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"It's nothing to do with mortality,but it's to do with the great beauty of the color of meat." So said Frances Bacon; an artist of the 20th century,
Explaining why he painted scenes of gore and squalor.
While admiring his sentiment, I would also postulate that Bacon's appreciation for the color of meat made him a connoisseur of the very mortality that he pretended to eschew.
I consider myself a connoisseur of mortality. While my millions of brethren and sistren chew, chew their way through whatever awful comes along. Inexorable, but mindless.
I preserve my energies for the sweetest of meat. The carcass tainted by fear. The carcass that suffered the protractive death. The agonizing death. Meat crisped alive by fire. Meat sliced open by steel. Meat with a bullet in its gut.
Here... in the slaughter house... I dine well.
It is everything to do with mortality. It is the great beauty of the color of meat; its many colors. The spongy purple of drowned flesh. The translucent rose of fresh viscera. The seething indigo of rot.
Bacon must have painted in the slaughter house.
It is the great beauty of the flavor of meat. Of its many flavors.
When we reduce a carcass to bone, we not only reveal its structure, we become composed of its elements. For most of the others, this is a matter of breaking down proteins and replenishing simple larval tissues.
For me, its a kind of catharsis. I take on the qualities of the deceased. I am nourished by his perceptions, and perhaps, somehow, I aid in releasing his soul.
Consenquently, I have lived thousands of lives. I have memorized countless tongues, and have written more than a few. I have constructed dynasties and torn them down, or watched them fall. I have been a fetus in a womb and a guru in a cave. I have digested the concepts of freedom and love and eternity and excreted them, over and over again.
Men kill other men sometimes for sport, sometimes for love, sometimes just sending them to the slaughter house to feed still more men. Or if left too long, to feed me and my kin.
Each one thinks he has lived in the worst of times, but nothing has ever been different.
I curl in the slightly damaged brain of a young man who died for no particular reason, after a protracted and honorable hunt. The glistening walls are dissolving; coming unglued, breaking down into their chemical components. I gorge myself on the primordial soup of his mind. A terrible realization that dawned upon him at the moment of death that sharpens the taste. I become drunk on his flooded experiences and emotions. I synthesize his knowledge. I live his entire life in the time it takes me to eat out a path to his liquifying brain.
I wallow in his world.
I die his weary death.
As always, it makes me glad to be a maggot in the slaughter house, and not a man."
 [ Overdose ] · Wed Jan 31, 2007 @ 06:46pm · 0 Comments |
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