The Beauty of Bile February 15, 2009

So, I just realized how much I love using the act of “throwing up” as a metaphor. Really, it’s quite fantastic if you think about it. There are very few metaphors that actually get a guttural response, but if you start talking about vomiting, especially as a reaction to something, anything that incurs disgust, people can actually feel what it is that you are referring to.

If something grosses us out, we gag. If someone or something offends us, we spit. And if something really bothers us, whether we are shunted about on a moving roller coaster, or sickened by how much we’ve eaten, or sickened at what we’ve eaten, or we see something or experience something too graphic, too horrible to bear, we purge it from our systems. We expel it.

If I say that “the sight of her dead father caused her to bend over and retch in agony; her insides wriggling and quenching so that nothing remained within; that everything, the whole disgusting mess, was brought to light,” you can feel it. You can feel the pain, the fear, and the horror of that girl. Everyone knows how horrible it feels to physically throw up, and everyone knows how mentally and physically it feels to want to get rid of certain feelings (e.g. grief for a dead father).

We know that sometimes the only way to feel better is to remove what is ailing us, to remove the aches, to remove feeling all together. Or, in other words, to up chuck.

Throwing up is both physical and metaphysical. It is a symbol of vulnerability. It is spiritual.

Example 1, Christianity: “Because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spew you out of my mouth.” (Revelations 3:16)

Example 2, Buddhism: Nirvana or Nibanna is the “freedom from the endless cycle of personal reincarnations, with their consequent suffering, as a result of the extinction of individual passion, hatred, and delusion.” But the word itself, in the original Sanskrit nirvāṇam is translated as “a blowing out, extinction, nirvana,” with "nis-, nir-,” being “out, away,” and “vāti” meaning “it blows.” So, literally, the word nirvana means “to blow out or away.” Or, as I like to say, “to blow chunks.”

The “blowing” represents the purging or outword push, the turning away from wrong views, wrong intentions, wrong speech, wrong actions, wrong livelihoods, wrong efforts, wrong mindedness, and wrong concentration by getting rid of those “chunks” of suffering, hatred, and delusion which reside on the inside, whether in the pits of our stomachs or the depths of our souls.

Who knew vomit could be the key to spiritual awakening?

But the metaphor for throwing up doesn’t stop there.

What happens after we blow these chunks? What do we feel when the pain has subsided, when the knots have unfurled, and the guts have stopped churning?

We feel relief. Sweet relief with a side of burning acid that coats our throats and mouths. To remind us, perhaps, that although we’ve gotten whatever it was that we ingested (whether physical food or mental anguish) out of our system, their will always be a trail, something bitter and sour left behind. The metaphor for vomiting is that we can push what is hiding in the dark into the light, we can disgorge and we can eject. But, every time we  heave and ho, the residue from our refuse, the bile from our belly, will remain on our tongues long after the source has been flushed. Puke’s passage and the rancor it leaves behind is a physical memory to past regurgitations.

So my people go forth and gag, heave, retch, spit up, throw up, disgorge, regurgitate, eject, expel, and spew! For these are verbs guaranteed to make you writhe and squirm. They are delightfully disgusting tools you can use to conjure and invoke the most pleasant pain and suffering.

These are words to make you feel. They are detoxifying. They are freeing. Take them in and then push them out. This. . . this is the beauty of bile.