Insides

We seem happy enough to countenance the death of our inner organs--our smokey lungs, our drink-scratched livers--provided only that this death does not manifest itself on our outsides. Perhaps we consider that landscape of viscera and darkness, that inward landscape, to be already, in a sense, dead; life happens at the level of skin, of face, of secondary sexual characteristics, of hands, of appearance, of that endless convulted surface called brain.