We Are Still Cannibals With Thought For Food

WE ARE STILL CANNIBALS

WITH THOUGHT FOR FOOD

BY

DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS

We are all cannibals, speaking figuratively. And how else might one speak, but figuratively? What might one say without resort to analogies? What abstract thought cannot be boiled down to particular concrete experiences?

When Pierre Cabanis made his infamous statement, that thoughts are secreted by brains just as bile is secreted by livers, the idealists were deeply disgusted and vomited volumes of discontent. But Cabanis, who was Mirabeau's favorite doctor, Napoleon's favorite ideologue, and Jefferson's favorite French materialist, was speaking figuratively, as physiology's ideologist. On the other hand, out of public view, he was dabbling in spiritual occultism.

We grind up each other's ideas and produce sausage for others to digest and they do the same. Our languages and tastes differ but the differences are increasingly superficial. Thus in our common meal we are a growing commune. We may chew the fat in silence to celebrate our good fortune, yet we are still one in our unspoken disposition.

Icelandic Amlodhi - Saxon Amleth - owned a Cosmic Mill, a vast Maelstrom or Whirlpool to grind up the warring world, and, in Time, to turn out peace and plenty, and salt to keep all well. At the bottom of the vortex is the sand and the Land of the Dead.

Each anxious and hungry Hamlet has his cosmic mill today. Hamlet is not nearly as brutal as Amleth was: Hamlet would raise mind over matter and set up a ruse, that evil might expose and destroy itself of its own accord; still Hamlet could not escape the grinding jaws in Fate's maw.

We grind with our minds instead of our teeth. Instead of decapitating others and storing their heads in a special vault at the back of the cave, to-day's capitalists keep powerful accounts in banks. Instead of roasting our heroic human host on the spit upon which he was impaled and pierced and bled into a cup; instead of laying out the roast like a cross on the altar and quartering and apportioning out the parts according to community standing; - we prepare and pass around the bread and wine, and each communist gets an equal share.

Each creature eats to live here and now. Together we reproduce to live hereafter; witness the faces of the dead alive in the living. Food eats food. The ancients said that living things want to be eaten. Food reproduces food. Life feeds on life or its remains and we wonder at the remains before we dispose of them one way or another; eating a creature alive is deemed reprehensible to-day. Food, sex, life and death, are sublime subjects for sublimation, for cultivation of human culture.

Human culture is spiritual, is mind over matter, is the head taken out of the dirt and lifted into heaven that humankind together may survey the surrounds, exalting its portion of the universal fire over the particulars of existence, grinding them into peace and plenty, and salt to keep all well. At the bottom of the vortex is the sand and the Land of the Dead.

XYX

Stop Talking Dirt Only Three Days A Week

STOP TALKING DIRT

FOR ONLY THREE DAYS A WEEK

BY

DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS

"Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen," advised Paul, and I think it is good advice for everyone to follow - three days a week.

To refrain even one day from unwholesome talk would not be easy, that much I know from personal experience. Some of my friends and I in show business resolved time and time again to stop talking dirt about people and to make positive suggestions and supportive statements to each other and to our usual targets of gossip instead. Our resolve never lasted more than a few hours at the most. Bad habits die hard. Still, they can be replaced with good habits.

I certainly would not want everyone to make a full-time habit of following Paul's rule. Censors would be needed to enforce the rule, and 'unwholesome' would have to be defined.

Negative criticism would naturally be unwholesome if people felt torn down instead of built up by it. So the rule sounds good and is appealing. We need a few people like that, but just imagine the result if everyone adhered to the rule.

Here is a related rule that we are more familiar with:

"If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all!"

If that maxim were followed by all, life would soon be hell on Earth. Only the rulers of Totalitaria would believe it was paradise. We do not have to read science fiction for examples.

Kids who bad-mouthed their parents were supposed to be stoned at the village gates according to ancient texts. If all kids could say something naughty, we would have true testimony about what goes on inside plenty of hellish homes which have that perverse maxim hanging on parental lips if not on the bathroom walls.

XYX