In defense of disgust

What nausea reveals about Nazi ideology, rancid whale juice, and the putrefaction in the White House

The worst toilet in Scotland.

You can get nausea in a car. You can get it while pregnant. You can also get it out of the blue. This week nausea almost laid me to waste.

Everything became revolting. Being alone, being with people. Pillowcases. The scent of air. For one day it was bleak. For two days death seemed preferable. Then this morning I saw a fat orange dot on the brainless app game I’d been using to blot out my waking hours. At once, the color orange seemed fractionally non-revolting. That’s when I knew the lurching and queasing could, might, sometime stop enough to write this—a post about disgust and ideology.

But back to orange. Orange (of all hues) offered the possibility that the sensible order of the universe might be restored. I then thought of actual oranges. Maybe this was pushing my luck. The pitted skin would have to be left out of the fantasy. Orange skin might be laced—the word that came to mind—with poisons or pesticides or the horrible oils of human palms. But would the edible inside of the orange, the sections, the pulp, be any safer? The earth’s groundwater is poisoned, is it not? I started to retch again thinking about sepsis and fertilizer and Monsanto and fracking. Immaculate digital oranges were the most I could bear, it turned out. I called up Fruit Ninja.

Cold water was my second sliver of equilibrium. The thought of it, and the taste on my tongue. But my imagination could not be trusted. What if the vessel I used to contain cold water was contaminated by dangerous detergents, “BPAs,” or diseases in fingerprints? I thought the water must be from a mountain stream but what if upstream a raccoon had died and sent its festering innards in particles to adulterate the water? Or even some rotted ferns. The stream could only be made of rocks but rocks without fossils or DNA, just minerals, and not minerals made toxic by mining sludge but pure minerals, straight from the Big Bang. Only then could I consider cold water safe.

Every day we were insulted to our faces and had to take it in silence. Under one pretext or another, as workers, as Jews, or political prisoners, we were deported. Everywhere we encountered the revolting and insipid picture of ourselves that our suppressors wanted us to accept. And because of this we were free. Because the Nazi venom seeped into our thoughts, every accurate thought was a conquest. Here I am not speaking of the elite among us who were real Resistants, but of all Frenchmen who, at every every hour of the day or night, during four years, have said NO. — Sartre, Paris Alive: The Republic of Silence