Tribesfolk spared us and cared for us
for good reasons. Our reasons.
As age’s counterfeits, forerunners of the city,
we survived, and multiplied. Out of self-defence
we invented the Self.It’s likely we also invented some of love,
much of fertility (see the Willensdorf Venus)
parts of theology (divine feasting, Unmoved Movers)
likewise complexity, stateliness, the ox-cart
and self-deprecation.(Les Murray, Quintets for Robert Morley, New Selected Poems)
I distrust our lean times.
There is something deeply disgraceful about ‘exercise’ – the frank and open admission that I eat more than I need to, that I have consumed more energy than I need to perform my normal functions,
and have to run around pointlessly to compensate.
If you are going to be so flagrantly insensitive and unjust in your consumption, you should at least have the dignity to get fat. And rejoice.
Maybe, we should celebrate Fat more. The Fat Man cuts a proleptic figure along our magazine fashioned streets. (Not the morbidly obese – he drowns in an addiction)
He points to banquets yet to come, to feasts, to an utterly excessive excess.
He may or may not be the shape of faith fed on grace.
Maybe that’s all just a bit foolish,
But there is much to a theology of Fat.
You crown the year with your goodness; and your paths drip fat.
(Psalms 65:12 My Translation – and yes, that’s exactly what the Hebrew says…)