I had a navel before 1998, but I was never so aware of it until I saw Britney Spears’s. She was in a surgeon’s office asking to get it back. (In the past, a stranger’s navel has been photoshopped onto her stomach.) I watched a reality program where a woman lamented how a tummy tuck had robbed her of her belly button. Karolina Kurkova, the supermodel, barely has a visible navel because of a surgery when she was an infant, and that rarely goes without comment in her line of work.
Something feels off, and one longs for the wabi-sabi pucker denoting human symmetry. That sounds pleasing, except when one is confronted with one of those rare folks without a belly button. It’s a question of some theological controversy as to whether Adam and Eve had navels-there are those who believe their prehistoric torsos were smoothly intact. When you look down they stare right back up, mouths open in perpetual surprise: O brave new world. Navels collect debris-snacking, apparently, as they peek out from under our clothes. Life, after all, begins at the navel-that vestige of our time in the womb, the scar of our severed connection to our mothers, the center of our earthly forms, an opening on the underside of our fleshy, vulnerable bellies. I suppose Britney Spears’s belly button is where it begins.
0 kommentar(er)
