A Sacrosanct Diet
1.
Usually she abstains from eating pomegranate and goat as it somehow feels disrespectful, even dangerous.
On the one occasion that she plucked a seeded apple from an abandoned garden and held it close with the greatest care before ripping it apart and sinking her teeth into the juicy sacs, she found herself questioned by a large goat asking why she has done such a thing.
“I slinked through the smallest gap and stole this particular pomegranate as it lay on the ground seemingly uncherished and ready to rot”.
On hearing this, the goat considered the situation in its entirety and encouraged her to proceed, with absolution.
The incident prompts consideration on her part of a great many things but she is perplexed mostly by a mysterious desire she feels to swallow both pomegranate and goat and feel them heavy in her gut.
2.
As intensities disperse and her ability to know re-asserts itself, she remembers her fears and she remembers her doubts.
Without the powerful glow of one within the other, she tends towards an anxious grip, to manipulation and control.
Things remain unsettled.
In quiet moments she wonders which parts of her life are sacrosanct.
He wonders whether such a concept is obsolete, if there is anything within him that is incapable of desecration, that sleeps as a holy bone, inviolable.
Vaguely, she remembers eating flesh, intense with power, and recalls the prolonged generosity within.
Brittle-edged with moroseness he almost remembers slipping the seeds between his lips and he yearns.
3.
They desire abundance , and though they know not how, they trust.
And so, uncompromising in the conditions required for growth, she throws out one last majestic crop and turns her powers outwards seeking it.
Absconding from the earth she turns the slowness of transformation into a proliferation of fantasies served with scarlet wine.
She sees juice stream as a fountain until a patch is sodden.
The blood of the hill-torn goat dries and forms a hard surface, and she paints raw sienna, yellow oxide, chalk and grey, various parts of him such as the netted seeds surrounded by their juice sac; the flesh, membranes, rind and horns.
At nightfall she suckles three seeds.
There, a sense of something, of nothing, which perhaps glides between, mumbles its thunder as she vacillates to almost stillness.
4.
The remnants of him fall dormant and he understands an abstract concept of fertility: one that imagines growth unsymmetrically and mutually alongside an other.
Retaining all of his faith, he waits.
He begins to understand her.
In those moments within his mouth saliva drips its connection to the one beside it, within it, upon it, flesh and skin dissolving.
5.
A bleeding banquet sufficiently syrupy to plunge her tongue in its juices covers the tables, and she sips from the cup until it is no longer full.
Entranced now with eyes upon her she retreats just a step and lifts her arms. The entire body gives attention to the performance of eating – a figment of her imagination he thinks - and to food as sacrament.
Anointing the hallowed core with a ceremony of compassion, of reciprocity, they re-integrate their unity.
Over time, alongside their anxieties, they find themselves in the midst of something outside the capacity of their imaginations, and it spreads into the place between them.
Here, moments of fragility tantalise without the bounds of law, protected by incorruptible mutuality.
And although as a rule she eats neither pomegranate nor goat, there are certain circumstances in which she imagines it acceptable, perhaps even desirable, that she eat both; though sparingly and with great caution.
A poetic essay that imagines an encounter between human and plant totem in which each is fragilised whilst not succumbing to a state of surrender.
It draws on Bracha Ettinger's Matrix Theory and references the ancient rite of Eating of Raw Flesh described by Jane Ellen Harrison in Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion.
‘A Sacrosant Diet’ was published in Leonorana 1: Diets, 2017.
Leonorana 1-diets
Editorial Project: Isabel Carvalho
Guest Editor: Luisa Mota
Graphic Design: Márcia Novais
21 x11cm | 128 PP
2017
Leonorana is a transdisciplinary, bilingual research magazine with irregular periodicity, which has as its main objective the study of the relationship of conflict and complicity between verbal and visual languages, presenting the essay as an elected gender for the development of speculative thought.
Leonorana - the word that gives title to this magazine project - owes its origin to "Book III-Leonorana ( 1965-70 ): Thirty-one thematic variations on the motto of a vilancete of luís de camões", by ana hatherly, Published in the book A Calculator (Chimera, 2001).