Like turning on the light to see the darkness better, or changing the nature of a photon merely by peeping at how it interacts with obstructions, you cannot approach any one part of ‘the world’, and walk away intact. You cannot witness it without being stained by it. There is no privileged perspective, no lofty body afloat over the mangled reaches of her carnality.
But there is more: it is not that we can avoid being in touch, we can’t – for we ourselves are produced in this ungodly ontology of irreducible compromise. This is the red-toothed, pan-horned, cloven-hoofed, lava-forked fear that haunts our present practices within nature or our institutions of escape: that we are the seething mass of pungency we have quarantined away from view. And that even perched atop our whitewashed steeds of superiority and moral nobility, we never really left the ground.
