The Ribs that March Forward Through the Skin
Japan | Intentional Starvation
The film is a strange one—it’s all shots of an endlessly blue-gray meadow. Dandelion-like puffs balanced on stems. Plastic sheeting wracked by rain. Pine needles pressed into snow.
It’s called ‘The Sound of Insects,’ and I do not watch most of it, but I do listen to it while I work a shift for a national youth suicide text line. While I text with someone diving slowly into depression and with someone else too perturbed by anxiety to concentrate, I listen to the film’s flat-voiced narrator slowly read the journal entries left by a Japanese man who was purposefully starving himself to death. The man’s most fervent ambition, for unexplained reasons, was to become a forgotten mummy in a forgotten meadow.
The movie is based on real life.
Day 0
The man buys a few snacks with a handful of change. He finds the blue-gray meadow and throws together a rough shelter from boards and the sheet of plastic. He does not say why he needs to die from starvation, only that he wants to. He brings a liter and a half of mineral water and a radio and a journal. In his shelter he listens to the radio. So far he sounds like a runaway fourteen-year-old. He writes in his journal.
“When I became absorbed in it, my hunger vanished. Perhaps music is edible?”
Day 10
In the last seven days he has masturbated a few times. Surprising, he thought, that he could still get it up after a week without food. His stomach hurt. He pressed out one of his last bowel movements. He listens to the radio during the day and appreciates the female announcer’s bell-like voice. He stills writes:
“Even without eating anything you can still fall in love.”
Day 20
He listens to insects. His stomach hurts very much. He thinks about the determination starvation demands. He has accidentally spilled the last of his mineral water, but sometimes it rains enough for him to drink the runoff from his plastic shelter, which tastes of wild pine. He reads Beckett’s Malone. Very few people know what it takes to starve.
“You can’t experience it unless you’re fasting.”
Day 30
It hurts. It hurts. Bitterness everywhere, and tightness, too, and a stomach distended as an inflated tire. But food has lost its appeal. Even become horrific. Some people die after 30 days, and he was expecting this. He had a day of death noted prominently on his mental calendar. But.
“It’s boring just thinking about death all day long.”
Day 40
His fast approaches Biblical proportions. Jesus must have been very strong, he thinks. Because Jesus was able to stand and walk back to his followers after his 40 days of fasting in the desert. But the Japanese man himself can no longer stand up. The radio’s batteries are fading. The man grows very cold. He hadn’t meant to survive into October.
“Adults who abuse children should be sentenced to a fast.”
Day 50
He is surprised. He dreams often. No real boundaries between the wake and the sleep anymore. Very hard to hold onto a sense of self. He has to concentrate tightly on words coming from the radio, but then the radio’s batteries exhaust themselves and dreams are the only voices left. The man smells bad. He wants cologne. His handwriting changes.
“My skin is like a dried apricot”
Day 60
He hears footsteps coming closer all the time. A girl stands beside his shelter and neither of them knows who is real anymore. He is grateful when a mosquito tries to suck his blood because some other living being has recognized him. He cannot urinate. No more oil left in his skin. He would like to find a cliff to really end it but he can barely move now.
“A centipede was crawling over my bed. No urge to eat it.”
Day 62
He lasted for 62 days. Twice as long as he had anticipated. He was afraid at the end that he might vomit up his soul. Who knows about the soul. The body did, indeed, mummify.
The Arctic Circle | Criminal Starvation
Rebecca Solnit tells us about a starving woman in The Faraway Nearby. The woman looked past dead. She could still wail, that’s what drew the hunters in. She had eaten her husband. She had eaten her son. She had not killed them though—part of the wailing was because she had to wail, she was still alive, and part of the wailing was because of the guilt of the eating. The three of them, together with the rest of their small group, had been snowed in while tracking seals. Overnight the snow piled up while they slept and sealed them in. And the dogs with them died and they ate those and the other humans died and she ate them.
After her rescue she was compelled to live for a year outside the village until she was judged no longer unclean. After completing her banishment she shared food eagerly with everyone. As though she owed everyone caloric energy. She remarried and had more children; so many parts of her survived the starvation.
“Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.” – Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Alaska | Accidental Starvation
A moose hunter found Christopher McCandless, the 24-year-old, dead, 67 pounds, in a sleeping bag inside Fairbanks City Transit System Bus #142. The bus had been hauled a few miles into the wilderness off Alaska’s Stampede Trail in the Denali National Forest. Christopher, who had taken to calling himself Alexander Supertramp, found it and denned up there to enjoy a dose of wild independence. As though the wilderness is a vacation one can take. He read Crichton, L’Amour, and Pasternak, and wrote in the margins, and wrote in his journal, and eventually even wrote help-me notes as the snow came and the bus froze and the river turned impassable and he realized his situation was one not of refuge from life but of retreat from it. The snow came; more snow came; Alex couldn’t hunt well enough; he cured meat badly; he ate bad wild potatoes; he scribbled:
| “Attention Possible Visitors. S.O.S. I need your help. I am injured, near death, and too weak to hike out. I am all alone, this is no joke. In the name of God, please remain to save me. I am out collecting berries close by and shall return this evening. Thank you, Chris McCandless. August?” |
On day 70 he was lonely and scared. Thirty days later: “Day 100! [underlined three times]. Made it! But in the weakest condition of life. Death looms as serious threat. Too weak to walk out, have literally become trapped.” He could not chop wood or keep the bus’s little stove going. He realized he was occupying his crypt. Then he accepted it. In his journal Days 109-112 are indicated by long empty lines. He tore a poem by Robinson Jeffers from his Louis L’Amour book:
Death’s a fierce meadowlark: but to die having made
Something more equal to centuries
Than muscle and bone, is mostly to shed weakness.
The mountains are dead stone, the people
Admire or hate their stature, their insolent quietness,
The mountains are not softened or troubled
And a few dead men’s thoughts have the same temper.
Christopher McCandless then wrote the number 113, but no line follows it.
Poland | Systematic Starvation
Hundreds of civilians and 28 physicians who “were significantly impacted by a lack of calories” were locked into the city in the space of a few blocks. Someone wrote it all down. Someone else smuggled it out. Someone else translated it from Polish. Someone else published it in 1979: “Hunger Disease: Studies by the Jewish Physicians in the Warsaw Ghetto.” One of the most meticulous, methodical accounts of starvation we know.
The book is full of details. First the body burns extra glucose stores, and then it melts fat. Then muscle tissues, then connective tissues and then organs. Nothing left to keep the whining nerves warm. That’s why the starving are always so sore, so cold. They are only 95 degrees Fahrenheit.
The body adjusts itself meticulously, in the same way one positions coals and blows strategically and shifts bits of wood around to keep a flame going. Systems shut down in orderly fashion like rats leaving the ship. The immune system gives up first. As the blood pressure drops, so does the core temperature. The heart only manages 40 thready beats a minute instead of its usual 60-70. The blood travels much more slowly through the body; oxygen is not well distributed. The eyes decrease their pressure so they don’t rupture. Cataracts form, even for children. Hair grows faster and the skin darkens.
The Jewish physicians locked in the Warsaw ghetto mapped it all. Their clinical skills were useless; they could only note the approach of death without being able to stave it off. They smuggled in advanced measuring tools. They began recording how life leaves the body and locks the door and softly tramps away.
Don’t forget—they were dying, too. Even with iron supplements, even with dribbling animals’ blood on their inadequate salads. Families often refused to report a death, since they could then keep claiming the departed’s 200-calorie dietary allotment. Two hundred calories is about a tenth of what the average body demands every day. Two hundred calories is a large potato. It is 20 potato chips.
The doctors asked the dying to do exercises that might, through hastening death, prove merciful. They needed the starving to complete sit-ups, if possible, for posterity, to examine the burden placed upon the circulatory system.
Something, something had to mean something. Not everyone in that ghetto starved there. Some were rescued—only, the Allies gave them too many calories at once, and the patients’ hearts failed, and then they, too, died.
Sudan | Famine Starvation
Kevin Carter crouched in a Sudanese field. He pointed his camera at a person folded onto her elbows, not very far away. The girl had close-cropped hair and was perhaps five or six years old. Carson’s camera also pointed at the vulture waiting for the girl to finish starving.
Looking at the photograph makes one feel like a vulture. Carter won a Pulitzer and killed himself a year later. The girl may or may not have actually starved.
Why write of starving? We are not starving.
That is, perhaps, the point.
Cyan James holds a Ph.D. in public health from the University of Washington and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan. Her short stories, essays, and poems have been published most recently in Salon, The Account, The Harvard Review, the Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Arkansas Review. She has been awarded three Avery Hopwood prizes, has attended several writing residencies, and is currently a Science & Technology Fellow at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The views expressed are her own and do not represent any other organizations.