CANNIBALISM (excerpt from Flesh)
Uploaded May 2023. Excerpt from my project Flesh.
Why do I fear being cannibalized when so much of my body is hard steel?
Steel ought to be difficult to cannibalize. It is not as tender as flesh, not something into which one can sink one’s bone-material teeth.
I have already given away the entire secret.
I spoke of cannibalism rather than mere consumption. There must be some common-being between the steel and the one who cannibalizes it then, must there not?
Are we not already mechanical? Were we to remove every last piece of steel from our lives, what would become of us? Entire cities would collapse, the supports of their towering buildings, their sky scrapers, removed like the bones of a fish. And the bricks, the concrete, the gleaming shards of glass would rain down upon the inhabitants and they, too, would collapse. So many bridges—gone, those traversing now plunged into the depths below, the impact of the infrastructure parting the waters only for a moment before before the waves crash together with a new force, swallowing all those unfortunate enough to have dared attempt a crossing.
We are nothing now without steel.
There is no shame in this. But we have long been more than just our animal flesh. Machine incorporated into animal, or perhaps animal incorporated into machine—we are nevertheless mechanized, even those whose bodies are purely meat, blood, and bone. It is easy to augment oneself. So I have done. So someone else, you perhaps, may as well.
Perhaps not internal augmentation such as mine, but an external one, one which allows one to make oneself manifest beyond oneself, to expand into the world and into others, to envelop, to turn what one encounters into an instrument, an extension of oneself, to consume—to cannibalize, when one encounters one of the same “kind”, whatever a kind may be.
I reinforce myself with steel. I would like it to guard me from violence. Others strengthen themselves with this same steel. With this very steel, they unleash violence far more brutal than seen before.
Of course I fear cannibalism. Not only the cannibalism that consumes entirely, but the cannibalism that sublates, the cannibalism that makes my body a part of the other’s, the cannibalism that makes of me an organ of further cannibalism.
Has it already begun?