Te Occidere Possunt Sed Te Edere Non Possunt Nefas Est**

** Allegedly, “They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier"

Thinking is form, and eating is choice of embodiment. From another angle: it seems like if you take the trouble to know precisely where the food you consume comes from, and you know to the dollar precisely in what and in whom you invest when you purchase the food that you consume, you are acting as a political animal, in the classical sense. You have cornered the geography and economy of your fuel.

As the years accrete, the Tabasco sauce and the tart pectin are each relied upon with greater frequency. A dull palate is enacted celibacy; oatmeal each morning is a missionary position.

The Greeks considered it possible that Gods eat their children, while Abraham had absolute faith that his God called for his son to go under the knife. What formal conventions unspool from those conceptual possibilities?

While we are at it (and somewhat closer in history and lower on the human scale): How many died trying to capture the rage for sugar and tea? To feed the cotton gin and, decades on, the textile mills?

There are so many riddles to which I want answers from the universe, and so many answers only few of us could withstand.

“The cause of tragedy is that we would rather murder the world than permit it to expose us to change.” A murdered world is not merely metaphorical. Growing meat in the lab is a kind of metonym for our adulterating cleverness. Growing ears on a mouse – that too.

A known problem of discussions with a crazy person is the impulse – nay, need – to step within that person’s idiosyncratic crazy construct and sally forth from there, conversationally.   The talk can go sideways, in which no one gains or loses ground, or deeper into craziness, in which case you hope that  bread crumbs left in your wake aren’t gobbled up before you turn back.   Every once in awhile, if you’ve inhabited that autochthonic discourse for long enough, you start to feel like maybe you are in the process of pulling the person back with you, in fits and starts, more and less voluntarily.   Hopefully without any tricks or compulsion (that can more than backfire), except when you think you must be getting closer to the light and the surface, Demeter is nowhere to be seen.  And so but it’s also a known risk of having gone crazy that those who care for you will come into your crazy room and get stuck there with you, because their love compels them to try you to guide you out of yourself and back to yourself, both of which can be simultaneously and painfully true.  And it’s a known risk of loving someone whose craziness persists and mutates so that, having loved them for long enough, the idea of still loving them doesn’t seem so much a decision as a condition, not unlike Crohn’s or (a nightmare) Capgras syndrome.  You think readiness is all and ripeness is all and maybe you’re not sure which Shakespeare play this is, after all?

All of which makes the more empathetic souls among us cotton to an expansive notion of verisimilitude.