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This ear?
Yes, that there.
I.
For Síomón Solomon, the human ear "is not merely a passive cavity or vacuous opening but a
transfigurative chamber of auditory fantasy" [1]. If this makes it for some the most poetic organ, so too does it help to explain why for ear fetishists aural sex is the only game in town.
One famous lughole lover is the American filmmaker David Lynch, who not only assigns the severed, decomposing ear crawling with ants discovered in a field at the start of his cult movie Blue Velvet (1986) symbolic importance, but gives it something of a lead role [2].
For as Solomon goes on to note, Lynch became so fixated with the prosthetic ear, that he and his make-up
supervisor Jeff Goodwin referred to it as a character in its own
right - 'Mr Ear' - and designed it out of silicone rather than
latex, "even embellishing it, in a superbly disquieting fetishistic
signature, with locks of Lynch's own scissored hair" [3].
Lynch's ear serves much the same function for Jeffrey Beaumont as the rabbit hole does for Alice; it is what leads him (and us) into a troubling and dangerous underworld. It is only when he finally comes through his ordeal that he (and we as viewers) exit the ear.
Of course, not all detached ears found lying on the ground have such a serious symbolic role to play. In Carry On Screaming! (dir. Gerald Thomas,1966), for example, Oddbod's ear has a strictly comic function, allowing for a couple of predictable (but still amusing) gags.
Whether the ear possesses the same remarkable regenerative capacity as the repulsive-looking finger which Oddbod also loses, wasn't made clear in the film, but the possibility of regrowing lost tissues or organs is an intriguing one worth looking at in a bit more detail ...
II.
Salamanders are well-known for their ability to regenerate complex body parts and this has long fascinated scientists keen to discover if people too may one day be able to regrow lost limbs, etc.
Whether this would involve genetically engineering human-salamander hybrids or simply transplanting blastema tissue from these loveable amphibians, I don't know. But, either way, it would be remarkable if doctors found a way to induce regeneration (and tumor regression) in animals such as ourselves with a limited ability to repair our own bodies and a penchant for the quick-fix of forming scar tissue.
Having said that, it might prove easier simply to 3D print new bits and bobs in the lab, as in the recent case of a young Mexican woman who had her external ear reconstructed using this technique to create a living tissue transplant.
According to press reports [4], the transplant procedure was successfully
carried out at a US hospital in March 2022 and such newly developed technology promises to transform the lives of people born with microtia; a rare
congenital condition in which one or both outer ears are absent or
incompletely formed.
The company behind this groundbreaking work - 3DBio Therapeutics - said the new ear was composed of a
3D-printed collagen hydrogel scaffold using the patient's own cartilage
cells. Clinical trials involving several other patients are ongoing, but fingers crossed the organ won't be rejected so that what's ear today won't be gone tomorrow.
Photos from the Microtia-Congenital Ear Institute
Notes
[1] Síomón Solomon,
Hölderlin's Poltergeists, (Peter Lang, 2020), p. 101. For further discussion of Solomon's audiopoetics, see the post of 10 May 2021: click here.
[2] To watch the scene in Blue Velvet in which Jeffrey Beaumont (played by Kyle MacLachlan) discovers the ear, click here.
[3] Síomón Solomon,
Hölderlin's Poltergeists, pp. 99-100.
[4] See for example Roni Caryn Rabin, 'Doctors Transplant Ear of Human Cells, Made by 3-D Printer', The New York Times (2 June 2022), and/or Nicola Davis, 'Woman's ear rebuilt with 3D-printed living tissue implant' The Guardian (2 June 2022).
