In a lonely room where the attendants wear rubber gloves and surgical masks and the air is sharpened with disinfectant, the pile of matter that was me will be pushed into a plastic bag, then taken out in the woods and mixed into the dirt. As you walk, carrying the bag, the earth is spongy, dense, and resilient beneath your feet. It has the consistency of a corpse. With each step, your feet press down on generations of dead ancestors. Their bodies, their rotted and transmuted flesh, have become the substance of the earth. When you eat, you ingest their essence — the fertility that survived their decomposition. In this way, they live through you, by your consumption of air, food, water. When you breathe, you breathe in a mixture of gases their bodies exuded in the process of decomposition, reassimilating into your body.
The air, being blood, is hard to inhale, but I learn. I relax and let it in. My body floats through it, subsumed by it. I breathe, swallow, and think blood. My imagination stops where blood ends. Blood surrounds me, drowns my sight, so that when I think, before an image forms, it’s consumed by blood. I’m withered, ancient, a child drifting through a thick red universe, pulsing and gorging myself on my own sentient blood. This blood knows me, licks me, keeps me in a perpetual drone of self-negating orgasm that sends waves of pleasure through the furthest pools of pumping red consciousness.
— Michael Gira, The Consumer, Rotting Pig
