An Invitation to Navel Gazing

Raymond Tallis requests the pleasure of your company for this most philosophical of gatherings.

From far, from eve and morning,

And yon twelve-winded sky,

The stuff of life to knit me

Blew hither: here am I. 

AE Houseman, A Shropshire Lad

I want to invite you to navel-gaze along with me. It’s an activity that has had a bad press, and has become a by-word for an excessive focus on one’s self, or for an inward-looking preoccupation with a narrow range of issues that excludes awareness of the wider world. But there is a more respectable mode of contemplating one’s navel: omphaloskepsis as an aid to meditation, in which the omphalos a.k.a. navel or umbilicus) becomes a window on a world beyond the horizon of quotidian concerns.

Facing The Darkness

Somewhere between the inward-looking gaze of the narcissist and the world-encompassing vision of the ompbaloskeptic mystic, there is the objective gaze of the anatomist. It reveals that the item rather dismissively called the belly button’ has a surprisingly complex structure. Have a look and you will see a central bump called the mamelon; a dense scar, or cicatrix’; a slightly raised skin margin, like a fortification, around the mamelon and the cicatrix, known as the cushion’; and the furrow’, which take the form of a depression inside the cushion and surrounding the mamelon.

I hadn’t noticed all this until I began researching this article, and so was reminded yet again of how brushing is our acquaintance with our own bodies. Ignorance, like charity, begins at home. I am not sure that I could pick the back of my hand which I know like the back of my hand’ out of an identity parade. My navel would be even more resistant to identification in a line-up.