"'The truth is that the combative instinct . . . seems to be as
constant, if not quite as active . . . now as in the days when the
oldest of the mummies led his armies to victory or defeat.'"
"'The Garden Party,' c. 645 BCE. King Teumman's head hangs from the tree
on the left, suspended by a rope through his jaw, while a harpist plays
nearby and attendants bring food to the king and queen, who are cooled
by a pair of fans as they relax under a grape arbor."
How to live, how to die, how to fight or flight, how to run-on
sentences, certainly. Our bodies have it all right. For starters,
nothing about them behaves as if under any delusion of singularity. The
gut cultivates its communities, DNA differences be damned. The immune
system wages an endless war of intelligence, complete with moles,
double-agents, secret police, the works. The heart just works, but even
then with the lungs, to feed everyone: home cells, friendly resident
aliens, cancerous traitors, omnivorous squatters. Once again, no one
thing about any of this living. Just the works.
We, nonetheless, we co-creators of our much-discussed anthropocene,
we know how to ask the absurdist questions of our selves, as if we were
selves: "What is the value of one life?" Do we know it's not either one
or a life, we're asking about?
What we fear the most is more like amputation, our heads swinging
from trees, suspended by stout, triple-threaded ropes through our jaws.
What we fear is the fleeing of the circulating self from circulation,
the flight of the miraculous awareness from the body that momentarily
housed it, or
What we fear is more like starvation by loss of habitat, no more grape arbors under which a mind reclines. The soul is driven out of
doors, a refugee from a combat zone, a deluge, or
What we fear is what we are. Compound beings that make a magical,
burning whole, metaphorical, flame-like, for a time, but do not inhere
in either the fire or the smoky, evanescing light it yields.
We can fight over this. We can order each other to wrap our corpses
after wars, drive the countless lives out from our remains, bind our tongues
with spells, the future selves with incantations not to despoil and
loot the loot of our despoiling campaigns. It won't work, except for the
spells themselves. The seals and cylinders may murmur quietly a great
long time along the fallen rows of torched, smashed shelves. Or not.
I have a terrible secret to tell. We come and go, we're never
whole. We never die, but what we are is not anything that actually
survives. We're never going to turn into hungry ghosts or angelic
choirs. We're already as godlike as we might get.
Or worse. What we really are, hunger and dying aside, is neither
energy, nor matter, nor gravity, nothing more than the passing of signs
occasionally noticing, like dogs growling uncertainly at mirrors that do
not smell at all of dog, that we are the crazed thing at which we bare our cruel,
our murderous, our word-honed canines, time. Or,
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