Celebrated French poet's notebook: "Idea for a story: it is discovered
that eating raw human flesh is a cure for cancer." What sort of story?
Surely not a morality tale, a talking heads, philo-sophistic dialogue of
should and shouldn't delivering a meditation on the nature of the Good.
Maybe he was thinking of a multi-part everyday TV soap of greedy folk:
amazing revelations of the mega-rich and their insatiable lust for a
life of endless full-screen details .....? No, that wouldn't be his
style. A melodrama, then, of electronic money, gigabyte power and market
corruption? Share prices in mortuaries reach new high, trade of the dead
and near dead brings life to ailing stock markets, tragedy - SICK
FINANCIER EATS MOTHER BY MISTAKE - strikes in ever new and enterprising
ways? Or a dozen other fun-filled cream and cupcake fantasies spun out
in this late 20th century moment, unforeseen by the poet, when the sight
on TV of cancered flesh-eaters chewing their way back to being heads of
armies and leaders of nations might -- I only say mightÿ-- be felt to be
too near the bone. After all, who is eating and who is being eaten in
the circle of the world is a tricky subject. Perhaps our poet was
thinking - which poet since then hasn't, at some time or other, thought-
of Dante's Ugolino trapped at the cold center of hell, forever sinking
his teeth into the skull of the treacherous bishop who'd bricked Ugoloni
and his children in a room to starve to death. You can see why he didn't
write it.