Mary Cappello

by Swallow: Foreign Bodies

  Then there’s an entertainer whom no one today remembers but who was known in his time as the Human Ostrich. A 1922 article by George G. Hopkins in the Brooklyn Medical Journal describes a man who worked as a “freak” at one of the “cheap shows” in New York. He was in the habit of swallowing things that members of the audience would pass up to the stage. Regularly, in an evening’s performance, he would swallow “80 pins ... and a lot of hair pins and long wire nails, most of which passed through him without doing any harm.” What brings him to the offices of Dr. Hopkins is the (more or less) accidental ingestion of a four-foot-long window chain. Usually, he performed with the chain attached to a string: first swallowing the chain, and then pulling it back out of his mouth by the string to which it was attached, as though flossing the center of his being. On this night, he lost his grasp of the string.

  Dr. Hopkins is incredulous before the Human Ostrich until he fishes around in his feces, from which he recovers “two horseshoe nails, one wire nail, and 19 ordinary pins.” “Hoping to get some more of his intestinal hardware,” the doctor feeds him some bread and crackers followed by cathartics. His patient, in tremendous pain, begged for Hopkins to operate on him, and he did, and he discovered, upon opening his stomach, the following inventory: “129 pins, 6 hair-pins, two horseshoe nails, 12 half-inch wire nails, 2 door-keys, 3 chains, and a large ring.”

  Hopkins’s article is accompanied by a long and narrow collage assembled after the surgery that resembles a hieroglyphic tablet or a kind of Dead Sea Scroll of the stomach in need of an interpreter. The Human Ostrich, chastened by his medical ordeal, decides that “he will not swallow any more truck” but will instead “spend his time selling pictures of the cut” the surgeon’s “knife inflicted on his stomach.” “The object lesson concerning the limitations of the human digestive tract” (in the doctor’s words) was, however, lost on the Ostrich—as was, I’m sure, the pun in the phrase “object lesson”—because the nineteen-year-old youth returns to the hospital in a few months’ time with more stuff inside him. Was it really the case that swallowing objects had become compulsive for him, though, or was it that the audience couldn’t stand not to see him swallow things, having gotten used to his particularly graphic performance? He went to the hospital after a group of men recognized him in a bar and forced him to swallow “2 wire nails four inches long, an ordinary nail, and a piece of bone two inches long.”

  He refuses a second operation and claims his pains have subsided, leaving us to imagine him walking in the direction of certain death, beyond the doctor’s office door, into unsafe streets and even less safe entertainment halls. The swallowing man is a caricature of celebrity: too recognizable, he is open to punishment for his daringly self-penetrating acts, destined to repeat what his audience can’t bear to watch and yet can’t keep themselves from wanting (because isn’t it ambivalence that drives such titillation?), needing him to perform for them at all costs like diabolical babies insistent that the adults throw the ball, tickle them under the chin, or play patty-cake once more, delirious with the pleasure of their new word: “Again!”

  The Human Ostrich seemed to perfect his act onstage, discovering what he was capable of with each new performance, but a special place needs to be reserved for the sword swallower who stands before us only after years of practice in private. No one “spots” for the sword swallower: he’s not an acrobat, though he has been grouped alongside the saltimbanco—literally, from the Italian, a person who jumps or somersaults onto a bench. The sort of performer who stops traffic to claim your attention, who interrupts the proper use of a bench by making it into a stage, who subsequently lures you in and, like a charlatan, cons you in some way. Most sword swallowers also obviously use a piece of the object world in unanticipated ways, but they aren’t illusionists: they want you to believe, yes, but what they want you to believe is horrifyingly real.

  In what furtive corner of a day—with the shades drawn or raised—does the sword swallower ply his trade? I picture the novitiate in the bathroom, basement, or garage, or perhaps the type of seedy chamber built of concrete blocks where boys perfect an unknown martial art. An open field will do if sufficiently far from people set before their easels, people running with kites, or throwing Frisbees on a green. Plein air might be perfect for this act that raises ceilings and looks to the sky, but I can only imagine a tiny room of banishment inside a domestic scene as the sword swallower’s proving ground. I picture a utility closet where no one expects to find him—he’s hardly missed—but out from which, in time, he emerges triumphant. Daily and for years he strikes the pose: the attitude of any number of ecstatics and ascetics and saints: the head thrown back beyond repose, and then the sword thrust in . . . but only after the head’s thrown back, almost as a punishment for ecstasy rather than its source.

  It’s hard to say whether sword swallowing is on the decline or on the rise: a renowned performer named Dan Meyer (aka Halfdan, an old Viking name for “Half Danish”) is one of the few practitioners left in the world, but he can’t keep up with the demand for shows in every part of the world. Meyer came to sword swallowing expressly as an alternative to magic; not only are the swords he swallows quite real, but, he jokes, the act requires “pinpoint accuracy and razor-sharp concentration.” The range of arenas that showcase his work is wide: from a spot on “Food Magic,” an episode of Unwrapped on the Food Network, to gigs before scientists at Cambridge University, Harvard, MIT, Oxford, and Imperial College; from appearances in Ripley’s Odditorium to shows for the Wellcome Trust, London’s prestigious library for the history of medicine; from demonstrations for videos like 99 Most Bizarre Self-Inflicted Injuries to inspirational, motivational, and even religious venues.

  It’s fascinating to see Meyer adapt his work to suit the occasion. Performing a sword-swallowing act before a Christian audience, he prefaces his show with a compelling set of analogies between Jesus and himself: just as Jesus was thought to be a magician by those who didn’t believe, so are sword swallowers. But Jesus said, “Blessed are those who have seen and believed; even more blessed are those who have not seen and yet believed.” Like Jesus, Meyer will risk his life to make an impact on your life (which isn’t to say he expects to die on stage, but that he might). Sword swallowing, he explains, is a perfect example of the amazing work of God, he who fashioned such an incredible thing as a human body capable of swallowing swords. Like a sword swallower, all Christians could afford to be more real, Meyer explains: this, not magic, is how to bring people into the fold. Pushing the string of metaphors further, he closes by describing the word of God as the sword of the spirit, and recommending that we try to swallow the word of God each day.

  “Laugh, then think” is the motto of the Ig Nobel Prize committee, a group that celebrates science’s eccentric side and has honored Meyer. Organized by the Annals of Improbable Research, Ig Nobel Prize events have featured the inventors of the plastic yard flamingo and of karaoke. They’ve honored physicists studying how sheets become wrinkled, chemists working on extracting vanilla from cow dung, linguists studying the problem of the word “the” for anyone trying to create an index, nutritionists “looking into the seemingly boundless appetites of human beings by feeding them with a self-refilling, bottomless bowl of soup,” and the inventors of a “centrifugal-force birthing machine” that, according to the Guardian, “spins pregnant women at high speed.” The Ig Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 went to an Ohioan group that had instigated “research on a chemical weapon to make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other,” while the prize for aviation went to an Argentinean group for the “discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in rats.” Meyer and the British radiologist Brian Witcombe won the prize for medicine in 2007 for an article they co-wrote for the British Medical Journal, “Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects.”

  “In non-medical terms,” Dan quips in an appearance on the Food Network, “I cram two feet of solid steel down to tickle the bottom of my tummy.” In medical terms, what
he does is much less whimsical and staggeringly complex. On a Web site he runs for the Sword Swallower’s Association International, Meyer describes how

  physically, in medical terms, the blade goes into the mouth, the epiglottis must be flipped open, the alignment and placement must be just right, so that the blade goes into the glottal chamber behind the prominentia laryngea, the voice box, past the pharynx, through the cricopharyngeus or upper esophageal sphincter (UES), down the esophagus, between the lungs, nudge aside the heart, past the liver, relax the lower esophageal sphincter (LES) so the blade goes into the stomach at or near the duodenum—each step must be done correctly and very precisely—one slightly wrong move and you could puncture any of those organs and kill yourself.

  In ever more exacting terms, the sword swallower alters the shape and direction and relationality of mouth to throat to esophagus to stomach, as a book excerpted on Dan’s Web site titled Bizarre Medical Abnormalities explains: “In the first place the head is thrown back so that the mouth is in the direction of the esophagus, the curves of which disappear or become less as the sword proceeds; the angle that the esophagus makes with the stomach is obliterated and finally the stomach is distended in the vertical diameter and its internal curve disappears, thus permitting the blade to traverse the greater diameter of the stomach . . .”

  Amazingly, two reflexes are brought under the sword swallower’s control: the gag reflex (which prevents passage of unwanted, forced, or inedible substances down the throat), and the retch reflex (which prevents passage of the same into the stomach). Bright-eyed, blond-haired, ever-energized Meyer adds that the peristaltic reflex—the twenty-two pairs of muscles that move the bolus of food down the esophagus—must also be brought under his control. These reflexes are, in Meyer and Whitcomb’s words, “desensitized,” while the pharynx, esophagus, and horizontal fibers of the cricopharyngeus, “which are not usually under voluntary control,” need to be relaxed. Without this “relaxing”—though “relax” cannot really capture the transformation of the body by a sword swallower—the throat can close up, a person can become asphyxiated, or a sword could even get stuck in its human sheath.

  Dan talks about the control of reflexes as the place where the psyche enters in, in a mind-over-matter sort of way, but I don’t know if the mind and the body can be so neatly severed in making sense of what the sword swallower’s body becomes, what he masters and what he serves, and all else that is going on at the scene of the sword swallower’s body—which is really a culmination of a series of previous acts—that the mere spectator doesn’t really see.

  Chevalier Jackson was often keen to point out that the esophagus is the most intolerant of human viscera. Poulet (that nineteenth-century compendia maker whom we visited earlier) would have disagreed, as he emphasized how the purposeful swallowing of fbdies “shows how great the tolerance of the digestive canal may become through habit.” Jackson claimed a failure to understand that, in order to develop a habit which is pleasurable, a person might have to put the body through unpleasurable paces, to overcome an initial distaste in order to acquire a new taste. “Everyone knows that to learn the tobacco habit requires overcoming distaste and nausea. Why do it?” he asks (LCJ, 171). It’s as though Jackson cannot understand masochism but only sadism, or he cannot fathom the human enmeshment of pleasure and unpleasure. But this entry through a painfully difficult, seemingly impossible set of doors in order to arrive at a place more exquisitely painful is what sword swallowing is all about. The audience to one of Dan Meyer’s performances witnesses a shocking act that lasts but a few seconds. The act is powerful, but so long as we don’t think beyond the moment of its startle, a disconnect maintains between the spectacle and the potentially more powerful, strange, and compelling route the sword swallower had to take to get there. What the sword swallower keeps to himself, what he does not publicly perform but which might be more meaningful than the culminating thrust is the self-disciplining, acclimating, retraining, and reconditioning of the body that he pursues via “practice” twelve times a day for at least three years before being able to swallow a sword.

  We see the lunge and plunge, but we don’t see the disciplining of the body, the radical reorganizing achieved, the familiarization with intrusion, the overriding of tendencies of the autonomic nervous system, the establishment of an independence of parts—in short, an overturning of what most of us think of as a nonmanipulable real (in which case, the sword swallower does perform a kind of magic). He brings under control what is not supposed to be controllable. He’s a submissive (he throws his head back), and he’s a master (he thrusts his sword), all at the same time. He is self-taught, but how can we describe his resulting expertise? He’s an expert in himself as his greatest obstacle.

  “The gag reflex is desensitized,” Meyer and Witcombe explain, “sometimes by repeatedly putting fingers down the throat, but other objects are used including spoons, paintbrushes, knitting needles, and plastic tubes before the swallower commonly progresses to a bent wire coat hanger.” It’s possible, then, that hysterics who swallowed large quantities of hardware in different shapes and sizes were also bent on controlling their gag reflex and relaxing their lower esophageal sphincter. That in both cases, an experiment is perhaps being carried out that is not only physiological but ontological: if part of the body no longer reacts, recoils, or protects, what becomes physiologically possible, the hysteric and the sword swallower seem to ask, and what, subsequently, does the body-as-the-person and the person-as-her-body become?

  In Ferenczi’s essay on hysterical manifestations, he makes an analogy between “normal” children and hysterical adults: what the two have in common is this tendency toward reorganizing the body and a “habit of ... super-achievements . . . for instance, the individual control of muscles which ordinarily contract symmetrically, the voluntary control of the cardiac, gastric, and intestinal functions, of the muscles of the iris, etc., which they finally display as though endowed with some special gift.” Children are trained to move beyond such feats since “a great part of the education of a child consists of breaking away from such tricks and acquiring others.” Ferenczi does not say what these others are, but his description makes a place for the sword swallower to join the duo of child and hysteric. Perhaps in this way the circus is an implicitly nostalgic activity, that what we like about the circus is the chance to watch people perform from inside a “stage” (in more than one sense of the word) that we were jettisoned from by education; perhaps we experience a longing there for a relation to the body that we had to give up in order to accede to adulthood. The sword swallower, then, can be understood as repeating the tricks of and on the body, the kinds of tests we only began to indulge as children but never took anywhere before settling into the body’s place and fit. The sword swallower continues to investigate that relationship.

  To speak of the sword swallower misses the details, though, that distinguish Dan Meyer’s work, its singularity and particularity.

  Dan sometimes talks with the sword in his throat.

  He often indulges in what is known as the drop: the performer holds the sword in his throat using only the muscles of the esophagus and then lets the sword drop further down the throat by relaxing the esophageal muscles.

  After he has swallowed a sword, Dan bends forward with the hilt sticking out of his mouth, which makes him appear, to my mind at least, a cross between a mythical bird with a tongue of steel and a bodybuilder in the act of statuesque flexing, but in his case the gesture is an extreme alternative to a reflex and therefore not like any “flex” we may have seen before.

  Dan has been known to swallow a sword after being dropped into a tank filled with sharks, which might make it seem as if he’s gotten so good at swallowing swords that the challenge no longer entirely satisfies him. He often entrusts (and, let’s also admit, dares) an audience member to experience a part of the act of swallowing a sword with him by giving someone the terrifying privilege of pulling the sword out. (On Dan’s Web
site, audience members can watch a video in which he has reserved this privilege for the world’s smallest man.) “Nudge aside the heart” is a phrase he is fond of using when asked to explain what swallowing a sword entails, which makes me think one of the fantasies at work in his own performances is to bypass the organ most essential to the organism. The heart—so central, so overriding, so necessary to life, our physiology’s commander, so to speak—is taken down several pegs with that word “nudge,” as if to say, I don’t need you, you’re in the way of something else this body is becoming. To “cram” or to “tickle,” that is the question; to cram so as to tickle, to force so as to subdue. Oneself. Ah, but to tickle his tummy—this is what he is doing, he says, when swallowing a sword, and one can’t help but imagine the parent or grandparent who might have loved/tortured him with tummy tickles as a child, but never knew it would lead to this.

  To swallow a sword is to be entered into by different means, and I wonder if this can be applied to thought. How does one concoct the idea of swallowing a sword in the first place?—given that “concoct” means, first and foremost, to boil together, to prepare (concoquere), to cook (coquere); in the second place, to digest; and in the third place, to form and prepare in the mind? How does thought enter in? I like that sword swallowing helps me to wonder, what do I have to nudge aside to make room for the unthinkable? Various shapes hold me—they are my habits—and many others will never in my lifetime rise up inside of me, dawn on me, occur to me. Or does thought occur in me? Sword swallowing, hysterical swallowing, Chevalier Jackson’s introduction of a rigid metal scope into an orifice: each of these acts is “preposterous”: something has been turned around, a fundamental order undone—I almost wrote, “by these acts of upheaval,” but even that word won’t do—in these acts of literal down-heave-al.