eschaton immanentization kink

I don’t know if you’re new to this blog but on the off chance you are please bear in mind that my often v theatrical and ridiculous levels of excitement in the tags sometimes need to be taken…not literally.

Also while I have no interest in actually consuming another human being let’s not ignore the fact that the endless links and parallels (literary, philosophical, religious) that can be drawn between desire / devotion and consumption are not incredibly varied and fascinating.

Food and love? Intimately linked, literally; from the moment we’re born, our very first meal is an inseparable union of food and love: it is warmth, security, connection, fullness and satiety, all in one gesture. It is our ‘welcome to earth’. It’s a memory that, I think, carries over into everything. Anyone who has spent any time around babies or young children knows (with a great deal of panic) that their primary method of exploration, without fail, is to put literally everything in their mouth. It becomes a way to measure the world.

from Natalia Andrievskikh’s ‘Food Symbolism, Sexuality, and Gender Identity in Fairy Tales and Modern Women’s Bestsellers’

It is also echoed by Levinas:

“This sinking one’s teeth,” he writes “into the things which the act of eating involves above all measure the surplus of the reality”

Simone Weil:

Hunger is a yardstick. Food is unifying. We make peace by ‘breaking bread’, by sharing a toast. Countless cultures the world over but every single one of them shares that. Eating together is communion.  Cooking together an even more intimate communion, taking forkfuls from your own plate to feed someone else? It’s what newlyweds do with the first slice of cake. In Amharic you commonly urge someone to take the food you offer them  with “bemote”–  if you don’t take this I’ll die. It is, literally, a life-giving gesture. It’s one of the most generous forms of tenderness I know.

Little babies and animals are so cute and impossibly adorable we want to ‘eat them up’ (there’s science behind it: it’s called dimorphus expression, or Cute Aggression. Similar sentiments include: desire to pinch, squash, crush. It’s essential to keeping us balanced–also alive.)

“Oh, please don’t go — we’ll eat you up — we love you so!” say Maurice Sendak’s Wild Things.“Please don’t go, I’ll eat you wholeI love you so, I love you so, I love you soPlease don’t go, I’ll eat you wholeI love you so, I love you so, I love you so, I love you so” echo alt-j, over and over like an incantation in ‘breezeblocks’

and while we’re on Sendak:

Anne Carson, too

Meaning, in order to be made, must be devoured. We ‘drink in’ words, we ‘digest’ and absorb and ‘savour’ them. Artists, I think, do it almost pathologically. There is hunger - hunger for what? That could be anything, but the point is: the hunger is there -  and when the art is true it is fueled by devotion, fueled by near maddening, impossible love.

“My reading a kind of eating,” says Li-Young Lee in ‘The Cleaving’, “My eating a kind of reading.”

and again:

“What is it in me would / devour the world to utter it?  What is it in me will not let / the world be, would eat / not just this fish, / but the one who killed it, / the butcher who / cleaned it. […] would eat it all / to utter it.”

and again:

And as for thee language used to describe sexual desire: the language of hunger, unequivocally: someone’s ‘thirsty’, you ‘eat them out,’ sexual appetite is voracious, insatiable, unquenchable. Anything less feels flat, lukewarm, insincere and, most notably, inaccurate. Love, says Sylvia Plath “gnaws [us] through”.

The list is endless. I don’t want to go on and on; there are others far more talented who have put it far better than I could:

The entirety of Helene Cixous’ ‘Love of the Wolf’ for a start:

“For us, eating and being eaten belong to the terrible secret of love. We love only the person we can eat. The person we hate we ‘can’t swallow.’ That one makes us vomit. Even our friends are inedible. If we were asked to dig into our friend’s flesh we would be disgusted. The person we love we dream only of eating. That is, we slide down that razor’s edge of ambivalence. The story of torment itself is a very beautiful one. Because loving is wanting and being able to eat up and yet to stop at the boundary. And there, at the tiniest beat between springing and stopping, in rushes fear. The spring is already in mid-air. The heart stops. The heart takes off again. Everything in love is oriented towards this absorption. At the same time real love is a don’t-touch, yet still an almost-touching. Tact itself: a phantom touching. Eat me up, my love, or else I’m going to eat you up. Fear of eating, fear of the edible, fear on the part of the one of them who feels loved, desired, who wants to be loved, desired, who desires to be desired, who knows there is no greater proof of love than the other’s appetite, who is dying to be eaten up, who says or doesn’t say, but who signifies: I beg you, eat me up. Want me down to the marrow. And yet manage it so as to keep me alive. But I often turn about or compromise, because I know that you won’t eat me up, in the end, and I urge you: bite me. Sign my death with your teeth.”

and also

and while we’re on that, Simone Weil:

“The great trouble in human life is that looking and eating are two different operations…Children feel this trouble already, when they look at a cake for a long time almost regretting that it should have to be eaten and yet are unable to help eating it. It may be that vice, depravity and crime are nearly always, or even perhaps always in their essence attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at. Eve began it. If she caused humanity to be lost by eating the fruit, the opposite attitude looking at the fruit without eating it, should be what is required to save it.”

There is Angela Carter (The Erl-King):

and again:

Han Kang, (The Vegetarian):

“He held her at the waist and stroked the mark, wishing he could share it with her, that it could be seared into his skin like a brand. I want to swallow you, have you melt into me and flow into my veins.”

Catherynne M. Valente (from Deathless):

see also:

“ I said: I could be a wolf for you. I could put my teeth on your throat. I could growl. I could eat you whole.” (from The Bread We Eat in Dreams)

Robin Coste Lewis, (’Plantation’):

Kenneth Rexroth (’When We With Sappho’):

Kim Addonizio’s ‘First Kiss’ in which the topography of hunger and desire is quietly drawn full circle:

Oscar Wilde (Salomé):

Maram al-Massri (Red Cherry on a White-Tiled Floor):

Maggie Nelson (Bluets, 206):

“[…] it became clear that I would lose you, or that I had already lost you, that you were “etched into my heart”– I may not have known then that “etch” derives from etzen or erzjan–to be eaten–but in the days since I have come to know the full meaning of the root.”

Li-Young Lee (’The City in Which I Love You’):

Food and desire frequently overlap in Shakespeare’s Othello: the language of sexual desire is, as always, the language of the feast – Desdemona is “honey”, “palate of my appetite”, “food [..] luscious as locusts”. According to Iago she will  “begin to heave the gorge, disrelish and abhor the Moor.”

there’s Jeanette Winterson (Written on the Body):

and Marguerite Duras (Hiroshima Mon Amour):

and this stunning excerpt by Julio Cortázar (Hopscotch):

Andal and religious fervour (from Autobiography of a Goddess):

Simone Weil, again (Waiting for God):

and while we’re on that see also: Catholicism

see also: Hannibal ( @bluebeardsbride collection of posts and analysis on this is simply marvelous)

and keeping with horror, what’s more seductive in Western popular culture than the enduring, insidious excess of the vampire’s hunger? The sheer breadth of the fears and anxieties they contain is endless, but that hunger – transgressive, monstrous and shameless –  both fascinates and repels us. You can read so much into the act of biting and draining your victim of blood, but there is an undeniably erotic element to it:

“She seemed like a nightmare of Lucy as she lay there; the pointed teeth, the bloodstained, voluptuous mouth–which it made one shudder to see–the whole carnal and unspiritual appearance, seeming like a devilish mockery of Lucy’s sweet purity.”  (Bram Stoker, Dracula)

and Nina Cassian (The Young Bat):

This, even with the inherent violence, reads like a sacrament. It is, for better or worse, communion. And so much of love and desire is about some sort of communion. “I don’t want you there, I want you here.” And what’s the most intimate and lasting communion than:

“to be hungered after / to be taken inside another’s warm mouth / to alter his atlas of desire” (Zakia Henderson-Brown) 

To me, that is the epitome of ‘I want you here’. At it’s peak the boundaries blur: inside and outside is one and the same. The circle closes. Literally. And once that’s done it’s yours forever.

(Sarah Clear, ‘Dinner For Two: Sexual Desire, Reciprocity, and Cannibalism’): The above is a literal take but for me it really isn’t about that; it is the motivation behind it – the kind of blindingly intense, utterly consumptive (hello) desire that makes you want something that badly. That’s what I’m completely floored by in Georges Bataille’s “A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism”.

Hunger is the most primal need. Everything circles back to that, always, whether political or erotic. To be wanted beyond want, to be desired at a level of pure necessity – that is intense asf. Who wouldn’t want that? As Erica Jong says: