There is nothing more pleasing to a urologist’s eye - at least, to this urologist’s eye - than to watch a ureter vermiculating. When you’re doing a nephrectomy for kidney cancer, it can be quite hypnotic. But please, allow me to explain.
Urologists are surgeons for the urinary tract and the male genital tract. And ureters are the long, narrow tubes that transport urine from each kidney to your bladder. They do this, not by passively allowing urine to flow down through them by gravity, but by active, automatic, intermittent, rhythmic contractions of their thick muscular walls. Much like the familiar movement of a worm (from the Latin, vermis). And hence, vermiculation.
But here, I’m borrowing Vermiculations to instead mean the contractions of my mind – the meditations, if you will, of a urologist. Of course, any comparison to the famed writings of an ancient philosopher king – or emperor to be more precise – is the height of arrogance. Which, you might suggest, would be just typical of a surgeon. But if I framed these intermittent thoughts as being more on a level with the lowly earthworm, then perhaps I could get away with it.
The self-proclaimed “philosophical entertainer” Alan Watts likened humans to mobile digestive tubes, as are worms, with large ganglia at one end (our brains), directing us to our next feed. I do like this notion of bringing humans back down to earth, quite literally, as the foraging, reproducing tubes with big brains that we are. How often throughout history have we thought how fabulously superior our own species is? True, our capacity to alter our own environment is indeed extraordinary. But what about other creatures, like the octopus, whose genius is instead to modify themselves to their environment? And aren’t we the only species to consciously commit acts of cruelty? It seems the more we learn about the nature of the universe, the less central to it we realise we are. Echoing Carl Sagan’s famous pale blue dot, Hubble makes humble*.
So I hope, in these Vermiculations, to stay true to the ideal of humility, and remember its shared etymology with human and humus – earth.
*Credit where credit’s due. My wife
, who is an infinitely more accomplished writer than I, came up with that one.