Towards an Aesthetic Cannibalism (2)

The subterranean Meiwes/Brandes tunneling project has kicked up the earth around some of my own carnivorous writings, long since buried and nearly forgotten. These are all private texts, a fact that ought to go without saying- Q: "Which of your texts were written in guilty privacy?" A: "All of them!"- and I thought, like a good investigative reader, to dig up the more interesting ones for public consumption. Here are some sections of an especially creepy, open-ended piece composed some five years ago, during that heady, ecstatically unrealistic season leading up to Y2K:

from the Housecleaning (H) series, category Appetites (Ap)

I am a meateater for many of the same reasons some vegetarians are vegetarians.

I want to a) eat as my ancestors did, or b) eat my ancestors.

To move towards the place that makes me flinch. To slice through flesh and messy bone. How to continue pricking oneself.

The horror of watching poultry shears snip through bone and cartilage, ribcage, as easy as paper. This illustrates the struggle, this actualizes it.

To perceive no difference between the flesh that is cut and the hand holding the knife that's cutting it.

There was a certain pleasure in pricking oneself and observing the blood that emerged.

There was a certain pleasure in pricking oneself and observing the blood that emerged.

How to embrace the body- the ill, dying body?

Cardamom, cinnamon, salt, coriander, basil, tomato, pepper, garlic, onion, ginger, and lemon.

Soy sauce, ginger, green onion, star anise, and black mushroom.

Chili pod, bean paste, soy sauce, salt, rice wine, and sesame.

Once relieved of its hirsute skin, the melon is lowered into a soup of leftover chicken broth and salt.

In a page paper-clipped to the inside front cover of an anthology I am afraid to pick up, a well-built blonde man clasps the hand of a corpse to his cheek. The corpse appears to have been Asian in another life; the man's face is ecstatic as he squints into the glare of the bright, foreign sun.

In a bootleg "documentary" film depicting experiments on Chinese and Western prisoners by the Japanese military, a woman is forced to expose her hands to a freezing winter night, then to plunge her arms in scalding water next morning. Soldier-experimenters pull at the dessicated flesh until it loosens from the bone, leaving the woman screaming in shock at the sight of her suddenly skeletal arms, artfully captured by the camp cinematographer.

A Chinese medical student, desperate to learn the rudiments of anatomy through the dissection of cadavers denied to him by state morality, adopts a routine of rushing to hospital wards and morgues in the hopes of observing corpses in various stages of rigor mortis. He acquires also the habit of arriving several minutes early for good measure, to witness patients in the throes of dying.

An executioner during the peak of a Maoist purge gradually experiences pangs of conscience and comes to institute a new work routine. He discovers a way to strangle prisoners just short of killing them, then to assign these "dead prisoners" to the cart bound for the graveyard. In this way he saves the lives of innumerable state enemies, who revive in the darkness of midnight to find themselves gloriously alive among stacks of unattended corpses.

Why be drawn constantly to these grisly testimonies and documents, why move closer to that which one would fear to touch?

Then, the public execution. Now, the snuff film?

Perhaps the popularity of the novel as a modern art form has encouraged pop interest in the serial killer. If the execution was the public poem, the serial killer is the private mythic narrative.

The kind of "silent reading" that all enthusiasts of the novel must develop as a skill.