Review By Harsimran Kaur

One often asks if the mind carries the liability of moral consanguinity. Doesn’t the mind every now & then question the recherché till the appetite of the ruminative cuts the anterior of the tongue washing the saliva back of the throat to assimilate what has been digested?

Then, we ask what has food to do with morality? Is hunger of knowledge a rectitude; what about the rumpus inside the stomach that’s boasts of illicit cravings? We might call it a delusional hunger marionette by the mind; don’t we all give into it?

Does mind act as an illusionist? If yes, then the gut could be a hubristic holler harrumphed quite often by the paradoxal mind-bending. The gut is in control of the mind so that the moral fabric expresses hunger to be a de rigueur or a discretionary power; Quod Erat Demonstrandum. However, there is a divergence.

In the book, ‘Rumbles—A Curious History of the Gut’, as per the Surgeon General of Venetian Army, “The stomach was a strangely wicked and ungrateful organ…implacably opposed to man’s progress & comfort.”

Wittingly elucidated, the gut has a ‘past’, ‘present’ & ‘future’. It is disputatious fomenting suspicion by its fundamental dichotomy to the rest of the body. The gauntlet of digestion presented in the gut is both a felicitation of survival, yet forbidden by the civilizational appendage. Let’s talk about food! Is it the ‘gut’ in ‘guff’ that makes the mind chastened for impropriety? Or the wild submission to food is either cultural or pathological?

What about the indubitable ‘gut instinct’? Aren’t instincts a natural predisposition of the gut? Tell the laggard to follow his ‘gut instinct’ and it is not the food that waters in his mouth; the pangs of anticipation play a flute, the mind coerced to the dilemma of the unknown. The ‘gut’ and the ‘brain’ are indefinitely connected but are not devoid of polarized persiflage and politicking. The ‘gastric disturbances’ have a story to tell! It is to be either whisked away as a palaver of indigestion or emotions sticking as a halberd.  How this all looks inside has been a matter of debate and extrapolation. Let’s ask,

• Is the mind-gut connection a grotesque simulacrum of a drainage system?
• Do we see a gargoyle spitting a bad mouth of crenellations in heed of suppressed emotions?
• What is digested; is the ‘gut’ awkward to accept it dejure or become a dehisce of flatulent fracas?

Can occupation of a man decide ‘gut health’? The mind in work catches the ‘gut’ in flagrante delicto of being unrequited churning belly cramps, constipation and reflux. As per the physician Thomas Cogan,

“The kind of work that the body performed in the world defined its essential physiology and as such good health could only be achieved by eating according to occupation.”

Elsa Richardson has profoundly managed to let the ‘gut’ speak for itself. ‘A mind over gut’ is an old hat! The chemical process of digesting and defecating is also bound by socio-cultural jurisdiction. The ‘gut’ in isolation can work to be defensive wall to external aberrations. Whether it were the suffragettes who fought for the ‘right to vote’ with empty bellies or the ‘gut’ which often becomes a political agitator incase the body defies its superiority. Building ‘castles in the gut’ by demons and evil spirits is still heavily anachronistic; their intervention in the belly—gladly nobody refutes it—is presumably considered a apothegm of ‘devilish affliction’ contemporaneous with ‘gastric goulash’. 

The ‘gut’ neither wants to be self-deprecating or be a maudlin savoir-faire! Not always will it find resonance to the mind panjandrum and not always it will be benefited from its prejudice to human proclivities.  Often, ‘intestinal stasis and ‘autointoxication’ will leave it diseased. Many researchers believe that ‘gut health’ is of paramount importance. According to the study by Harvard Medical School,

“Our micro biome is a soothsayer capable not only of predicating if we develop conditions like IBS in the future also of forecasting our deaths.”  

The book expatiates the ‘past’ of the gut galvanized to make humans comfortable with their bodies in the ‘present’, and how the ‘future gut flora’ can define our existential preoccupation to varied emotions.

Fascinatingly, the book journeys through the eclipses of ‘bad omens’ on our gut to precarious passions violating a mystic power. The ‘cheese dreams’ to the ‘dirt fabric’ linked to the viscera are a psychological manifestation, to be ritualistically condemned or are we ready to embrace the ‘gut gulch’ in gravitas?

TAKE AWAY

Invigorating and effectual!