Finally, sunset.
The Asadi fled, but Eisen Zwei – no doubt as surfeited as a python that has just unhinged its lower jaw to admit a fawn – slumped in his place and did not move.
Now a single alien moon dances in the sky, and I’m left with a question whose answer is so stark and self-evident I’m almost afraid to ask it: From what sort of creature did the old man obtain and dress out his ritual offerings? Huddled beneath the most insubstantial of roofs, I am unable to fend off the frightening ramifications of the Asadi way of death . . .
Speculations on Cannibalism: An Extemporaneous Essay
From the unedited in-the-field tapes of Egan Chaney: It’s a beautiful day, and if I hold my microphone out – I’m holding it out now, extending it toward the Asadi – all you’ll be able to hear is five hundred pairs of feet slogging back and forth through a centimeter of hot dust. There. Hear that? Perhaps you don’t. Nevertheless, Eisen, it’s a beautiful day.
It’s four days since your counterpart, Eisen Zwei, stirred things up with his disorderly three-course banquet. Since then, nothing.
I’m walking. I’m walking among the Asadi. They fail to see me even though I’m just as solid, just as real, as they are. Even the ones I’ve given names to – Campy, Werner, Gus, Oliver, and the others – refuse to grant me the simple fact of my existence. This is hard, Ben. This is difficult to accept. Nonetheless, I continue to feel a paternal tenderness toward these few Asadi – Jane, Thelma, Dianne, Celestiue, and the others – I’ve been able to recognize and name . . .
I’ve just walked by Celestine. The configuration of her features gives her a gentle look, like a Quaker woman wearing a parka. Her seeming gentleness leads me to the topic of this commentary: How could a creature of Celestine’s mien and disposition actually eat the flesh of one of her own kind? God help me if these aliens are intelligent and self-aware, base-camp huggers, because I’m walking among cannibals!
They encircle me. They ensorcel me. They fill me with a sudden dread, an awe such as the awe of one’s parents that consumes the child who has just learned the secrets of conception and birth. Exactly thus, my dread of the Asadi, my awe of their intimate lives . . .
Turnbull is missing. Do you remember him? I named him Turnbull because he was small, like the pygmies the first Turnbull wrote about, like the pygmies I worked among . . . Now I can’t find Turnbull. Little Turnbull, squat and sly, is nowhere among these indifferent, uncouth people. I’d have found him by now, I know I would. He was my pygmy, my little pygmy, and now these aloof bastards – these Asadi of greater height than Turnbull – have eaten him! Eaten him as though he were an animal! a creature of inferior status! a zero in a chain of zeroes as long as the diameter of time! May God damn them for their impious rapacity!
[A lengthy pause during which only the shuffling of the Asadi can be heard.]
I think my shout unsettled some of them. A few of them flinched! But they don’t look at me, these cannibals, and I don’t know whether to be outraged or gratified. A cannibal may never go too far toward acknowledging the existence of another of his kind, so uncertain is his opinion of himself. A cannibal’s always afraid he’ll ascribe more importance to himself than he deserves. In doing so, he discovers – in a moment of hideous revelation – where his next meal is coming from. He always knows where it’s coming from, and he’s therefore nearly always afraid.
Cannibals – the civilized sort – are the most inwardly warring schizophrenics in all of Nature. On the one hand, Eisen, it requires a colossal arrogance to think oneself enough better than another member of one’s own species to eat him. On the other, this same act demonstrates the abject self-abasement of the cannibal in his readiness to convert the flesh of his own kind into . . . well, let’s be blunt about this, into shit. Grandiose haughtiness versus the worst sort of voluntary self-degradation. Have the Asadi incorporated these polar attitudes into the structure of their daily life? Does their indifference to one another result from the individual’s esteem for himself? Could it be that the individual’s lack of regard for his kind precipitates the practices of pariahhood and public humiliation? A schizophrenic society? Does the pattern of indifferent association during the day and compulsive scattering at night mirror the innate dichotomy of their souls? After all, who’s more deluded than the cannibal? His every attempt to achieve union with his kind results in a heightened alienation from himself.
[Chaney’s microphone picks up the incessant shuffling of Asadi feet and the low sighing of a breeze in the rain forest.]
Yes, yes, I know. This is all very bad anthropology, But I’m not really speaking anthropologically. I’m speaking metaphorically, and maybe I’m not talking about the Asadi at all. I realize full well, gang, that among human populations there are two types of cannibalism: exocannibalism and endocannibalism. I haven’t forgotten all my training.
Exocannibalism, Ben, usually occurs in a context of continuing warfare between tribes that are dependent to some extent on agriculture for their livelihoods. They war, you see, to protect their sedentary way of life or to expand their holdings into areas where the soil hasn’t been depleted by overuse. Enemies eat one another to steal their adversaries’ strength and to gain power over them. In such a context, cannibalism is patriotic, and human flesh is invariably kosher.
The Asadi, not being agriculturists, and having no natural enemies here in the Synesthesia Wild, are not adherents of exocannibalism. Instead, Ben,
