Originally published in Apartamento magazine issue #33
With all the holes in you already, there’s no reason to define the outside environment as alien.
—Jenny Holzer, Survival Series, 1983
In Flatland, 19th-century theologian Edwin Abbot Abbot penned a thought experiment-cum-satirical novella where all sorts of problems arise from a world without a Z-axis, from navigating a household to identifying the face of a loved one. Worst of all, without depth, it becomes very hard to eat. Any form of digestive tract would bisect a Flatlander in two. It appears Pac-Man’s a bit of a fraudster. All this might lead you to think you just can’t be whole with holes. But can you?
The average adult human has approximately five million pores on their body: lacrimal glands, ear canals, nostrils, a trachea, and so much more. Many of these are blind holes, not through holes, entrances with no exits and insufficient for most interlopers to sneak past. But to the microscopic bacteria, fungi, mites, ticks, and protists that surround us in their trillions, even a dead-end alleyway can feel like a five-star resort.
While your skin, the largest single organ on your body, covers an area of about two square metres, your gastrointestinal tract is about the size of a tennis court (some 200–300 square metres). Counterintuitively, your inside is the biggest threshold to the world around you. Let me ask you this: When you were a child, did your mother ever call you her ‘whole world’? If so, she was unknowingly sharing you with roughly 40 trillion other microbes who could say the same without meaning it metaphorically.