Eating People

Beneath the podium of disgust we have flung greed onto, there is a thing that drips—that seeps into a rag and gets wrung into all of our mouths, and without fail we lap it up with eager tongues. Whether we would like to admit it, there is a need within our fleshthings to consume. There’s a gluttony that lives inside the body, and it writhes and lunges as if by an electric impulse. While the greedy collects physical tokens of his sin, the glutton consumes until he himself is the token of his own sin. In this way the glutton must be united with his wants; he must wear the evidence of his desire as one would a scarlet letter. An infamous glutton, Tarrare, seemingly ate everything in his path—small animals and toddlers alike. When inspected in an autopsy his insides were left ravaged by his insatiable appetite—pus and ulcers branded into him like a rococo black mark of syphilis. 

What is worse than our need to consume is our consumption’s greatest object of desire: each other. To consume what was never meant to be consumed; the only act of consumption that is wired to leave the brain in a state of agonized disgust. As suggested by St. Gregory, it was never the food that was the sin but the desire. And nowadays, we are more desperate than ever to consume each other. Media that fetishizes cannibalism attempts to origami fold it into beautiful metaphor that represents true romance—the pinnacle of sanitized desire; to be loved is to be known, and if I’m consumed by you I can be sure that you knew every piece of me. What the movies and the books and the shows and the audience seem to not consider is that the latent content is equally as disgusting as the manifest. 

Is it truly pure, unadulterated love to want someone to the point of consumption? Aristophanes claimed we were rent in twain; that we are beasts afflicted with the phantom limb of another body, but in our attempts to once again become whole we forget that we are doomed to never truly be perfectly enmeshed in each other. As we are, we can only become a host forcing ourselves onto a parasite—or worse, a pair of parasites both convinced that they are the host. We consume each other and we digest until we are inextricable from one another—until we are left to wonder which parts are even our own anymore. Of all the ways to be a glutton, St. Gregory thought the worst to be consuming with too much eagerness as it showed an attachment to pleasure. Our desire to consume each other is driven by pleasure, and when engrossed in this impetus we tend to expedite the process of consumption. Food that didn’t receive the proper amount of chewing goes down the throat rough, as if to say, “I wanted to take it slow—didn’t you?” When you are running on desire and it’s stronger than even the signs of your own hunger, that’s when the body no longer speaks; when even your fullness is not enough to satiate your longing to consume. It’s then that you are a boiling mass revolving about another—when you are sinew in sinew and you have breathed them to a completion, and you are left having to question, “Am I inside, or are you?”

And as if you were breathing, it’s never just the inhalation; there must be a release. When it feels time to separate we purge each other. In his book of aphorisms, The Trouble with Being Born, Emil Cioran contemplates the matter, “Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal—less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him.” A purge can make room for more consumption, but a purge is also a display—the proof that there was any consumption to begin with; it’s a moment between the glutton and the parts of another that have been broken up by his insides. A purge is a memory, the evidence there were ever two. A final act of love erected by the body: the purge is to remember the meal. When the glutton’s desire has become too great, he must feel it all again as it leaves him. He’s forced to see the amount he has consumed and he must stare at it in a lumpy pile near his feet. Even when he returns to his consumption the past desires burn his throat as a reminder; the acid eats away at his teeth and he knows deep down that one day he’ll be rotting from the inside out.

Our desire to consume each other is perfectly grotesque—and we spend our time attempting to make it out to not be that way. It’s a reminder that we are filthy. That we are rotten, disgusting things; eager for phagocytosis, eager to fuck; we want to tear each other to pieces to add to ourselves and we claim it to be a symptom of love. We’ll call it sin, but is this something to be ashamed of? We are craving to press on the boundaries of our own humanity, to give into the animal impulse. We want to see how far the flesh will stretch; if I can pull it a mile farther than I thought, I might vomit and try to pull it a mile more. But perhaps the departure from our humanity that gluttony brings out in us might be exactly what is so human about it; our fascination with consuming each other is just testament that we cannot quiet our most innate desires.

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Sexual Salvation or Repression?

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Love Letters