Broad River
When one reaches a certain age, it becomes next to impossible to lose weight. I’ve lost almost 20 pounds (so far) on the Keto diet. Here’s my theory:
We Homo sapiens were cursed early on to live, eat and die along with all the other animals roaming the earth, a predatory lot (do you know the story of Lot and Able?). We like to think we’ve risen above this curse, but we haven’t. We are only animals.
The reason Keto works is our bodies function best when we are consuming the meat of others. As we do, we reassert the natural order. We are literally consuming death. Survival of the fittest is a delusion, because all living things on Earth are destined to die at some point. We all share the same ultimate fate. We live and die from the murder of others. Our death is the slow process of justice, our punishment for the murder of our fellow beings. That we have murdered to stay alive is no justification. We are all guilty of murder. This endless cycle of capital punishment is the price we pay, the curse, for being mortal. It is our ticket for the ride called life, which ends in death.
The junk we added to our diets, filled with carbs and preservatives, was of our own invention, to prolong and distract us from our inevitable fate. We are only animals.
The moral impetus behind vegetarianism is yet another attempt to deny the fate of our curse, all feeble efforts to separate ourselves from our animalistic nature. The Keto diet embraces the natural order. It is what our earliest ancestors ate, a diet of meat, vegetable and nuts. And still, after millions of years, we are only animals.
John is Watching
Older people put on weight as part of the process of natural selection. As we become older, weaker, of less use to the herd, nature intends to fatten us up for the slaughter. We are only animals.
But it is not just a question of diet. In a noble fight against the natural order, we have become civilized. We have created laws against murder, while institutionalizing the mass slaughter of animals. All laws eventually lead back to prohibitions against murder, even as certain forms of murder are condoned, war and the mass slaughter of animals being the obvious examples. The human race is a walking contradiction. We fancy ourselves superior, but we are still only animals.
When Cute Little Girls Grow Up
We invented art and philosophy to explain, distract us from and perhaps even celebrate our curse, our inevitable fate. We have romanticized and expressed our fatalism in order to survive the experience of life, the constant fear of death and the unknowable, because we are only animals.
We suffer in guilt and shame because it is the natural order. We find ways to rise above our fate, even as we are reminded of it constantly. We are born guilty of murder. We are the product of an endless cycle of mass genocide, generations upon generations of mass murderers who have created the conditions for our existence, because we are only animals.
Then, somewhere along the line, we invented God. Or God invented us. It doesn’t really matter. We utilize the idea of a higher power to help us make sense of the senselessness of this mad existence, filled with contradictions. We directed our artistic impulses to give us access to this higher power. For without art there could be no communion with God. And without this connection to something higher than our murderous selves, we would have no meaning or purpose for remaining alive, because we are only animals.
So, when you think of how expendable the arts are, you are really talking about doing away with our one and only chance for peace, meaning and purpose, in a violent, meaningless and magnificent existence. You hear this meaning expressed in the music of Beethoven, in the portraits of Rembrandt, in the screams of Janus Joplin or in a Shakespearian Sonnet. You can see and hear it anywhere you take a moment from your “real life” to look and to really see and consider. Art is what allows us to function in the massive contradiction it is to be human. We have become fantastic meaning-making machines, creating and consuming art. I bet you never realized art was such a matter of life and death. Well, it is, because we are only animals.
