"The Sudden Smell of Burning Flesh"

**'s cousin disgusts me. Even his teeth and lips, the way his gums appear when he speaks. The curve of his mouth and the almost sneer. I find him fascinating to look at, yet repellant. On Saturday night we were drinking after dinner, and I don't know if he was drunk, but for a moment I wasn't sure if I was offended or amused. I wasn't drunk. He talked about shooting black people in South Africa and leaving bodies to rot. I thought of the song Strange Fruit, particularly the Nina Simone version...."black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze". I become sarcastic and barbed in situations like that, and attempt to humiliate people into agreeing with me, or at least pretending to. I wish I didn't, and I wish I could truly accept difference (I even want to accept the idea of hating people, wanting to kill them and watching their corpses decompose, yet I rankle immediately at that, as if I was implanted with that horror pre-life) but I can't. How can you accept something that disgusts you? This reminds me of my obsession with violence, with Le Differend, and with our inability to recuperate anything from experiences/people/actions we find abhorrent. We like to exclude and demarcate until the cows come home (where were the cows anyway?), but acceptance is almost impossible. Yet there is also the tendency toward complete assimilation. Perhaps along with the desire we have to fuck each other, we also wish to consume each other (or are they the same thing anyway?). And do we fuck or consume with a view to changing or reformulating the other person? It is a strangely partisan system of control and exchange. I am often surprised by my desire to submit quietly to the person who I wish would fuck me. And despite my consistent ebullience, I want sometimes to be tamed to death.