Towards an Aesthetic Cannibalism (1)

Armin Meiwes and Bernd-Jurgen Brandes were two different men when they met, but I have a hard time telling them apart. It's not just because Meiwes slaughtered and ate Brandes in March of 2001, with Brandes's alleged collaboration and consent. Photos of the two men when they were both alive show striking similarities in their appearance. They could have been brothers or quasi-narcissist lovers, with their close-cropped hair, high foreheads, and wide, thin-lipped mouths. Introduced through a cannibalism bulletin board on the Internet, they were instantly smitten with each other's mutual (and complementary) fantasies and desires. By that point, Meiwes's personal ad posting on the Internet had already empowered him to scout out other "young, well-built men aged 18 to 30, for slaughter." Several of these candidates advanced to the final round and diligently arrived, one by one, at Meiwes's house to be strung up naked on a meat hook, suspended over a butcher's table, and strategically mapped by Meiwes, who used a black marker pen to delineate choice cuts on their bodies. This experience proved viscerally disturbing enough to rouse the dormant survival instincts of the would-be devourees, and Meiwes, ever true to the etiquette of metrosexual Internet hook-ups, let them off the hook.

Brandes, on the other hand, was serious enough to sell his car, compose a will, wipe clean his computer hard drive, and request a day off work before departing for Meiwes's home in the village of Rotenburg. According to Meiwes, who picked him up at the Rotenburg train station, Brandes stepped forward from the platform and candidly announced himself: "I am your Cator [Brandes's Internet moniker]. I am your flesh." They then repaired to Meiwes's house, where Meiwes programmed a camcorder to document the important event. The home video was to serve both as Meiwes's trophy and eventually (if you believe in the kind of calculated foresight made possible by worst-case-scenario hindsight, extending the power of the individual to regulate public revisions of his/her own causal life narrative) as his defense in the courtroom, where crucial footage was played as evidence to buttress the claim that Brandes had marched into a consensual slaying.

Indeed, once the camera got rolling, Brandes and Meiwes were free to engage in some heavy symbolic discourse. Acting on a longtime fantasy of Brandes's, Meiwes first attempted to bite off Brandes's penis. When this failed, a sharp kitchen knife was produced with greater success, and the severed member was flambeed and eaten together by Meiwes and Brandes, who began to feel faint from loss of blood. Hours passed. After downing plenty of liquor, sleeping pills, and several spoonfuls of narcotic cough syrup, Brandes realized his suicidal desires by allowing Meiwes to stab him repeatedly in the neck. Upon the expiration of Brandes ("It took so terribly long," Meiwes recounted later), Meiwes carved up the corpse, taking care to wrap and freeze the cuts for later consumption. By December of 2003, Meiwes had devoured an estimated 44 pounds of Brandes's barbecued flesh and would have continued to dine, happily and leisurely, on the remaining remains, if the police hadn't shown up to arrest him and confiscate the contents of his fridge.

That's all I'll say for now about Meiwes/Brandes (I have a hard time holding them in my mind as separate entities, so I'll just stop trying). With regard to details on the infamous trial of Meiwes/Brandes (the explicit one for the deviant who killed his counterpart/the implicit one for the deviant who killed himself), the murder ruling sought by the prosecution, the illegal euthanasia ruling sought by the defense, the relaxed grin of Meiwes/Brandes as he entered the courtroom, his calm and meticulous testimony on the stand, the final verdict finding Meiwes/Brandes guilty of manslaughter, and his sentencing to 8 1/2 years in prison, I refer you to the long research arm of Google.com. As for myself, I am personally disturbed by the implications of the incident, even as I am powerless to stop myself from writing about it, and speculating about it, and Googling for more news on it, and generally feeding off its material to gratify my own hungry curiosity. I-- who can barely stomach the video jacket cover for The Shining, who had nightmares for two months after seeing the grisly chariot-race sequence in Ben-Hur, who can gulp down my fear and revulsion only long enough to absorb, in wide-eyed sobriety, a few moments of the limitless horror framed by journalistic photographs of the effects of war and other human-instigated atrocities-- can nevertheless savor the salacious semiotic splendor of a cannibal's tale in the abstract, i.e., in words and sanitized pictures. And I could (and probably should at a later date) explore how closely this type of reading experience resembles the compulsive, internalized image-making and character animation that goes on in my head when I read a specimen of realist fiction, which escapist enterprise and mutual possession play between reader/fantasy have led many a pure poetry critic (without responding to enough of the counter-challenges that such a claim deserves) to dismiss descriptive narrative prose as an inherently commodified space.

But what I simply want to note here is how easily Meiwes/Brandes has burrowed right into the center of my writing. How did Meiwes/Brandes, folded into his own flesh, incarcerated and absorptively self-referential, manage to do this? Does the strength (or weakness) of his binary appetite relieve some part of the lurid indeterminacy that forms the dreamspace of my writing?