Interviewer [I]: Tell us a little bit about how you got where you are today.

Vulture [V]: I think I’d rather talk about something else.

I: Like what?

V: Like my work, for example.

I: Why the aversion?

V: It’s not a pleasant tale.

I: Right. So what have you been working on?

V: I was eating the dead, at least until recently.

I: Like an autocannibalism-thing?

V: No. Cadavers are much more palatable when one has no personal connection to them. That includes one’s own. But it occurred to me, one day, that the mitigation of strong feelings towards the things one consumes is not actually desirable. Why would anyone want that? To lack any real attachment towards the elements that go into making one what one is? So I began to eat. I mean, I really ate. I thought deeply and with the sincerest consideration about every morsel that entered me, and thus began the journey that eventually became my life’s work. It was difficult to stop.

I: You held nothing back.

V: I held nothing back.

I: And what stopped you?

V: That’s neither here nor there. When it comes to my life’s work, my obsession, my mission, I believe that my later projects are simultaneously consummate and salient, regarding the execution upon the themes that occupy my work as well as the pervasiveness of said themes throughout that work, respectively. Only parts of my early oeuvre stand out in that regard.

I: Maybe we should unpack that a bit. Can you provide some insight into your final piece?

V: “Racoon Number Eleven.” The way that his viscera spilled from the wound in his gut into his open arms, it was like a gift. To himself, but also to me. I couldn’t let him go, so I decided that I had to capture the majesty of that moment, the portrait of God that was his body’s final rest. It’s funny to talk about this one in retrospect, because my body’s final rest was mere feet away. All of that being said, I must add that I don’t consider this one my masterpiece.

I: Which project do you consider your masterpiece?

V: “Dog Number Two.”

I: That’s an early piece.

V: Indeed, one of my earliest.

I: You described your later work as your most “consummate,” so why do you consider this early piece so important?

V: Like I said, execution and salience. In “Dog Number Two,” my subject and materials had an aberrant quality. The dog in question had once been someone’s pet, but died of starvation on the side of the highway. I had been following him for several days at that point. He died in this kind of liminal spiritual zone, occupying space between the human world of his former master and the cumulative ecological murder that is the natural world. And he died on a highway, a totally transient nothing-space. It’s like he was in purgatory, but for the God of the Earth rather than the Catholic God. So the material was there, and I wanted to say something about death but hadn’t managed to do so in any of my previous pieces. I mean, not really. And then this dog comes around and it’s like I’m handed the skeleton key to the doors of perception, the decoder for life’s absurd beauty. And then that human photographer showed up to capture the moment. I don’t think she realized that it was precisely her presence that was momentous. She took several pictures, although I never saw her again so I have no idea how they turned out. The serendipity was nonetheless disquieting. Of course, I didn’t realize that it was my masterpiece at the time. It only acquired that quality in retrospect. Still, it was prophetic, a thetical work.

I: You say that it was thetical and that you wanted to say something about death. Can you elaborate on that? What was the thesis, so to speak?

V: That, contra Montaigne, the continuous work of death is to build life. But that there is also a dialectical moment happening here.

I: Can you explain?

V: It’s simultaneously true that the work of life is to build death. The moment of transition from one direction of this movement to the other is what I think needs to be explored. That transition is the dialectical moment. What I wanted to do was flip the traditional formulation of death-consciousness on its head. In the Heideggerian recipe, for example, the capacity to relate authentically to the world is built from the horizon of meaning that is enclosed by inevitable death. I think that Montaigne probably meant something similar. What I want to say is something like the opposite, or perhaps the inverse. This horizon of meaning, this relationship between life and consciousness of death is built from a pre-existing and authentic relation to the world. My subject in “Dog Number Two” had neither death-consciousness nor an authentic relation to the world. What this piece displayed, along with my subsequent work, was a reversal of the process whereby the two phenomena relate to one another.

I: What does this have to do with “life’s absurd beauty,” as you call it?

V: The work of death building life. There is a literal aspect to this, of course. The very possibility of life on this planet is built on an empire of bones, a hegemony of decay that is millions and millions of years old. But then there is the metaphorical or metaphysical aspect. A living thing can die at any time, for any reason. The randomness is absurd. But it’s also beautiful.

I: I don’t follow.

V: I was only alive to consume the dog because of a concomitance of obscene and absurd events, a throw of the dice. And yet eating it gave me life. And I was alive while eating it. I wasn’t even thinking about death until afterwards when I began to understand the significance of how it all worked together. I was Sartre’s pervert looking through the keyhole. Then the photographer showed up. It was the interlocution of subsequent events that awoke me from raw life and returned me to a consciousness of death.

I: I’m still having trouble understanding what you mean.

V: An animal died, and by a miracle of chance I was able to partake of his flesh. You don’t think that’s beautiful?

I: I suppose it is.

V: It is. The most beautiful thing in the world.

I: Is that why you wanted to avoid discussing how you got here?

V: Possibly.

I: Is your own death as beautiful as any other?

V: I think so, but it’s also sad.

I: Why is it sad?

V: I can’t see it well enough to appreciate it.

I: Then how can you know that it’s sad?

V: I mean that it’s sad for me.

I: Right. Before we wrap things up, could you maybe say more about God?

V: What do you mean?

I: You described “Raccoon Number Eleven” as a “portrait of God,” and you made a distinction between the “God of the Earth” and the “Catholic God” in your disambiguation of the themes in “Dog Number Two.” It seems that there’s something happening here. Do you see “God” simply as a metaphor, or does your work have something to say about the existence of God in a theological or metaphysical sense?

V: Firstly, I do not believe that metaphors are ever simple. Language is built on metaphors. They are its foundation, its bedrock, not some accident or ad-hoc accoutrement. Our consciousness and our life could not be sustained without them. Our world consists of and in Nietzsche’s mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms. Secondly, the space that God occupies in my work is the same space that it occupies anywhere else. God is the photographer, the guard who catches the pervert peering into the keyhole. God is the interviewer. God is the everpresent look from the other, the dialectical moment that guarantees self-consciousness. But the thing to remember is that God exists and does not exist. God does not need us. God doesn’t even need God. The possibility of the moment of self-consciousness which is sustained by God in this way is a literal, material fact of the world. God sees you and takes your picture, and this is what makes you real. God is the rose bush as well as the blooming knot of maggots that nourish it. God exists and God does not exist. There’s a little bit of God in all of us. 

I: Even in death?

V: Especially in death.

I: Fascinating. Well, thank you for agreeing to this interview. I think that our readers will appreciate these insights into your life and work.

V: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

I: Any final thoughts before we close out?

V: If you glimpse my remains by the side of the road, be sure to take a picture.

Watch the fingers grip its jaw before it regains eyes to see them. Appendages delicate, bones a tangle of porcelain cherubim with pink skin to hold them close. Hands musician’s hands. Watch them worm into the wet earth anyways, steam rising from the lichenous emerald floor of the rainy woods like tobacco smoke. Watch the Man smoke tobacco anyways, the cherubim digging past the worms to find the beauty while he sings his song. The rain washes and cleans and reveals treasure. Reveals a human skull. Watch the musician’s hands disenter it. See the skull regain eyes regain windows to see them, to see itself. A different kind of treasure.

Look at him. The Man. His vulpine mug while he digs the skull from beneath the tree. There are no other bones in the dirt to speak of, but an effigy fashioned from a deer skeleton hangs from the side of the tree beneath which the skull was revealed. How the fuck did it get here, anyways? Look at it. The skull.

There is a Person inside of the skull. The Man does not know this. Neither do the skull nor the Person inside of it know this. Too much time has passed. At first the Person counted down the days in the dark. Eventually they gave up. Were they Woman or Man? No one remembers. They will remain a plurality, multiple. They will remain in darkness.

Light explodes into the windows where eyes once dwelled. This is what a forest looks like, the Person remembers. The musician’s hands pull the skull from the earth. Its fingers make their way into its cavities as they brush away the wet dirt. Its cavities its windows, the orbits and the mouth and the holes where ears and a nose once dwelled. This is what a Man looks like.

Steam rises from the emerald floor, the Man stops to listen. Raindrops and clumps of fallen earth upon the glade. He tucks the skull beneath his arm and peers toward the bones that were once a deer, hanging from the tree. Peers into its windows where eyes once dwelled. He takes a final drag of the tobacco and lets the burnt leaves fall from his musician’s hands, into the soil where the skull once dwelled. The deer windows peer back. Bearing witness.

The Man carries the skull back to a building, a house. He cleans the skull and places it upon a shelf in a room where a bed and wardrobe dwell. Books and plants and pots and pans and images and musical instruments align the walls. From this position the Person can see. They dwell together. This is what a home looks like.

The Person speaks. The Man would not understand the language if he could hear it. He cannot. For him the skull is silent. The Person inside, a prisoner to sight.

Days pass, then months and years. The man adorns the skull with motifs, jewelry and bugs and plants and jewelry made from bugs and plants. He opens his wrist and pours blood into its mouth. He replaces the other objects on the shelf until it becomes a monument to the skull. He occasionally invites others over to look upon it. The Person inside looks back. Bearing witness.

What the Person sees are happenings, some of them are more easily interpreted than others. They speak their strange language all the while, no one has ears to listen. At some point the Man has a Woman over, he shows her the skull before they remove one another’s clothes and fuck and fill the home with tobacco smoke until the sunlight disappears. This happens many times. At another point the Man has other Men over and they do the same thing. He makes music for the skull and for the others, the Old Guitar is his favorite. The instruments listen and speak, his fingers dance across their strings. The Person screams.

The man often disappears from home for many hours at a time, he leaves the skull atop its shrine. When this happens the Person inside uses its voice to move objects. The objects, with ears to hear their language, listen. Teacups and dishware throw themselves from their resting places. Vases containing plants shatter themselves upon the floor and one another. Whenever the Man returns he must clean up the mess. One day the Man has others over to see the skull, they remove blood from their veins to pour into its eyes before removing clothes from their skin and fucking, their flesh scarlet and glistening while they fill the home with tobacco smoke. The Person inside the skull screams, the skull whose windows admit light the color of raspberries. The Person screams until the Old Guitar finally listens. It removes itself from the wall and lands violently upon the floor where it shatters. The Man weeps but continues his adulation of the skull, a home for the Person whose dwelling leaves their throat ravaged. Their singing that might shatter anyone with ears to listen.

Years become decades. The Man ages. He has others over with increasing infrequency. The Person’s scream dulls to a roar, then a sigh, then a whisper. The objects lose their grasp upon the voice, the strange language. Eventually they hear nothing. The Man continues to sing until he cannot. The Man who never heard anything. The Man who eventually loses his voice, too. He dwells alone except for the skull and the Person inside. All he can do is fill the home with smoke.

One day the Man removes the skull from its position of prominence. He tucks it under his arm and flees home, into the forest. He returns to the tree where deer bones once dwelled, no longer. He fixes the skull to the tree, glimpses it. He lies beneath it, where his body dies and is eventually swallowed by the emerald glade, the lichenous soil. The Person inside peers back. Bearing witness.