The man who forgot, remembered and then dreamed of the secret value of food
And then it happened. I stopped digesting. It was not a physiological problem, I was sure of this, rather, it was most definitely a metaphysical one. I had been on to this for a while. I had been feeling my metabolism slowing down for the past few weeks. And now it was stopped. It was as if my body had finally realized its limits. I knew it had to happen sooner or later. At last I no longer needed food. It was a rash moment of existential angst that I made a promise to myself to spend the rest of my foodless days staggering my way aimlessly through the city. And so I did. I wandered about and for the first few days all I could think of was the amazing futility of my stomach, the mind boggling absurdity of it. I came across a Burger King and saw people eating hamburgers and sipping on their plastic straws, and it seemed completely unnecessary, ridiculous, as if they were eating because they were bored, and it was then that I understood that somebody had lied to me and that food was not a prerequisite for life, that indeed I could carry on years like this stumbling through the city without a bite to eat. To think of all the foreign substances we put into ourselves, things we know not where they come from, lifeless inhuman things that could be hurting us. So I emptied my bank account and rolled through town with money crowding my pockets, buying things here and there until I couldn’t carry anything more, but never buying anything to eat. When I grew hungry I told myself that hunger was an illusion, that it was the devil speaking from the depths of my bowels; in my more rational moments I’d tell myself that it was a mental illness of sorts that my parents and teachers had implanted in me, a collective neurosis, perhaps instigated by the government or capitalism to keep us under a predictable dietary regime or make us buy more. Walking up the streets of Huertas I would pass by restaurants and the smells they exuded made me hungry again. God dammit I thought, could there be a significance to food after all? No, surely not. It made no sense, to put this utterly arbitrary substance into my body and expect that to do something for me. Why sex made sense, sex made babies, I could see the babies with my own eyes, sex had an irrefutable logic to it. But hunger, food, digestion, this was all absurd, surely! Why, all I ever saw food produce was shit, and who needs shit? I was much better off without shit, and so was the rest of the world. Secretly I hoped that I would never have to shit again. I thought of shit as an aberration of sorts, a toxic residue which our body produced to warn us that it was ill, the way pain exists, or the way we sneeze when we are sick, so we shit to purge us of the unnecessary harm that eating inflicts in us. I went a week without eating anything, roaming the city, just looking and walking, just lingering, not doing anything; occasionally I would sit on a bench and question reality, wonder at the children screaming ecstatically in the park and then wonder about my wonder and the wonder of my wonder, and then wonder about wondering about something ad infinitum, and the walking would always seem to open new realities for me; I would be in the Retiro and it would be the most important thing in the world, and then I would walk and it was as if I were slowly exterminating that reality for another infinitely realer one. One day I was strolling along the obscenity that is the Castellana, dragging myself past buildings built for royalty and the aristocracy and here and there one built for the modern business men of Madrid, when I happened to glance to my right and catch my reflection in the tinted window of a sandwich café. I was a skeleton, there was no fat in my cheeks, my legs were crookedly bent inwards and my shoulders looked like they were falling off. And then the thought struck me, that missing piece of evidence suddenly made itself known to me, that secret function of food which I had overlooked. All these days my body had been evacuating itself through the meager turds I had been producing on rare occasions. Little by little my body had been disintegrating and there had been nothing to replenish it. And that was when I realized the secret value of food. I understood that in a quite literal sense I was food, that without food I was nothing, that somehow in the hidden magic of my body food became me. I spent the rest of the day eating hamburgers and when I returned home I plopped my bloated, rachitic body on my bed and I don’t know if it was the food but I immediately entered into the most bizarre dream I have ever had. In the dream I was not myself, I was somebody else, an entirely foreign consciousness. I was a French man living in Paris in a luxurious apartment with a view of the tour Eiffel. I was old and obese and I was sitting in an enormous leather couch with a whiskey in my hand, telling a story, looking out the window at the white seagulls dancing against the turquoise sky, and simultaneously wondering why there were seagulls in Paris, so far away from the sea. It was strange because in my dream I was both the old man telling the story and I was the protagonist of his story at the same time. After reflecting on the seagulls I, the old man, began as follows:
Today? The usual. No, I won’t run, I am too old to run. Besides, it’ll be night soon. What will I do then, you ask? Well, I will eat. Why? I will eat because the most important thing in the world is food. More important than love, more important than family or friends or politics or god, more important than anything is food, I know, a trite truth, but precisely because it is so obvious, this truth can be so misleading. Let me tell you about the day I discovered the secret value of food. I was young and it was a dark red day, in which the sun seemed to be in heat and to be indulging in some nasty dark homoerotic activity; the fact is, the day was a lot like hell, and I was in Malawai. In a forest. I was doing development work. I had strayed from the village I was trying to save, hopelessly lost. And there was no food in the forest I was in, no rabbits, no plumb trees, no candy bars, bubble gum or hamburgers, not even snails, not even ants or elephants. No food, period. And I walked and walked and the sun just hovered there burning with lust between the clouds which gathered around it like the dirty fumes of a forbidden passion, dark and red; I could see it blinking through the skinny black trees, the horny bastard. And I walked, and came across, eventually, a black man. I said, “Hello black man”. And he said, “Hello white man”. “Do you have any food,” I asked him. “Hohohoho”, he said, much like our Santa Clause, “Now you see how precious food really is, don’t you? But there is no food here. No food in this forest.” I began to sulk and think about death, and the poetry and sexuality of the sun eluded me. There was just this black man sitting on a rock touching the inner part of his thigh and looking into space. I said, “please, how does one go about surviving here?” He said, “hohoho, wouldn’t you like to know. Now you see the secret value of food”. “Yes, yes, I know, the secret value of food…” “Look at me,” he said, “my ribs are visible, my head is like a sundried prune and my height is severely stunted from malnutrition”. But the black man would not show me the way to survival. I suppose you want to know how I escaped from this precarious situation which was the source of my epiphany concerning the true value of food? I will tell you. I stood there, my hunger burning a hole into my stomach, and suddenly decided to kill this black man and eat him. So I picked up a large, sharp stone and smacked it against his head, killed him, and then I hacked his body into pieces and ate his meat raw, which it turned out was enough to fill me up. It gave me sufficient energy to walk and walk and walk out of that enchanted forest, through a yellow desert and all the way to a random village where I boarded the first bus to Timbuktu. There I phoned my parents and they bought me a ticket from Timbuktu to Paris with layovers in Johanseburg and Munich on Expedia which cost me an exorbitant 2000 Euros. I flew back to my native Paris and have been preaching the true value of food to all my friends ever since. “Ma poulette”, I will tell my girlfriend, “you do not know the secret value of food”, as we are eating at the McDonalds between the Hotel de Ville and the Centre Pompidou ( I have become a rabid admirer of McDonalds). “You see this here hamburger, Marie, you see its dripping juices and the tomato and the lettuce, these are all infinitely more valuable than what you and I share on any platonic level. This coca cola, my chere Marie, contains more truth in its calories than our love will ever contain in its silences or orgasms, why this here Mc nugget is more beautiful to me, its curves conceal more promise, more poetry than your silhouette ever will, these here onion rings…” here Marie stops me and tells me to shut up for once as she looks out the window and perhaps contemplates leaving me. This will not detract me, however, from what I know to be true.
Then, I, this old fat man, take a sip of my whiskey and say, “Now, if you will excuse me, I think dinner is ready. Marie? Oh Marie? Ma poulette, Dinner time!” and I pick up a little brass bell and ring it, louder and louder, and I ring it so loudly that it wakes me up. I have a throbbing headache and tinnitus ringing in my ear the same timbre as the old man’s bell. My bedroom is filled with dark blue moonlight. I stumble my way into the bathroom and take the biggest shit of my life. Then I go back to bed and I don’t dream again.
Jared
What is the highest form of music? An answer.
And then it happened. I stopped digesting. It was not a physiological problem, I was sure of this, rather, it was most definitely a metaphysical one. I had been on to this for a while. I had been feeling my metabolism slowing down for the past few weeks. And now it was stopped. It was as if my body had finally realized its limits. I knew it had to happen sooner or later. At last I no longer needed food. It was a rash moment of existential angst that I made a promise to myself to spend the rest of my foodless days staggering my way aimlessly through the city. And so I did. I wandered about and for the first few days all I could think of was the amazing futility of my stomach, the mind boggling absurdity of it. I came across a Burger King and saw people eating hamburgers and sipping on their plastic straws, and it seemed completely unnecessary, ridiculous, as if they were eating because they were bored, and it was then that I understood that somebody had lied to me and that food was not a prerequisite for life, that indeed I could carry on years like this stumbling through the city without a bite to eat. To think of all the foreign substances we put into ourselves, things we know not where they come from, lifeless inhuman things that could be hurting us. So I emptied my bank account and rolled through town with money crowding my pockets, buying things here and there until I couldn’t carry anything more, but never buying anything to eat. When I grew hungry I told myself that hunger was an illusion, that it was the devil speaking from the depths of my bowels; in my more rational moments I’d tell myself that it was a mental illness of sorts that my parents and teachers had implanted in me, a collective neurosis, perhaps instigated by the government or capitalism to keep us under a predictable dietary regime or make us buy more. Walking up the streets of Huertas I would pass by restaurants and the smells they exuded made me hungry again. God dammit I thought, could there be a significance to food after all? No, surely not. It made no sense, to put this utterly arbitrary substance into my body and expect that to do something for me. Why sex made sense, sex made babies, I could see the babies with my own eyes, sex had an irrefutable logic to it. But hunger, food, digestion, this was all absurd, surely! Why, all I ever saw food produce was shit, and who needs shit? I was much better off without shit, and so was the rest of the world. Secretly I hoped that I would never have to shit again. I thought of shit as an aberration of sorts, a toxic residue which our body produced to warn us that it was ill, the way pain exists, or the way we sneeze when we are sick, so we shit to purge us of the unnecessary harm that eating inflicts in us. I went a week without eating anything, roaming the city, just looking and walking, just lingering, not doing anything; occasionally I would sit on a bench and question reality, wonder at the children screaming ecstatically in the park and then wonder about my wonder and the wonder of my wonder, and then wonder about wondering about something ad infinitum, and the walking would always seem to open new realities for me; I would be in the Retiro and it would be the most important thing in the world, and then I would walk and it was as if I were slowly exterminating that reality for another infinitely realer one. One day I was strolling along the obscenity that is the Castellana, dragging myself past buildings built for royalty and the aristocracy and here and there one built for the modern business men of Madrid, when I happened to glance to my right and catch my reflection in the tinted window of a sandwich café. I was a skeleton, there was no fat in my cheeks, my legs were crookedly bent inwards and my shoulders looked like they were falling off. And then the thought struck me, that missing piece of evidence suddenly made itself known to me, that secret function of food which I had overlooked. All these days my body had been evacuating itself through the meager turds I had been producing on rare occasions. Little by little my body had been disintegrating and there had been nothing to replenish it. And that was when I realized the secret value of food. I understood that in a quite literal sense I was food, that without food I was nothing, that somehow in the hidden magic of my body food became me. I spent the rest of the day eating hamburgers and when I returned home I plopped my bloated, rachitic body on my bed and I don’t know if it was the food but I immediately entered into the most bizarre dream I have ever had. In the dream I was not myself, I was somebody else, an entirely foreign consciousness. I was a French man living in Paris in a luxurious apartment with a view of the tour Eiffel. I was old and obese and I was sitting in an enormous leather couch with a whiskey in my hand, telling a story, looking out the window at the white seagulls dancing against the turquoise sky, and simultaneously wondering why there were seagulls in Paris, so far away from the sea. It was strange because in my dream I was both the old man telling the story and I was the protagonist of his story at the same time. After reflecting on the seagulls I, the old man, began as follows:
Today? The usual. No, I won’t run, I am too old to run. Besides, it’ll be night soon. What will I do then, you ask? Well, I will eat. Why? I will eat because the most important thing in the world is food. More important than love, more important than family or friends or politics or god, more important than anything is food, I know, a trite truth, but precisely because it is so obvious, this truth can be so misleading. Let me tell you about the day I discovered the secret value of food. I was young and it was a dark red day, in which the sun seemed to be in heat and to be indulging in some nasty dark homoerotic activity; the fact is, the day was a lot like hell, and I was in Malawai. In a forest. I was doing development work. I had strayed from the village I was trying to save, hopelessly lost. And there was no food in the forest I was in, no rabbits, no plumb trees, no candy bars, bubble gum or hamburgers, not even snails, not even ants or elephants. No food, period. And I walked and walked and the sun just hovered there burning with lust between the clouds which gathered around it like the dirty fumes of a forbidden passion, dark and red; I could see it blinking through the skinny black trees, the horny bastard. And I walked, and came across, eventually, a black man. I said, “Hello black man”. And he said, “Hello white man”. “Do you have any food,” I asked him. “Hohohoho”, he said, much like our Santa Clause, “Now you see how precious food really is, don’t you? But there is no food here. No food in this forest.” I began to sulk and think about death, and the poetry and sexuality of the sun eluded me. There was just this black man sitting on a rock touching the inner part of his thigh and looking into space. I said, “please, how does one go about surviving here?” He said, “hohoho, wouldn’t you like to know. Now you see the secret value of food”. “Yes, yes, I know, the secret value of food…” “Look at me,” he said, “my ribs are visible, my head is like a sundried prune and my height is severely stunted from malnutrition”. But the black man would not show me the way to survival. I suppose you want to know how I escaped from this precarious situation which was the source of my epiphany concerning the true value of food? I will tell you. I stood there, my hunger burning a hole into my stomach, and suddenly decided to kill this black man and eat him. So I picked up a large, sharp stone and smacked it against his head, killed him, and then I hacked his body into pieces and ate his meat raw, which it turned out was enough to fill me up. It gave me sufficient energy to walk and walk and walk out of that enchanted forest, through a yellow desert and all the way to a random village where I boarded the first bus to Timbuktu. There I phoned my parents and they bought me a ticket from Timbuktu to Paris with layovers in Johanseburg and Munich on Expedia which cost me an exorbitant 2000 Euros. I flew back to my native Paris and have been preaching the true value of food to all my friends ever since. “Ma poulette”, I will tell my girlfriend, “you do not know the secret value of food”, as we are eating at the McDonalds between the Hotel de Ville and the Centre Pompidou ( I have become a rabid admirer of McDonalds). “You see this here hamburger, Marie, you see its dripping juices and the tomato and the lettuce, these are all infinitely more valuable than what you and I share on any platonic level. This coca cola, my chere Marie, contains more truth in its calories than our love will ever contain in its silences or orgasms, why this here Mc nugget is more beautiful to me, its curves conceal more promise, more poetry than your silhouette ever will, these here onion rings…” here Marie stops me and tells me to shut up for once as she looks out the window and perhaps contemplates leaving me. This will not detract me, however, from what I know to be true.
Then, I, this old fat man, take a sip of my whiskey and say, “Now, if you will excuse me, I think dinner is ready. Marie? Oh Marie? Ma poulette, Dinner time!” and I pick up a little brass bell and ring it, louder and louder, and I ring it so loudly that it wakes me up. I have a throbbing headache and tinnitus ringing in my ear the same timbre as the old man’s bell. My bedroom is filled with dark blue moonlight. I stumble my way into the bathroom and take the biggest shit of my life. Then I go back to bed and I don’t dream again.
Jared
What is the highest form of music? An answer.
Backwards fear look forwards sustain and easily simplify a keyhole door. Done awaiting an order that touches on some idea. That a person can be free without turning around, an uncle and a village, until it's you.
Does this appear to be some place to lay your hands down; or, are you over there, while we are over here? What style, what grace. When what appears where, then clarity turns you on.
I want to tell you something. Interest, the rapture of learning, is accompanied ever only by feeling. But that which makes me unique is as automated as your car is driven. Stupid watchers, closely keeps inside a switch. "Turn on, tune in, and drop out."
Happen. Be yourself. Do you look good? Think outside the box. What are you going to be? I think maybe if I write the right books I can radicalize the youth. Now, think outside the box. What is radicalism? What is context?
Life is a suitcase in a room that you walk by as a child tugs on your sleeve with open eyes inquiring your soul. What is space flight and aeronautics? Get some fire under your ship. Unless it's a wooden ship, that would be poor judgment.
What are generalizations? What is America? What is the American people? I was there, say. Where were you? When? Say again, I was there. Who are you? What are the five "W"'s?
My heart is for the hurting. It goes out. Any reluctance on my part may be interpreted as an attempt at talent. He who organizes first is first to have followers. Be careful.
Can you calculate risks? Take risks. Think outside the box. Measure twice, cut once. Take calculated risks. Be like me.
You could kill me. Speak the magic words. What are the magic words? Don't kill me. Don't stop asking questions. Are you going to kill my curiosity? Ask questions. What's hypocrisy? Who am I to say it's not great? Maybe one day they'll say, 'his genius was true, it wasn't used up as he became older'.
He gave and could not take. Learn to take. You must learn to take. We all know that if you don't take, what happens? What's survival? Do you want to survive?
You're sadistic. Do you know, what is sadism? You're schizophrenic. Think outside the box.
What is the box? What is a thought? Think outside the box.
What's defensive? What's death? Don't be defensive. A good offense is as good as a strong defense.
What is your process of thought? What is the result? Think outside the box. Speak.
What if you were a teacher? What would you teach your students?
We all have opportunities. I used to take drugs, but I didn't find confidence. That's a story for another time. It has nothing to do with you. I tell you this so you might benefit from my experience.
O, it's a car. Did you see that, car? It was very fast, passed me by. O, that's poor tasting. O, that's priceless.
Become a bourgeois school child, who thinks the only way to have relief is to escape the mind.
From,
Jared
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