In Defense of Being Eaten

by Philippe Atallah

           “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him”
                                                                                                                       - John 6:56

Reincarnation is inescapable. I do not mean the return of the self or the soul from the bardo. I mean carne. The flesh. That is what has eternal and recurrent life. Hidden in the body of the individual is the capacity for ecological flourishing and returning one’s mass to the matter-circulating ecology. Could this be a great comfort to us who fear dying? Modern burial practices suggest just the opposite.

The corpse is placed in a sealed box preventing the organic material that makes up the body from returning to the land and its flora and fauna. Often, the body is embalmed with toxic formaldehyde to stave off consumption by the host of microorganisms present on and within the deceased. Alternatively, the body is given to fire, releasing the soul in a cloud of carbon. No living creature can benefit from your molecules until, say, an alga or plant fixes your CO2 to build themselves from light and air. In both practices, the goal is to prevent other living organisms from eating the body, preserving the selfhood of the deceased; the body remains an individual even after death. Why should this be so?

Twinned with alienation from labor, the capitalist mode of production alienates the individual (or even creates The Individual¹) `from the land on which they work and live.No longer is it truly possible, in countries with high levels of capital concentration, to go “off the grid,” or live off the land as the majority of dead humans once did. The enclosures began this process of alienation² culminating in fantasies of virtual reality/the singularity or Mars terraforming. These are demiurgic visions only achievable, say our technologist preachers, through economic growth and burning more fossil fuels. In virtual reality lies the false promise of immortality while terraforming presents the illusion of perpetual growth; infinite resources to power our undying digital brains. Escape into the matrix or to outer space seems preferable to living and dying on earth. In our collective alienation and hyper-individualization, any suggestion that the self could and should be dissolved is met with derision, fear, and accusations of hippie orientalism and psychedelic “we’re all one thing, man”-ism. It is instead the real order of the material world. Matter cannot be created or destroyed, only transmuted.

Robin Wall Kimmerer writes that in the Anishinaabemowin/Ojibwe language, words that in English would be a noun often take the form of a verb, an active way of being:

    “A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by
   humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the
   verb wiikwegamaa—to be a bay—releases the water from bondage and
   lets it live. ‘To be a bay’ holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living
   water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with
   cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers.” ³

A bay is not a bay but is being a bay for now, capturing in language the changing nature of the physical world. The bay was once something else and will be something else again. We are similarly trapped in the noun-centric, static world formed by Anglo powers and described in the English language. The language itself collected loan words as the British Empire collected colonies and its scientists collected species from across the world. The transformational action of nature siloed into discrete categories, and individuals.

Like the bay distributing its water across the world's oceans, so too do humans, when allowed, proliferate into the biotic firmament. Alternative burial practices are becoming more available. These practices include green burial, allowing the natural decomposition of an unembalmed body in the earth; terramation, technologically assisted decomposition for the creation of nutrient-rich soil; and aquamation, dissolving the deceased in a basic solution. Each of these practices emits less carbon than cremation and allows for the deceased’s matter to be released into the environment.

I do not claim that a change in burial practices alone will solve any of the host of mounting ecological crises, but it might grant today’s increasingly city-dwelling populace an opportunity to consider the land and our place on it before and after death. The dominant liberal ideological system centers the individual and labels the body one’s property.⁴ But I do not wish to be a unitary commodity when there are worlds ready to erupt from my flesh like a whale fall in the oceanic deep.