Vines (A meditation on consubstantiation)

In working with the "Writing the Disability" group, I've been contemplating what Burke has to say about disease. It's not positive, of course. In Burke world, disease is dis-ease, and is what we are always/already acting against; we are "rotten with perfection" or at least the motive to perfect, and that means constantly expunging the disease around us. But what happens when the diseased is a person, not an idea or situation? What does that do to Burke's motive of identification: He says we all want that communion with each other, but do we really? Do you want to share substance with the ill and dying? That would mean admitting that you, too, are ill and dying, and we Americans don't do that well.

So, thinking about Burke and disease and about his brief comments on consuming ("you are what you eat" being his example of how changes in substance can occur) and thinking about the latest episode of Supernatural, in which Famine perfects the desire to consume which leads to death (insert Lacan here), I came up with this. This Whatever.

Vines
To be consumed,
to share in substance
to stand on the same ground
to emerge from the same soil like spider plant offspring
Springing off away from each other
soaking in the same rain
under shadows, one withers
the other bears fruit amid glittering rays: This is brotherhood.
It falters against the wind
it leans against its brethren
it steals all the nitrogen
just to stay till spring
just till May, not greedy enough to hope for summer.
To be ensconced
to huddle together for warmth and shelter
to bear down to the root
to find the common branch
and kill it: This is brotherhood, too.
Free from earthy tethers
from the lines of fathers and mothers
from the what was consumed together
the fruit bearer bears itself away
takes no part in the disease
of yellowing leaves and barren pods.


And, now I've managed to depress myself. Lovely.