thought experiment 1. the place of the parasite.

To what lengths do people go to remove parasites from their bodies and from society in general? How do we determine if these parasites are threatening or not? How did these parasites get to be where they are? All these questions have a common thread, and that is: what place does the parasite occupy, both physically and imaginatively? My roommate and I just watched Schindler’s List; this of course got me thinking about World War Two and the Holocaust. We can say that Hitler did what he did, in part at least, because he thought that he was removing a harmful parasite from the planet. The common argument would be to say that his error was thinking of a cultural group as a parasite, and not as people. I would like to shift this somewhat by suggesting that his error was not in mistaking a group as a parasite, but rather, in thinking that he was justified in attempting to kill off a parasite group. At first glance it might seems offensive to refer to Jews as parasites, but if we take a look at the bigger picture we find out that this really is not significantly harsh view of humanity. The Nazi’s were also a parasite, both to the German population, and to Europe as a whole. The allied forces also, all parasites to their respective countries.
Anyone who has ever poked around into parasitism will probably be quick to tell you that parasite comes from the Greek “Parasitos” meaning “near food”. I could stop there and say that anyone or anything that is not starving is a parasite. This method of deriving definitions is a poor one, in my opinion; it’s outdated, vague and lazy. I am going to try to expand the context a bit, one of the definitions turned up by the The Oxford English Dictionary, is: “A person who lives at the expense of another, or of society in general; esp. a person who obtains the hospitality or patronage of the wealthy or powerful by obsequiousness and flattery; a person whose behavior resembles that of a plant or animal parasite; a sponger. Chiefly derogatory.” Now instead of “anything that is not starving is a parasite”, a parasite can be just about anything. With this multitude of available interpretations, “parasite” becomes much more significant as an action rather than as a thing; keeping in mind of course that humanity comes up on the roster before any other, seemingly more conventional parasites, such as a tape worm.
Not only do the above definitions give us an idea of the vastness of potential parasite has as a verb, but they also hint at where the parasite will always be found. The parasite is chiefly concerned with sustenance, often food, but not always; and since it does not produce its own it must remain near to the host. Without the host, the parasite dies off, or rather, whatever is acting as a parasite can then no longer parasite. Without nearness, neither the host, nor the parasite exists. The imagined threat of a parasite is also greatly mitigated over distance, as we see in The life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr, Lothario is only threatened by, and only poses a threat to, Murr when in close proximity. Here the parasite-host relationship does not hold well, instead we have a battle over who will be the dominant parasite. “The brute will become a lecturer, receive a doctorate, will end up as a professor of aesthetics lecturing to students on Aeschylus! ... -- Oh I am quite beside myself! – that cat will root about in my own entrails…” (111) In this section we find a Lothario worried that Murr will rise up and claim his job. Each thinks the other to be the inferior parasite, but neither is a threat to the other when separated. Parasites, it seems, have a competitive nature over hosts.
Similarly, hosts also would appear to compete over parasites. This is derived from the intimate relationship that a parasite and a host share. I am by no means the first to realize this, no here is where the flea gets its truest poetic justice:
“Thou know'st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead ;
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pamper'd swells with one blood made of two ;
And this, alas ! is more than we would do.”
Donne, with poetic panache, cuts right to the heart of it. The flea, as a parasite, is intimate enough to represent sex without the loss of virtue on the part of any one of them. Not only does the flea get to take in part the act of Donne’s desire, but it is also pampered by this act, the parasite, it seems, is allowed enjoyment. The flea is also protected, partially at least, by being a vessel for a sacred mixture of blood. In “Puce” Barry Sanders gives us some history to Donne’s metaphor, “The events in question unfolded in the most innocent way. One particular evening in the summer of 1579, Monsieur Étienne Pasquier, a lawyer and distinguished man of letters, made a call on Madame Madeleine Des-Roches at Poitiers, and, to his surprise, noticed a flea on the bosom of her daughter,” The men at this get together, we are to understand, did not know what to make of this. The flea has had centuries of negative connotations attached to it, but at the same time, how could they kill the well positioned fellow without embarrassing both themselves and the young mademoiselle? Instead of taking action, the men did a rather French-y thing, and all wrote poetry about it. Donne’s sexually charged flea was born. These Frenchmen did more than just create a witty metaphor however; they were perhaps the first to discover a parasite that is socially desirable. Now we have iPods and iPads, and we shell out big money for these things, and then even more money for applications and songs to fill them.
If anything is to be gained from this thought experiment thus far, I hope it is that parasites are everywhere, and that quite a few of them are not too bad to have around, or are at least tolerable. This, however, is all still built into a society that usually has an aversion to parasites, or as OED puts it, their use is “Chiefly derogatory” we have also know that people will go to great lengths to remove what they perceive to be a parasite from themselves and from society. As I have hinted at earlier, this is not so much derived from any notions of superiority, but rather from competiveness stemming from instinctual systems. To become a parasite contains a set of desires, the want for more, for improvement. For the last piece of this puzzle, I want to take a look at Shivers as the ultimate representation of where lies the parasite. The parasite’s relationship to the host ends up being so intimate, that competition is ruled out almost entirely amongst the infected population; it seems likely that the parasite only wishes to spread to increase the population, not to become more powerful than any other individual parasite. Within the Starliner itself, the parasite’s transmission is always evident, but aside from the transmission, its origin and destination are much vaguer. Take Dr. Hobbes for instance, we are led to believe that he first engineered the parasite at first to replace livers, but then we are told that he made them into a combination of a powerful aphrodisiac and a venereal disease in order to let humans go back to their animal instincts, to live lives less burdened by social constraints. Finally, although at the beginning of the film, we see him kill off his test subject in an attempt to also kill the trial parasite. This seems to confirm my ideas that a parasite without a host is a vague notion at best, and also that you cannot really know what sort of relationship the two will have until the point of actual exposure. Also raised is the question of what will the parasites ultimate victory look like. Suppose it takes over every human, will the parasite still be considered a parasite, or will the world’s population just gain a characteristic. In order for a parasite to exist, do we not need a norm with which to compare the host-parasite relationship?
My discoveries are thus: the parasite cannot exist without the host, and by that rule, nothing is a host without a parasite. If the parasite leaves the host, or the host removes the parasite, the relationship is also void. The parasite only sometimes seeks the host. The host sometimes seeks the parasite. By these rules, parasites often compete for hosts, hosts often compete for parasites. More intimate parasite-host relationships can sometimes negate this competition. The place of the parasite is the host; the place of the host is the parasite.