You always think of yourself as the protagonist. The people you call friends or lovers, your professional contacts and colleagues, the man or woman on the other side of the counter when you swipe your ATM card—who are these people? Bit players, antagonists, romantic interests, conquests, and McGuffins? You don’t aspire to be a Cezanne—the aesthetic linchpin between one era and the next—because you realize the impossibility of radical change as art plays out each infinite permutation of an endgame. Even in politics you realize there are no more Hannibals or Hitlers, but instead, an endless stream of genocide and crimes against humanity.
You think the agents of change are the coders, typing out the zeros and ones that create the interface between what the monitor renders in pixels and this missive my fingers articulate on the keyboard. You realize they are keeping a record of every site you visit; every search term you enter. You act like this doesn’t faze you in the least, saying that privacy is the tarted-up façade of subterfuge and hidden agendas. If everyone rutted in the streets (you say) the world would be in a better place. But in reality you covet your own occluded interiority, that homunculus that sends our mixed messages and words that evoke and provoke and beguile and anger.
When you were in the hospital, you felt corrupted by the intravenous needle that penetrated your forearm, your vein bulging in indignation. You felt less violated by the catheter, for it entered a “natural” orifice and saved you the trouble of making your way to a toilet or having to lie in the warm acrid damp of your piss. The head and neck surgeon, with her delicate touch, shot your face full of Novocain. You couldn’t feel the incision, but you could feel the forceps pushing gauze between your skin and the armature of your skull. She aspirated the wound while her assistant brought more gauze to soak up the puss, blood and saline. It profoundly bothered you when you could feel her inside of you, violating your insides, all for good biological reasons. It reminded you of feeling that skinny boy’s heartbeat through the soft tissues of his viscera when you put your arm up his ass. Both situations were intimate, and a disturbing reminder of the vulnerability you attempt to ignore.
You try to be cavalier about The Inevitability, knowing that there are more organisms on and in you than there are cells in your body, from the pounds of flora in your gut to the little mites that attach themselves to the base of every hair on your body, feasting of sebaceous fluids and sloughed off dead skin. You take some consolation in the fact that as soon as your heart stops, lactic acid levels will rise, and within minutes your cell walls will break down, transforming your moldering corpse from a symbiotic host to bacteria fodder. Eventually they too will die. The crematorium will boil your fluids, and your fat will be rendered then burned along with the flesh, eventually leaving some desiccated bone fragments and burnt carbon. You think about this almost daily.
These thoughts give you some consolation; as a child you had nightmares of being buried alive. De Sade shared your fears. His will specified that his body be left in state until it showed signs of decomposition. Like de Sade there can be gross differences between the activity of the conscious mind and the sometimes-subdued levels of outward animation. This allows others to project their parataxic distortions, which is perfectly fine with you.
For a moment I’d like you to think of yourself in that other role—that of the antagonist, the parasite, the bit player. You as the biological machine that transforms sublime meals into turds flushed down toilets; you as the instigator of insecurities that foster relapse, reevaluation and new life paths; you as the unemployment statistic, the shuffler of papers, the vector of disease; you as the barren receptacle for semen, the dead-end.
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