TUZLU SU SALTWATER

108 Chus Martínez
Denemeler / Essays
109
understanding the cultural, aesthetic and logical connotations of such a simple gesture
that is fundamental to the hand and, therefore, to the mind.
When I discovered the egg titled We, the Outsiders (1965), the last formal work by
Argentinian artist Federico Manuel Peralta Ramos, I thought it was the greatest attempt
by an artist to put an end to the straight line. Think of it: an egg is like a safe,
an enclosure inhabited by limitless elliptical lines moving around the inner and outer
surfaces. But why is this relevant? Was Ramos alone in contesting the line? No, he
was not alone. Around the same time, a large group of scientists led by Douglas
Engelbart developed what we now know as the ‘hyperlink’. It is interesting that both
Ramas and Engelbart, in the middle of the 1960s, were making these very serious
attempts to connect knowledge, reality – time, even – in a completely different manner.
In this context, the egg not only expresses a Humpty Dumpty attempt to reinvent
language, but a very particular language that is the internet. The hyperlink, too, is a
major attempt to break the line and open up to a different navigation system that
transforms, not just the sentence, but the very nature of reading, connecting ideas
and times in dimensions that have still not been fully explored.
A study of non-sense, of how to reverse meaning and how to un-order the logic of a
sentence, can also be seen as an attempt to address the straight line. However, it is
one that still respects and acknowledges the idea of direction, even if altered by the
Humpty Dumpty language game.
And so I have come to think that the egg is the expression of a new era, one where the
straight line is surpassed, and that has already been called the Metabolic Era. A time
that comes after the modernist time of thinking in terms of a linear progress from past
to future, about continuity and coherence, the Metabolic Era is marked by the invisible
signs of life in transformation, by living and non-living organisms silently changing,
metabolising, absorbing and giving, producing a new environment. The Metabolic Era
will demand a different thinking, as well as a different understanding of will, of volition,
not only versus other organisms but also versus technology and the inanimate world.
Remember that to Live is to Metabolise
It was in the 1920s and 1930s that researchers started focusing on the human metabolism.
The isolation of vitamins had begun in the second half of the nineteenth century,
and during the 1920s multiple experiments proved the role of vitamins A and D, and
further studies isolated vitamins C and K (a powerful blood coagulant). And so the
interest in diet took a new form, with food not only being seen as a question of access,
class or tradition, but as a question of health and a new form of self-control. Especially
relevant for our context is the work and research of Catherine Kousmine (1904–1992),
a Russian emigré who studied in Lausanne and developed a theory and a praxis for
the cure of cancer predicated on diet. Her first diet protocol was based on a case
study of 1949 that described the cure of a patient with intestinal cancer and was highly
influenced by the research of another woman, Johanna Budwig. Budwig, a German
biochemist, had developed throughout the 1940s a study of fatty acids and their influence
on cancer cure. She published her first diet protocol in 1952, mostly presenting
the virtues of flaxseed oil mixed with low-fat cheese, and meals high in fruits, vegetables
and fibre, as well as the avoidance of sugar, animal fat, salad dressing, meats,
butter and especially margarine. Even if Kosmine followed the discoveries and the
precepts of Budwig’s diet, she was a pioneer in a new understanding of the benefits of
raw food for our health, putting a special emphasis on cold-pressed oils. During World
War II, oils were pressed under heat, from 160 to 200 degrees Celsius. The reason was
simple: this technique allowed the extraction of up to 70% of the fat from the grain.
The resulting liquid is a dark, strong-smelling oil that needs, therefore, to be refined,
a process that requires first mixing the oil with hexane (a dissolvent), then separating
the two later. This oil lasts forever, since, as Kousmine described it, it is ‘dead’. Coldpressed
oils, on the contrary, obtained by simple physical processes like decanting
and filtering, are alive, but they react to light, becoming rancid, and need refrigeration
once exposed to the air. Kousmine’s texts are intensely eloquent in explaining how
simple food is transformed by industrial processes and how they destroy fatty acids,
also called vitamin F, that play a fundamental role in how the membranes of our cells
are protected from external attacks, as in immuno-deficient conditions, for example.
There is, of course, no proof that following diets as rigorous as the Kousmine method
cure cancer. It is also not my point here to describe these methods. The interesting
aspect in this context is the parallel growth from the beginning of the twentieth century
in the use of dieting and the understanding of drugs. To compare the rise of interest in
vitamins and raw food with drugs seems nonsensical at first. Food may have an effect
on our organism, but isn’t it too slow, too long term, to provide us with the basis for a
proper comparison? But the common denominator of both is clear: the way they affect
our metabolic system. Both the interest in drugs and in diets have to do with exploring
the possibilities of enhancing our capabilities. The world of drugs is all about the brain,
about the possible chemical transformations that will enable us to explore the way we
sense the world. The importance of food – not gourmet cooking, but food as a source
and method to structure life – bears a strange and powerful relation to all sorts of experiments
in freeing the mind. It has to do with the psychiatric and anti-psychiatric
movements of the last century, and, most of all, with the avant-garde, with the idea
of controlling the body, of fuelling it not too little and not too much to become productive.
But the science of nourishment is not only aimed at avoiding illness, to make
us live longer, to stretch the productive years of the human, or to achieve a strong,
machine-like body. It is also aimed at generating a paradoxical state, one where we
are healthy enough to work more, but not so healthy that our body is in a state of repose
beyond labour. If drugs are all about the mind a as skyrocket able to take off and
escape, leaving behind a damaged body, the metabolic cult expressed by super food
represents a body capable of making the mind stay put.
And … why all this?
Why would I make this connection between diets and eggs and hyperlinks? Because
we are in the middle of a very important transformation that radically affects our culturally
inherited ways of understanding the relationship between mind and body, our
ability – or inability – to see coherence, to read and synchronise with the time we are
in. The curved line, the hyperlink, even the slow assimilation of nutrients, all contribute
to change and challenge the accepted body construction: eyes that are fingers touch
screens that follow no one sentence. It all adds up to a slow transformation of the body
through absorption – a transformation that happens over years, decades, but that was
consciously started and hopes for reciprocity in nature and also in the technological
world. The end of the straight line is the beginning of the future.