How am I not myself?
Essay, published in The Animal Touch by The Institute of Anxiety
How am I not myself?
On taking metaphors seriously
1. Feeding, Eating
I am standing in my kitchen, scissors in one hand, sharpest knife in the other. In front of me: a whole, plucked chicken, and a YouTube clip on my laptop: “How to Chop a Chicken”.
I still eat meat, not much, just some. But it’s always secret meat – slices of cured ham or pork (no fat), mince, cubes of perfectly sliced chicken breast (no legs, no wings). I eat flesh that doesn’t have an animal, vegetables I do not know how to grow. The pharmaceuticals in my waste – I do not follow them downriver.
I haven’t chopped a chicken since 1997. I put on gloves (so that it’s not quite me), and look away when thorax or neck come into view. I take off my glasses, so it’s all a blur. The video is functional, borderline perfunctory, well-lit: To chop off the thighs, pop out the leg bone and chop alongside it (I pop, retch, chop). To separate the breast and back, grab a pair of scissors. Cut along the line of fat that runs from hip to neck. I grab the scissors.
As I snip, a delicate, carnal resistance. Horror: a kind of invitation. Then the thought, out of nothing: ”Human flesh would probably feel quite the same, to cut”. Just that terrible sentence. I repeat it to myself, and hear it become intimate, mutually possessive, just on this side of sensual.
A kiss: lips touch, breathe in, tiny suction (a meal). Satiated, smacking sound, that was delicious. A kiss stands in for eating you. This is not monstrous, and does not imply monstrosity. A kiss is not a betrayal, despite what they say about it.
Here is the 13th-century mystic and poet, Hadewijch in her vision, “Oneness in the Eucharist”:
I desired to have full fruition of my Beloved, and to understand and taste him to the full. [...] He came to me as humbly as anyone who wholly belongs to another. Then he gave himself to me in the shape of the Sacrament, in its outward form, as the custom is; and then he gave me to drink from the chalice, in form and taste, as the custom is. After that he came himself to me, took me entirely in his arms [...] for a short while, I had the strength to bear this; but soon, after a short time, I lost that manly beauty outwardly in the sight of his form. I saw him completely come to nought and so fade and all at once dissolve that I could no longer recognise or perceive him outside me, and I could no longer distinguish him within me. Then it was to me as if we were one without difference.
In Hadewijch’s mystical vision, the Eucharist is a spiritual and physical revelation of oneness, carnal and numinous and both at once. The fleshy act of eating and being eaten, dissolving into another as one, without difference: can we pause on this notion and observe it theologically, allegorically and ecologically at once? What does this vision encode, what memory does it hold about what we have always known about matter? Is mystery the same as memory?
2. Eating, birthing
Taking metaphors seriously, looking within them for manifestations of deep-time human knowledge about our place on this planet, is an exercise that puzzles and fascinates me lately, to the point of obsession. In breadmaking, a yeast starter is also referred to as a mother. “Feed the bitch or she’ll die!”, Anthony Bourdain recalls his baker friend barking at him over the phone. He describes it: “a massive, foaming, barely contained heap of fermenting grapes, flour, water, sugar, and yeast.” What would taking this metaphor seriously yield? In other words, could we reverse the metaphor back onto itself, and ask the yeast, as an investigative partner, to help us uncover a deeper wisdom about mothering, birthing, the oneness of the body? The yeast starter is fed, and it is a feeder. At the point of the ‘event’ of separation, part of the starter is taken from its main body, to subsequently continue to grow, into another mother, or a loaf of bread. If we assume the yeast mother as a body – swarming and multi-cellular as it may be, and as we are – doesn’t it then, in spite of separation, continue to be that same, one body? After all, there are loaves baked from yeast bodies as old as 4,500 years.
This is what calling yeast a mother says to me, and how it made sense of something very deep and very strange that I perceived, pre-linguistically, through pregnancy and birth: through mutual and continuous incorporation and transformation, we are all, and have always been, a nested set of ‘events’ within one, singular body. This oneness is not stasis. A static universe does not vibrate, does not transform. It is frozen in place, lifeless, no universe at all. Like the Eucharistic oneness of Hadewijch, this oneness is enmeshed in the messines, pleasures and pains of earthly, actual, physical existence.
We say to our babies, “you’re so cute I could eat you!” We nibble on their chubby, 7-month-old thighs. We kiss them ravenously, love them desperately. Their growth, to us, is a long, sad story by which we become less and less permitted to recall that physical oneness. We become less and less permitted to recall that profound, near-mystical understanding of them as the enfleshed manifestation not of our metaphorical selves, our ambitions or our ‘lineage’, but our actual body. Making babies hovers somewhere in the middle distance, between self and almost self, and over time, the profound, organic truth of this fact is obfuscated by culture, by taboo, by reduction. Their growing up is our coerced, slow forgetting that we were once one body, two hearts, two minds, one tube, four hands, twenty fingers, twenty toes, nested into one another – not as one, but literally one.
Birth – and this is how I lived it, in the hallucinatory ecstasy of fever: one body, shedding its own, older skin. That skin is me, mourning the distance.
3. Birthing, thinking
Policing the boundaries of the species is a historically contingent, relatively recent project, instrumental to – and inextricable from – the colonial one. If, as James Sambrook argues in The Eighteenth Century: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, Enlightenment thought can be traced back to Newtonian science and the notion that ‘man’ can formulate the laws of the universe around ‘him’, one of the most essential features of Enlightenment thought is the turning of the ‘outside world’, outside the mind, into the object of scientific enquiry. The gaze, here, is lucid, unidirectional and utterly non-implicated. In this sense, the gap between observer and observed widens – a cleavage that still plagues our disphoric and disenchanted relationship with the environment today. Categories, species, boundaries: these become the intellectual prerequisites through which life becomes intelligible.
Yet, like its own unwanted shadow – like a fugitive symptom, the 18th Century Western popular imagination is rife with feral children, anthropomorphised apes, monstrous births. They haunt writing and legend alike, at the very same time that the taxonomic process begins to take root into the natural sciences, threatening the guarded boundaries of self with the conceivability of their collapse.
In 1726, Mary Toft, a woman from Guildford, Surrey in England, began to give birth to rabbits. Over a few, gruelling and closely-reported weeks, she delivered nine in all, all stillborn and in pieces, as well as three legs of a tabby cat and the contents of the cat’s guts: the backbone of an eel. To engineer this, Tofts appealed to a common belief of the time, by which strong emotional impressions on a pregnant mother could, in some cases, manifest as physical characteristics on the foetus. In accordance to this, women were advised not to come into contact with animals, or be exposed to anything that might shock them during pregnancy, for ‘whatsoever moves the faculties of the soul in the mother may move the same in the child: Hence it is that (...) if any species be sent to the imagination of the mother which she strongly receives, it may make an impression upon the child.’
This belief, it’s worth noting, is not utterly extinct, at least in language: in Italian, birthmarks are referred to as ‘voglie’ (wants or wishes) and considered to correspond to particularly strong cravings experienced during pregnancy – hence, a pink birthmark is referred to as a ‘voglia di fragola’, a strawberry craving, and so forth. In other contexts, recent research on epigenetics also seems to corroborate, at least in part, some original, ontological basis for this folkloric wisdom, opening up as it does the possibility that trauma and toxic stress may endure through generations. Again, taking metaphors seriously can sometimes shed light on enduring and applied, situated knowledges.
In 1726, Mary Toft’s case was a sensation. The Royal Surgeon and Anatomist, the secretary to the Prince of Wales, and countless other doctors and officials all visited Toft in the midst of agony, scrutinising her every contraction and the comings-and-goings within her households to ensure animal body parts were not being smuggled in. Meanwhile, it stirred the popular imagination for months, appearing in newspapers and in the writing of both Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, who referred to it as “the miracle in Guildford” in private correspondence. Even after the births were exposed as a ‘hoax’, Toft is said to have been shown occasionally at dinner parties by Charles, Second Duke of Richmond.
For the purposes of this reflection here, the question is not how Mary Toft's case came to be such a successful deceit, but rather the reasons for the public to react to it as both ‘miracle’ and ‘monstrous childbirth’, that is, with both fascination and fear. First and most taboo of all, the birth manifests the transgression of boundaries between species, those very boundaries that natural scientists were going to such lengths to describe and categorise at the same historical time. The second reason emerges via the category of the ‘grotesque’: the body is estranged, rendered gruesome by the manner through which it is presented. Like Bakhtin’s ‘grotesque body’, Mary Toft’s rabbits make reference to the categories of “impurity… heterogeneity, masking, protuberant distension, disproportion, exorbitant, clamour, decentred or eccentric arrangements… physical needs and pleasures of the ‘lower bodily stratum’, materiality and parody.”
Holding these two transgressions in our hands at the same time, and looking at them for slippages, we can hypothesise that what causes fascination and fear might indeed be this concretisation of the immaterial (the imagination into physiognomy). And that this concretisation, in turn, reveals, by way of the grotesque, that natural sciences’ boundary categories, presented as concrete, are in fact a product of the imaginary realm. In other words, what was intangible takes form, only to show what is presented as ontological to be nothing but an abstraction, a historically contingent, and thus unstable, ‘order of things’, to borrow Foucault’s term.
4. Thinking, grieving
Between 2012 and 2016, for over 900 days, artist Kristina Buch lived with a chicken, waiting to kill it.
Initially intending to conclude the work in about three months, Buch looked for an art institution that would help to complete it, by hosting a live slaughtering, boiling and feeding of said chicken as part of its opening events. Unsurprisingly for a work that pushes so insistently at our moral dissonance, the chicken remained alive for far longer than the original intention.
The artwork, One of the things that baffles me about you is that you remain unmurdered, holds the slaughter, or sacrificial event, as potential, both in its name and in its realisation. But, as the tension-potential held within the work’s title underscores, the longer the chicken remained ‘unmurdered’, the starker a light it shed on the cognitive bias that distinguishes the qualitative and the quantitative in our ethical capabilities. As Judith Butler reminds us in Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence in the context of human conflict, the qualitative – a person I can name and mourn – is a precondition for grievability and, thusly, for recognition. Once that qualitative collapses into the quantitative – 700,000 people dead – that view dissipates, in a kind of cognitive and ethical collapse.
Between Kristina Buch’s unkillable, familiar chicken and the 136 million slaughtered each day for food production lies an uncanny gap, an unwitting hypocrisy, one that the art institution’s shyness in espousing the work belies. A rumbling from the collective conjuring of contemporary ecocidal life.
5. Grieving, feeding
Felix Gonzales-Torres’s Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) is a mound of candy, stacked in the corner of a gallery. The artist conceived of this work in mourning, following the death of his partner Ross Laycock, from complications related to HIV in 1991. In meeting the work, visitors are invited to take, and eat, a piece of candy, and the artist asks of the organising institution that the weight of the stack remain the same, 175 pounds, equivalent to Ross’s body weight.
When I first approached and loved this work, in the context of a long research on mourning, questions around psychoanalysis and the incorporation of the lost object were, to me, central to its interpretation. I was then, many years later, invited to revisit it – and when I did, something completely different came into view, that is, the ecological sensitivity that emerges from it, as a ritual of composting, evocative of the Eucharist and of biological decomposition at the same time.
Think of it with me: the weight of the work remains the same; the planet is a closed system.
“I’m giving you this sugary thing; you put it in your mouth and you suck on someone else’s body.... It’s very hot.” you are called into the work through a gesture, sucking, which is infantile, agricultural and erotic and all at the same time (see the figures gratefully suckling the ancient Egyptian tree goddess Hathor). In this intimate embrace, the notion of ‘self’ is no longer immediately obvious, nor should it be; when tuned to loss, sexual fusion is reconfigured as you, walking away with a piece of someone else’s lover, much as Hadewijch did in the eucharistic moment of fusion. And then how like a garden, I think to myself, revisiting the care, the tending, the erotics and delights, that make up the conditions of its possibility, from artist to organisers to you, sucking.
The dissolution of the lost other, following entropy, takes place in their dispersal throughout other bodies, places, organisms. In this way, the work is also a portrait of death itself, and maybe, from an ecological perspective, it is a portrait of the promise of renewal, too. When a body dies, it goes everywhere. Eventually, it is eaten by a plant. Light and death become sugar: mushrooms and trees make forests out of mourning.
Let’s return to Hadewijch, and take the abstraction, that is to say, the ritual, seriously – and again interrogate it for what it reveals, codifies or remembers of our collective, accreted environmental wisdom. Let’s allow the associative slippage that this presents, as a cognitive possibility. And let’s turn the narrative back to front, beginning from the god(s/dess/es) concretising and appearing in complex form, and then, through a ritual that is both mournful and sensual, dissolving into another as if there were no difference.
There is no loss, and no gain: there is vibrancy and transformation, temporary form, cycles of time and things that we are just barely aware of, and only in song. It is in us and between us all, this more-than-human-ness that forms and reforms, breaks down and forms again. That which is numinous and divine is the vibrancy of how complexity itself creates emergent, complex form. It is our interdependency and interconnection, it is the care with which we commit to that fragile interdependency and are obligated to it. We – us, these beings, give ourselves away and birth and love eat one another in gestures, in rituals, and in events, that are full of grief, and full of love – for grief is full of love.