Cannibalism and Pierre Joris' "Antlers"

[This is a continuation of the previous post.]

What is “cannibalism”? It could refer to two actions: eating your own flesh or eating the flesh of another of one’s own kind.

Stars cannibalize themselves. Then cannibalize their kin, their solar systems.

Cannibalism among animals is more widespread than often thought: chimpanzees, polar bears, and even, possibly, dolphins.

The universe itself, according to the current understandings of physics, cannibalizes its own energy, burning itself away into "darkness."

Cannibalism plays against similarity and difference. For instance, the individual eats another individual of the same kind. Or the mouth eats another body part. It would be tough for the mouth to eat itself, although some desperate or deranged people have chomped on their very lips.

Pierre Joris’ “Antlers” gathers the universe about a word, "antlers," a word of cannibalism, of defense, of killing, of awe, of a glorious story ultimately to be ignored because of the gnawing of time, the gnawing of other, more important concerns.

To live is cave into yourself, to grow hungry for your own vitality, to grow stooped as a result of your own voraciousness, to chomp against yourself: a law of nature as inexorable as gravity.

(If you don’t like it, go to another universe.)

The only body part you can't cannibilize is your mouth. But another will do it for you. Will eat away your most basic childhood enunciations, calling them anything but okay, twisting your talk into channels where it will die an acceptable death—slowly, rather than quickly.

I recall a dinner where we adults talked of the auto industry cannibalizing the streetcars. And a young child wailing when he found the restaurant had run out of his ice cream. He wailed, full-throated, from the ocean's spongy bottom. I loved him for it. And his parents, necessarily, had to hush him. And I loved them for that, but not as much as I loved the child—in that moment.

Maybe he would become a poet of sorts, singing of change.

“What does not change is the will to change,” said the poet Charles Olson, but change can’t be helped—will or no will. Change just happens. Here, Joris veers from the pronunications of Olson: Joris enacts change—as root deep to his poetics as ink and papyrus. As inevitable as the cannibalism of the universe.

To me, the antlers in Joris’ poem become an emblem of cannibalism, of the glory of the hunt and sustenance, of the losing of that glory in the grind of living and caring, of one priority chewing and discarding another, of old glories faintly pulsing, a pulsar, only an echo of what it once was.

Your very organs eat themselves—fire dropping to embers dropping to mere ash. Your hairline, your skin, your heart muscle—your child gnaws at as you worry. 

We will grow old, and, in turn, gnaw at our children. Most accept out of duty, some gladly and gratefully remembering what we did for them, others grudgingly.

Love sustains us. And eats us.

_____________________

Pierre Joris, Brecchia: Selected Poems 1972-1986 (éditons phi, Station Hill, 1987)

Pierre Joris, Poasis: Selected Poems 1986-1999 (Wesleyan UP, 2001)

Peter Cockelbergh, Pierre Joris—Cartographies of the In-Between (Litteraria Pragensia, 2011)