Notebook: On Cannibals and Christians

...It is certain at least that we live in a time which interrupts the mood of everything alive...

...So the pure cannibal has only one taboo on food —he will not eat the meat of his own family...

...The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again...

...And we are close to dead...

...And the continuing metaphor for the obsession —a most disagreeable metaphor—has been cancer...

...Or are we face to face with a desperate but most rational effort from the deepest resources of the unconscious of us all to rescue civilization from the pit and plague of its bedding, that gutted swinish foul old bedding on which two centuries of imperialism, high finance, moral hypocrisy and horror have lain...

...Then come our Christians...

...Is the curse on the world or on oneself...

...And all the food is poisoned...

...black humor is its wit, the dances are livid and solitary—they are also orgiastic: orgy or masturbation—the first question posed by the art of the absurd...

...And the waters of the sea, we are told...

...The commercial is the invention of a profoundly Christian nation—it proceeds to sell something in which it does not altogether believe, and it interrupts the mood...

...So the second: is the art rational or absurd...

...Doubtless...

...Whereas their counterpart, the Christians—the ones who are not Christian but whom we choose to call Christian—are utterly opposed to the destruction of human life and succeed within themselves in starting all the wars of our own time, since every war since the Second World War has been initiated by liberals or Communists...

...And there is always the sound of some electric motor in the ear...

...you don't know who clear their plague by visiting it upon friends, passing their disease into the flesh and mind of near bodies, and into the circuits of the world...

...It contains happenings, pop art, camp, a theater of the absurd, a homosexual genius who spent thirty years as a thief...

...Some succeed, some fail, and some of us succeed nobly for we clear our own plague and help to clear the plague upon the world, and others succeed, others, are we those...

...they are a host of chemical machines who swallow the product of chemical factories, aspirin, preservatives, stimulant, relaxant, and breathe out their chemical wastes into a polluted air...

...What characterizes Christians is that most of them are not Christian and have no interest left in Christ...

...Does the world get better, no matter how, getting better and worse as part of the same process, or does the world get better in spite of the fact it is getting worse, and we are approaching the time when an apocalypse will pass through the night...

...Other men he will of course consume...

...We live in a time which has created the art of the absurd...

...Apocalypse or debauch is upon us...

...And they poison the wells and get away free, some of them—they get away free if there is a devil and he has power, and that is something else we do not know...

...moonshots fly like flares across black dreams, and the Beatles— demons or saints?—give shape to a haircut which looks from the rear like nothing so much as an atomic cloud...

...So they are the cannibals— they believe that survival and health of the species comes from consuming one's own, not one's near own, but one's own species...

...In a modern world which produces mediocrities at an accelerating rate, and keeps them alive by surgical gym nastics which go beyond anyone's patience but the victim, the doctor, and the people who expect soon to be on the operating table themselves...

...So the dilemma remains...

...it has perhaps not been here so intensely in thirty years, not since the Nazis were prospering, but it is creeping back...

...in a civilization where compassion is of political use and is stratified in welfare programs which do not build a better society but shore up a worse, in a world whose ultimate logic is war— because in a world of war all overproductioz and over-population is possible since peoples and commodities may be destroyed wholesale, in a breath, a world of such hyper-civilization is a world not of adventurers, entrepreneurs, settlers, social arbiters, proletarians, agriculturists, and other egocentric types of a dynamic society, but is instead a world of whirlpools and formlessness where two huge types begin to re-emerge, types there at the beginning of it all: Cannibals and Christians...

...There are Norman Mailer On Cannibals and Christians faces and bodies like gorged maggots on the dance floor, on the highway, in the city, in the stadium...

...The difficulty—for one can always convince the literary world to accept a metaphor if one remains loyal to it —is that my obsession is not merely an obsession, I fear, but insight into the nature of things, perhaps the deepest insight I have, and this said with no innocence of the knowledge that the plague can have its home within, and these condemnations come to no more than the grapplings of a man with a curse on his flesh, or even the probability that society partakes of the plague, and its critic partakes, and each wars against the other, the man and the society each grappling with his own piece of the plague, as if, indeed, we are each of us born not only with our life but with our death, with our variety of death, good death and bad, and it is the act of each separate man to look to free himself from that part of his existence which was born with the plague...

...Their virtues he will conserve in his own flesh, their vices he will excrete, but to kill and to elimi nate is his sense of human continuation...

...We believe man is good if given a chance, we believe man is open to discussion, we believe science is the salvation of ill, we believe death is the end of discussion...

...these Christians also succeed by their faith in science to poison the nourishment we eat, and the waters of the sea, alter the genetics of our beasts, and break the food chains of nature...

...Do we have the art because the absurd is the patina of waste, and we are waiting in the pot for the big roar of waters when the world goes down the pipe...

...ergo we believe nothing is so worthwhile as human life...

...From Lyndon Johnson to Mao Tse-tung, we are all Christians...

...The skulls of black men and the bowels of the yellow race are in that bed, the death of the Bride of the Sabbath is in that bed with the ashes of the concentration camp and the ashes of the Kabbala...

...So forth...

...Yet every year the girls are more beautiful, the athletes are better...

...The argument is old by now: its first assumption is that cancer is a disease different from other diseases, an ultimate disease against which all other diseases are in design to protect us...

...We are all of us Christians: Jews, liberals, Bolsheviks, anarchists, socialists, Communists, Keynesians, Democrats, Civil Righters, beatniks, ministers, moderate Republicans, pacifists, teachinners, doctors, scientists, professors, Latin-Americans, new African nations, Common Marketers, even Mao Tsetung...

...We are martyrs all these days...

...And products deteriorate in workmanship as corporations improve their advertising, wars shift from carnage and patriotism to carnage and surrealism, sex shifts from whiskey to drugs...

...But the plague remains, that mysterious force which erects huge ugly and aesthetically emaciated buildings as the world ostensibly grows richer, and proliferates new diseases as medicine presumably grows wiser, non-specific diseases, families of viruses, with new names and no particular location...

...We think no one should go hungry...

...Well, it has been the continuing obsession of this writer that the world is entering a time of plague...

...They are the commercial...

...All that Right Wing which believes there is too much on earth and too much of it is second-rate, all of that Right Wing which runs from staunch Republicanism to the extreme Right Wing, and then half around the world through the ghosts of the Nazis, all of that persecuted Righ Wing which sees itself as martyr, knows that it knows how to save the world: one can save the world by killing off what is second-rate...

...What characterizes the Cannibals is that most of them are born Christian, think of Jesus as Love, and Collective Bargaining in Education get an erection from the thought of whippings, blood, burning crosses, burning bodies, and screams in mass graves...