Catherine Imbriglio: Your book, Earthly Materials: Journeys Through our Bodies’ Emissions, Excretions and Disintegrations, is a rich, multilayered text that I find entertaining, beautiful and unnerving. It contains a masterful blend of on-site reportage, scientific exposition, historical research, analysis, reflection, and personal narrative; it is delightful in its quietly deceptive, associative, meditative approach to existential questions. I think it is a good idea to be upfront about its nominal subject matter, so here are the chapter titles: Mucus, Urine, Blood, Semen, Menses, Milk, Flatulence, Breath, Feces, Vomit, Hair, Tears.
Given some of these topics’ inherent “ick” factors, a skeptic might wonder how a book about subjects that might be difficult or embarrassing to talk about is worth reading. One possible answer resides in the Prologue, which traditionally serves as a retrospective look at where a book has been. It’s where we might find a succinct statement of a book’s main argument. Here is what I think is yours, an argument that your ensuing chapters endeavor to support: “It’s far easier philosophically, and far safer emotionally, if we consider these materials mere byproducts of the real work of being human. But we’re wrong to do so. Whether we acknowledge it or not, our shedding bodies put us in constant dialogue with our environment and our fellow human beings, and in so doing, these materials play a central role in who we are and how we organize ourselves in society.”
This passage makes me want to think about origins. I remember reading a version of your chapter on urine that appeared in Harper’s years ago. What made you decide to go on to write an entire book about our bodies’ emissions, excretions, disintegrations?
Cutter Wood: Let’s see. I wrote that first chapter on urine as something of a joke. I’d been reading a lot of W.G. Sebald at the time, and if you know Sebald, you know he has this long, meandering, melancholy style. It’s a mixture of anecdote and historical knowledge, and it’s dense, paragraphs that go on for pages. When you read him you feel like you’re sinking into concrete, and at the end, once you’re totally immobilized with only your head protruding, Sebald kneels down and takes off his shoe and wallops you over the head with some absurd and usually morbid historical fact. Most people find him intolerable. I loved it. And I thought, no I didn’t really think, I had that cadence of Sebald in my head, and I was reading something else, a book about the man who’d discovered phosphorus back in the 1600s by saving thousands of liters of his own urine and boiling it down. I left the library to go get a cup of coffee. I needed something to read at an event that night, and as I was walking this half-satirical essay began to write itself in my head about the history of people saving their urine.
I wrote it down, and that more or less, was that, except it wasn’t, because I liked it so much. I wrote other things, but always that piece about urine was revolving in the back of my head, very quietly, and every time I came across some scrap of information related to the human body, I’d make a note of it. Years that went on, me tinkering away, consciously, subconsciously, somewhere between the two. I wrote a piece on feces during that time. I wrote a piece on tears. I had a kid, too, and now I was not only dealing with this stuff in an intellectual way. On a profound and daily basis, I was forced to contend with this infant’s multifarious and unending secretions. Someone during a baby shower had even given us this foul straw device for sucking mucus out of the child’s nose when it was sick. I never used it, but on more than one occasion I got it out of the drawer and just contemplated it.
Around about then, I went to add a note to the document I’d been keeping, and I realized the thing had grown to massive proportions. It was a book unto itself already. Hundreds of epigraphs, a sprawling index, links to photographs, paintings, scholarly articles, songs. Still it didn’t occur to me to make it into a book. It wasn’t until I had to give another reading, in fact. I decided to read my essay about feces, and afterwards, there was a line of people out the door waiting to ask me questions or tell me their own anecdotes. And suddenly I thought, I wonder if I could sell this thing? As it turned out, I could.
CI: Where does your title come from?
CW: This book had a lot of working titles, from Effluvia to Hazardous Materials to some that in hindsight were so bad I’m embarrassed even to mention their existence. Earthly Materials, when it came along, just felt right. It has some religious and philosophical overtones for me, nodding toward the old idea of the two-part human, the base physical self and the ethereal spiritual self. That idea, of course, in about a million different ways, is complete bosh, and pretty much everybody knows it’s bosh, no soul flies out your nose at the moment of death, etc. We know this, but it doesn’t mean we’ve changed our behaviors as individuals or as a society to reflect that understanding. The customs and mores surrounding the human body are so engrained, we’re so used to pretending we don’t inhabit these sacks of unruly viscera.
So the title is a tongue in cheek nod in that direction. (A title should always wink a little, shouldn’t it?) It’s a question for the reader. What exactly is earthly here?
CI: Each of your chapters have distinctive approaches for exploring their subject matter, so that none of their routes feel predictable. They are full of twists and turns, reversals even, taking the reader along in your writerly journey of discovery. In the chapter on blood for instance, the last sentence reads, “It almost feels as if it is not about blood at all.” Could you elaborate a bit on how the chapter develops so as to arrive at this last sentence?
CW: The body is a mess, continuously ejecting things in every direction for all sorts of reasons, many of which we still don’t understand, and I wanted this book to reflect that. I didn’t want a perfect progression of chapters leading to a neatly packaged thesis. I wanted every chapter to be its best reflection of the material it was describing. A chapter on constipation, for instance, should be turgid, one on vomit should be garrulous. Maybe this sounds straightforward, but not for me. Figuring out what a chapter is about, how it feels, this is a painstaking, though also fun, though also painstaking, process. Beginning to end, basically, I’m groping around in a dark house trying get out. I feel my way slowly, haltingly, down one hall, hit a dead end, and slowly, haltingly, retrace my steps, sometimes I go down the same hall a bunch of times without ever realizing. Eventually, if I’m lucky, I get out, but not always. And how I get out is always a surprise.
With blood, for example, I went through so many iterations. I had a version of this chapter that was all about how blood has been depicted in painting (and how this reflects our changing understanding of what blood means and of how the circulatory system functions). It was a fun chapter. You had these early Christian paintings where blood shoots out of Christ in strange linear rays, and there were Da Vinci’s instructions for how to paint blood in battle scenes (make it dusty), and Faith Ringgold’s blood-spattered canvases, and contemporary artists whose work contained actual human blood infected with HIV where the whole point of the art was to showcase who was afraid to show it. It was a fun chapter, but it didn’t move the way I wanted it to; I never got out of that house. So I started again, and again, and again.
Generally, I often have some small idea or fact in mind, something that seems to resonate with a meaning I don’t quite understand. I don’t go at this thing directly, but I have it there in the back of my head. With blood, I remembered learning that in the mid-twentieth century, in what were then the British colonies of Kenya and Tanzania, there was a belief that firefighters were vampires. I found—I still find—this strange and fascinating, one of those details that reminds me of the illimitable weirdness of existence, and I knew that whatever I wanted to do in this chapter, it had to move in that direction. This info ended up occupying a small paragraph in the middle of the chapter, but that is what gave the piece its operating logic.
CI: Along the same lines, in the Epilogue, you write “The reader, by now, will have realized that this is a book about death. It comes as a surprise to me, as well.” I’m surprised that you were surprised, since much of your work that I am familiar with is concerned with death. At what point in your writing did you realize that this book is about death? Which chapters best illustrate this point? Would it be fair to characterize your book as a form of radical elegy?
CW. I mean it’s all elegy, right? Everything is slipping through our fingers all the time. Writing’s just one of the ways we try to arrest, or at least briefly detain, what otherwise would already be gone. Or writing’s a way of learning gratitude from that continual loss, and maybe even courage. Or it’s a way we distract ourselves from the loss. Or by allowing us to continue talking after we’re gone, it’s how we give death the slip. I’m not sure it matters which. It’s all elegy regardless. We’re all just glossing Pericles.
(Elegy, by the way, has one of my favorite etymologies. It comes from Greek, of course, but like every language, Greek evolved from the interaction of multiple tongues. Much of Greek has Indo-European roots, but certain words and proper nouns seem to derive from a different lineage, possibly from the language of an archaic population that existed in that part of the Mediterranean even before the Mycenaeans, possibly a population that was subjugated by and absorbed into the Mycenaeans. It’s from this pre-Greek substrate that we get some of the words that feel to me most Greek, words like labyrinth, Odysseus, Athena, tyrant, and also elegy.)
I don’t know why it surprised me to be writing about death. Of course I was writing about death. I’m always writing about death. I guess it surprised me because I set out to be silly. I wanted to write a book about flatulence and snot, you know, and still death got its tenterhooks in things.
Hair and tears strike me as the most overtly elegiac, tears being considered as expressions of grief, and hair being such a classic memento mori, but death is all over this book, even in a chapter like feces, which ended up being largely about an early Christian theological dispute over whether intestines and feces would be assumed into heaven when the faithful are bodily resurrected. I was surprised, I guess, because we act like these materials are silly, outré, beneath us. The mucus lab at MIT, for instance, struggles to get funding simply because mucus seems gross. And I was a little guilty of that even myself. I never expected them to be so central to who we are.
CI: Writing Earthly Materials must have involved a significant amount of different types of research. Could you describe some of your research process?
CW: With this book, I also wanted to showcase all that’s possible in nonfiction, so the forms of research are quite wide. The chapter on mucus, for example, involved your standard reportage: travel to a place, conduct interviews, craft a narrative, fill in the gaps with independent research and follow-up interviews. The urine chapter, on the other hand, was built almost completely in the library, just piles and piles of books. Or then you’ll have a chapter like the one on vomit, where I wanted to take a much more gonzo journalism approach, making myself a character in the piece. The throughline for all of them, I think, is a close attention to detail and copious and continuous note-taking. And a sense of humor.
CI: One significant recurring motif involves collection of the materials that our bodies leave behind. We collect mucus and blood samples, we develop systems to collect human waste. You take the idea of collection to absurd lengths in the chapter on breath. Could you talk about some of the effects you were trying to achieve with this chapter, why you approached breath in a semi-satirical way?
CW: Well, this is the saddest chapter to me. Yes, the book is about dying, but nothing is really so intimately connected with dying as breath. For almost forever, breath was how you decided if a person was alive. You’ve got Lear in Shakespeare for instance putting a mirror up to Cordelia’s nose to see if she’s still breathing. It was only in the 1980s, as the use of ventilators to support breathing became widespread, that we stopped using breath and heartbeat as the legal and medical definition of death.
So I knew I wanted to talk about the moment of death, but that’s trickier than it seems. Many people have been present for the death of another person. It’s an obituary truism: so-and-so passes surrounded by loved ones. That moment can be beautiful, it can be excruciating, it’s often both, and it’s always very personal. If you take a fully technical tone, you can end up completely eliding what makes witnessing a death hard and important. If you go the other direction, it gets maudlin pretty quickly, which is to me an even worse disservice.
For me, it felt very natural to move then in the direction of the absurd. I don’t think of the absurd or surreal as silly. It feels that way sometimes, but that’s only because it can be so disorienting. I’m thinking here, for no particular reason, of a line from Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry. It goes something like, “We talked for a while, and pretty soon we got married.” That’s absurd, right? That’s not a love story. But by making it strange and unfamiliar, it restores some of the majesty and mystery. That’s what I hoped to do in this chapter. To try to collect a person’s dying breath is absurd, but it’s no less absurd than whatever it is we are actually trying to do at a loved one’s deathbed.
CI: I see an increase in tension between chapters in the latter half of your book. Do you see an arc to your book?
CW: I didn’t want this book to have some sort of tidy pop-science or pop-philosophy takeaway, but that doesn’t mean it can’t gather momentum and accumulate in different ways. Breath, vomit, hair, tears, these all come toward the end of the book, and that’s no accident. The book becomes more personal as it goes along, and this I think gives that feeling of increasing tension.
CI: The chapter on vomit seems to be the most intensely personal. What is at stake here for you personally and for the book as a whole?
CW: I don’t actually think of the vomit chapter as the most personal. (That would probably be hair.) But it undoubtedly was the most intense. I suppose it feels personal because it was the closest I came to death. I don’t want to exaggerate my circumstances, but this chapter was hell to research. I’d decided I wanted to write this in a very gonzo manner so I joined an ayahuasca cult in Orlando, Florida, and it turned out they weren’t the most conscientious folks. I never actually vomited (which is supposed to be the entire point of ayahuasca), but after weeks of fasting, and a day sitting in an ad-hoc sweat lodge in the Florida summer sun, I got so dehydrated that my veins started to collapse. If it hadn’t been for the timely arrival of some EMTs, I’m not sure what would have become of me. Nota bene: that cult no longer exists; they folded after someone died during one of their ceremonies.
As for what was at stake... well, I was in bad shape after that. I’d lost a lot of weight. I was still sick as a dog when I got home. I walked in the door to my house and went straight to bed and didn’t come out for a while, and pretty much all I thought about was how stupid that was, how profoundly, profoundly stupid. So I suppose that chapter inadvertently raised the stakes for the entire book. Now I had to write something that was worth almost dying for.
CI: Sir Thomas Browne and Montaigne appear to be some of your literary forbears. Are there contemporary writers that serve as inspirations? I see some moves in your text that remind me of Eliot Weinberger’s work, for example.
CW: Who isn’t an inspiration!? I see the dirty thumbprints of a thousand folks on this book. Weinberger is certainly in here, but there are a bunch of other writers who’ve mined that particular vein, too, from Alexander Theroux to Annie Dillard to Guy Davenport, and they’re all in here to greater and lesser degrees. But then each of these chapters takes its own strange approach, and because of that, each has its own more immediate influences. Let’s do a quick tour. The first chapter, mucus, with its relentless zooming in of the microscope, is deeply indebted to John McPhee and to some of the more manic essays of David Foster Wallace. Milk, with its reportage on the tragicomedy of contemporary America, feels to me very Joan Didion and Susan Orlean and Charlie Kaufmann. Breath was inspired by all the folks who have written beautiful how-tos but especially by Julio Cortázar’s Instruction Manual and Claudia Hernández’s Dead Child Manual. Blood took some cues from the work of Eula Biss, but really it was driven by the poetry of Will Alexander. Vomit could not have been written without E.B. White, and though the final version here is cleaned up and tamed down for mass consumption, my original vision of Menses was a far more screwball affair that took its cues from Antoine Volodine, Lydia Davis and Renee Gladman.
But that’s still just a cursory glimpse of things. There’s the underlying breath and heartbeat of the book, too, right? A mind has a way of turning, a habit of movement built up through contact with the work of a few certain (though countless) beloved authors, and maybe the most important folks here are the ones whose connection to the book is the least obvious. I’m thinking of W.B. Yeats’s still water, William Maxwell’s “undestroyed by what was not his doing,” Reginald Shepherd’s “free of any eden we can name,” Virgil’s “sunt lacrimae rerum,” White’s “no one was with her,” Ginzburg’s “our dreams are never realized,” and a hundred or a thousand others, and not just writers either, composers, painters, people overheard on the street, friends, family, my father, for instance, who once told me, “If everyone got what they deserved, the world wouldn’t be a very nice place to live.” These are the phrases that, in flushing color back into the world, remind a person, remind this person how to put one foot in front of the other and why. There are no books without them.
CI: What parts were the hardest to write and why? Which the easiest?
CW: Everything is hard in its own way. There are forms or styles of thinking that flow a little more smoothly for me—the sort of associative, Montaigne-type essayistic approach for instance. I can do that sort of thing all day long, and I do, to the alternating delight and dismay of my children. So in some ways, the chapters that take that tack—urine, hair, feces—felt easier to write, but then the inherent challenge with that approach is wrapping things up, recognizing the through line and winnowing and weaving the strands to follow it to a satisfying, but not too satisfying conclusion. On the other hand, you have chapters like vomit which were quite literally excruciating to research, but because they’re based in narrative, the arc was more defined and simpler to follow. I’m not sure why but Breath was the hardest. It just was.
CI: What project(s) are you working on now?
CW: Too many to name, (shakes head, sighs) too many to finish.
Cutter Wood’s work has appeared in Harper’s, Discover, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Paris Review Daily and other publications. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and he was the Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Residence at George Washington University. He lives in Baltimore with his partner and family.
Catherine Imbriglio is the author of two books of poetry, Parts of the Mass (Burning Deck), which received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and Intimacy (Center for Literary Publishing), which received the Colorado Prize in Poetry. Her poetry and criticism have appeared in After Spicer (John Vincent, ed.), American Letters & Commentary, Aufgabe, A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line, Conjunctions, Contemporary Literature, Denver Quarterly, Epoch, Green Mountains Review, New American Writing, Pleiades, West Branch, and elsewhere. A selection of her poetry was anthologized in the Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries, ed. Reginald Shepherd (University of Iowa Press). She is a recipient of an Untermeyer fellowship in poetry, a fellowship and two merit awards in poetry from the RI State Council on the Arts.