Isolation, Part 2

On this bright cool morning, in which every moment dies alone like a feral cat in the woods, curled and ashamed in the hollow of a fallen tree, I can’t help hearing a construction team cutting stone on the street below. I have to shut the windows. Leaves tremble and robins sing as a drill punctures my gums. In a fit of frivolous ire I distinguish what should be and what shouldn’t. But on the pure plane of being, there’s no essential difference between bird calls and grumbling motors, wind from the sky or wind from a speeding car going 40 in a 20 mph zone. Pulverized squirrels and flattened bags of fast food commit the same cardinal offense of existing. Pressurized blood and tangy sauce coagulate into carcinogenic enamel.

The ancients feared the gods would flick their nuts if they grew too large; early man assumed nature harbored divine jealousy, hunger and lust, and that heroes and kings would die in agony, in hair tearing madness, crunching on the charred bones of their own children, in disgraced old age after lying with their mothers, condemned to blind insight and vain lament.

A new breed of audacious men drafted a plan; instead of fearing nature and propitiating the heavens, they developed machines and methods. Now it was nature's turn to weep and bare its abundant loins whether it wanted to or not. God’s turn to plead forgiveness, to beg for belief.

An astonishing success; the modern world of science and industry. But it’s part of the wrathful divine plan, too, not an overthrow. A staged rebellion serving the crown of extinction. Or it’s one more malfunction, one more botched product. What right does a weasel have to bite down on a chipmunk if a man should be shamed for eating a chocolate bar. The grass has no greater claim to its glowing green than the white shine of packing peanuts.

Dulled by habit into speaking of things we no longer think about, we distinguish sleep from waking, as we contrast peace from war. But there’s no peace in sleep, just as there’s none in death. Some evenings a dread comes over me, a foreboding of the night’s battle with at least three combatants: the blank unconsciousness, the roiling unconscious and the withering lucidity of the conscious mind. And then there’s me, which is none of those forces exactly, but a dirty peasant drafted into each army for a time.

The unconscious of dreams, of chimeras and eerie facsimiles, would like to conquer my rational empire, while my logical soul tries to put the heads of real people I’ve known back onto their rightful bodies, put my memories back in their proper place, separate one location from another and reaffirm the independence of inner and outer.

Pure nothingness wants to win for all time, plug the gushing vomit of ghouls, erase the manufactured goods of the mind. Blank from end to end, a borderless and motionless white desert without a single grain of anything, an eternal ocean of glue.

Never sleep enough. Never sure what wakes me, or if I’ll get up or fall back asleep. Upon waking, I tape together the pieces of my identity and try to count the casualties of the night’s melee. Why wake now and not later, why wake at all. Could’ve been a cat biting my bare toe, a subwoofer from a slow rolling car on the street, a gurgle from an appliance, a coughing in the air ducts of my apartment. However much I’ve slept, a roughness in my eyes as if my lids were sandpaper.

Always the same morning, whether it begins at 4 or 6 or 7. Led to the bathroom by my bladder. Cats swirling about, happy to see me awake, annoyed that I ignored them. If I were to stay in bed long enough they would surely eat my tender parts. Eyeballs, testicles, the intractable tub of belly fat on an otherwise lean torso.

The fact that cats will supposedly eat you when you die is sometimes referenced as proof that they don’t love you and have no heart, that they’re selfish and amoral beasts using you for food and shelter. Whereas a dog will lie down and die with you. But in times of stark survival, people eat each other. People eat themselves.

Eating someone might be the highest expression of love. An act of intimacy. Any two people can fuck but only soul mates consume each other. Only they live within each other so steadfastly they have a right to the other’s flesh. Not just the genitals, as old Kant liked to say, but every bit of the body. You say you know your lover, but do you know the taste of their skin fried in oil like a pork rind. Do you know their kidneys or liver, have you had their thalamus on a plate, would you stand and eat their shoulder over the sink.

And would you let them carve you up, put pieces of you in the oven. Roast your salted meats on a bed of root vegetables. The inside of one blended into the inside of the other. One flesh, the most radical and material instantiation of the spiritual bond of love.

Pure prejudice, the idea that eating a living being signals contempt or malice. A tiger crushes the throat of the deer with great reverence, in solemn affirmation of the indestructible will to live, in recognition of the valiant and noble spirit of its prey, whose fate it is to die in agony.

If you set aside all the spiritual claptrap, each animal wants to survive, and some survive by eating others. Those that don’t eat other animals eat plants, which are alive and, for all I know, feel pain, or at least a sensation of horror, of being ground up, swallowed and digested. But the emotions of eater and eaten are irrelevant, inconsequential. Only one iron law beneath all the wispy guidelines of our physical universe; execution; there is something only insofar as it destroys something else and is in turn destroyed.

We tend to think of revulsion toward cannibalism as a defining feature of our more advanced civilization. Eating human flesh is a savage practice, fit for crude worshippers of painted wood, naked bodies dancing with flames deep in the jungle. Our sophistication might be a cowardly misunderstanding of our own nature, the nature of nature, a festival of slaughter and shitting, a misery-go-round.

Ancient Greece and the tragic view of their playwrights. Brutal and heinous stories. I want to know where those stories came from. No one tries to explain it. Just a bunch of tool using apes who, for no reason because none of it is true, invented gods and other worlds, shape shifting beings and plots, gods ejaculating in mortal women, raping woodland creatures, cursing bloodlines. The existence of a band of monkeys is already improbable enough, but the thoughts of those monkeys, their blood and snot on cave walls, their oral accounts of mind-bending atrocities.

Every ritual act has a beginning, every idea has an original idealizer. But every origin refers to another origin, announces itself as a repetition of an earlier creation, older foundations. The mind reels in contemplation of contemplation. The mind is this reeling, superfluous and dominating, expanding shrink-wrap machine. A man could live the same way he lives now without consciousness, stories, explanations, he could eat and fight and die without reasons and myths and dreams, without pain and despair, or with pain and despair but without the outside eye, the doubling back on pain, the pain on top of pain.

Great myths with their familial butchery. Fathers killing their children and children killing their fathers, mothers and daughters conspiring against each other. In the first family in the Old Testament, one brother murders another over sheep. Four humans total and already deadly comparisons, enraging competition and then exile. Only an atomized and emancipated person wistfully recalls family values. Only someone utterly uprooted and adrift and lacking all contact with the boiling cauldron of blood at the center of the universe would lament the loss of old-time values. God commands us to honor our mothers and fathers because he designed us to betray them. Love our neighbors because we hate them. Nothing but contradictory demands that lead to gore and lunacy.

Family values from the oldest traditions: like tearing off the head of your child, serving your brother a stew of his son, fucking your mother and driving a dragger through your eyes, going to war over a slut, sacrificing your daughter for a gust of wind, blood feuds, avenging the deaths of brothers and sisters, stoning and exiling and burying disobedient women alive, frivolous suicide.

Complaints about plot holes; that’s what a plot is—a series of holes where action occurs, dramatic action, defiance, reversals; all gaps in logic, ruptures of reason. Man tells stories like God creates the world, in arbitrary and spastic fashion, like a dingbat winging it.

A plot without holes, or a plot with fewer gaping holes and flagging prolapses, would resemble your real life, with every steel-toed step in a lead vest tightly linked from school to school to job to marriage and children or no marriage and children to job to job to retirement and death, all possible holes stuffed with straw, the fiber of reasonable days working and going to grocery stores and restaurants and watching movies and caulking the cracks in time with fantasies you’ll never live.

The closer a story comes to real life, an average day, a normal sequence of events, the more it bores us. But boredom fulfills us as well. We like it because it makes us feel superior, and asks nothing of us.

Art covers up its perversity and weakness with sheer excess, through revolting proliferation. Art is so plentiful no one stays with any one work for long, long enough to think through its defects, not only of form and technique, but of priority and worth. What did a man fail to do as he buffed and edited and revised and rescored and reshot, what anxious relative did he spurn in favor of lightly titillating ungrateful strangers.

In the production and consumption of art, a man pretends to think and feel, act and imagine, but always from behind a wall, within the cells of his creations and the little cells of others.