at eating." Some part of me still feels that this activity is indeed, as Percy put it, "not important enough." 

Some of us belong more to the empyrean, perhaps, and never find a home in the flesh. Like Baudelaire's Albatross, the wings that help us soar in the heavens only serve to hamper us and made us more ridiculous when we are confined to Earth. 

But the same reason why food is, in some sense, "not important enough" is the very same reason why we should partake of it without fear or shame. The flesh is indeed a temporary envelope. No "body image" is therefore worth sacrificing our health or happiness or safety or survival to.

If food itself is "not important enough"—still less, then, is thinness. No one has to look like a Kpop Demon Hunter. The stick-thin form won't come with you—when the time comes for each of us to make that last journey into the empyrean.