Oh body! my homeland! thou art like steel
The Old Axolotl“Oh body! my homeland! thou art like steel” is a recurring expression that makes the body at once a place of belonging and something shaped by metal. Its first appearance is tied to Bartek’s work on a replacement limb; its later return among the book’s ex-librises gives the line a final, emblematic presence.
The Body as Homeland and Material
The expression addresses the body as a homeland, a place to inhabit rather than merely an object one possesses. Its comparison to steel complicates that intimacy: the body is figured through a material associated with machinery, endurance, and construction. The line’s invocation of home and its metallic image therefore hold together belonging and transformation without resolving their tension.
Appearance in Bartek’s Workshop
The phrase appears as a core line in a scene set in an underground-garage workshop beneath the forty-storey Aiko Tower apartment complex. Bartek is laboring there to make himself a replacement limb. The surrounding account describes how he has accumulated surplus robot parts from work for the Tokyo transformers of the Royal Alliance, along with extensive construction plans and hardware catalogs. In that setting, the line’s image of a body like steel is placed beside practical work to repair or replace part of a body with mechanical materials. The evidence does not identify the phrase’s speaker or explain its origin, so its force comes from this juxtaposition rather than a stated attribution.
Recurrence Among the Ex-Librises
The expression appears again, unchanged, under the heading “Ex-librises:” near the end of the book. It is listed alongside other brief, memorable lines, including “All that lives must die, passing through steel to eternity” and “Would you like to know more?” The recurrence carries the body-and-steel image out of the workshop and into a concluding collection of textual fragments. What first accompanies a concrete act of bodily reconstruction thus also serves as a compact motif for the book’s entanglement of human embodiment and mechanical existence.
