Excerpts from Damrosch

"'The truth is that the combative instinct . . . seems to be as constant, if not quite as active . . . now as in the days when the oldest of the mummies led his armies to victory or defeat.'"

"'The Garden Party,' c. 645 BCE. King Teumman's head hangs from the tree on the left, suspended by a rope through his jaw, while a harpist plays nearby and attendants bring food to the king and queen, who are cooled by a pair of fans as they relax under a grape arbor."

    How to live, how to die, how to fight or flight, how to run-on sentences, certainly. Our bodies have it all right. For starters, nothing about them behaves as if under any delusion of singularity. The gut cultivates its communities, DNA differences be damned. The immune system wages an endless war of intelligence, complete with moles, double-agents, secret police, the works. The heart just works, but even then with the lungs, to feed everyone: home cells, friendly resident aliens, cancerous traitors, omnivorous squatters. Once again, no one thing about any of this living. Just the works.
     We, nonetheless, we co-creators of our much-discussed anthropocene, we know how to ask the absurdist questions of our selves, as if we were selves: "What is the value of one life?" Do we know it's not either one or a life, we're asking about?
     What we fear the most is more like amputation, our heads swinging from trees, suspended by stout, triple-threaded ropes through our jaws. What we fear is the fleeing of the circulating self from circulation, the flight of the miraculous awareness from the body that momentarily housed it, or
     What we fear is more like starvation by loss of habitat, no more grape arbors under which a mind reclines. The soul is driven out of doors, a refugee from a combat zone, a deluge, or
      What we fear is what we are. Compound beings that make a magical, burning whole, metaphorical, flame-like, for a time, but do not inhere in either the fire or the smoky, evanescing light it yields.
     We can fight over this. We can order each other to wrap our corpses after wars, drive the countless lives out from our remains, bind our tongues with spells, the future selves with incantations not to despoil and loot the loot of our despoiling campaigns. It won't work, except for the spells themselves. The seals and cylinders may murmur quietly a great long time along the fallen rows of torched, smashed shelves. Or not.
     I have a terrible secret to tell. We come and go, we're never whole. We never die, but what we are is not anything that actually survives. We're never going to turn into hungry ghosts or angelic choirs. We're already as godlike as we might get.
     Or worse. What we really are, hunger and dying aside, is neither energy, nor matter, nor gravity, nothing more than the passing of signs occasionally noticing, like dogs growling uncertainly at mirrors that do not smell at all of dog, that we are the crazed thing at which we bare our cruel, our murderous, our word-honed canines, time. Or,