One of the most fundamental requirements of life is that we consume living tissue (or tissue that was once living) to survive.
We, the unwitting instruments of some grand energy conveyance, come together, feed, split, grow, "evolve," die.
Each organism begins within, and is formed of, the world it will inhabit. Colonies
of cells created from proteins, enzymes, the alpha carbon. Atoms clicking together
to form molecules, which in turn grow together into an endless array of patterns
and functions. We are a sea of tissue, held together by living bonds,
subordinated by the breaking of those bonds, and the slow (or quick) spilling
of our life's blood back into the earth; feeding the multitude of living organisms
following behind us, around us.
The living
follow a hierarchical self-interested, species- or same-centric survival system,
motivated by self-preservation. The thrill of conquest and the reward
of the feast have taken on many historical and allegorical adaptations
in art. The debasement or transcendence of the "other" is sublimated in courtship,
politics, power plays and warfare.
In humans, our innate tendency toward first acknowledging something as "other" and then ascribing it to be "evil," "beast, or savage" certainly
helps the whole killing/consumption/conveyance process along. It would be difficult
to eat a pig if we thought about its very definite preference for life or imagined
it sick with fear just before it was to be slaughtered. Likewise, human tribes
have tried throughout history to see ethnic and/or religious (intellectual)
distinctions between them as confirmation that one or the other was better
suited for brutality and subordination.
But the "other" is fundamental to life. If all life-forms don't share
the ability to determine a distinction between self and other, they all share
the definition of a physical boundary. The boundaries of its body are an organism's
first territorial responsibility. Keeping them intact is what keeps it plugged
into the world.
Life's boundary, then, is death, or literally, non-life. In the larger, timeless,
formless unsheathing of one organism into another through division, offspring,
and evolutionary transformation over a massive expanse of time, life can be
seen as a kind of kinetic struggle against entropy. From this perspective there
has been no death here for nearly 4 billion years. Life could be called All-life
which is fed by the nuclear fusion of the sun.
Finally, the sun consumes itself:
The sun is an explosion of hydrogen into helium that was sparked by gravity
pulling against the mass of a once giant gas cloud. As the mass falls in on
itself, it crushes atoms together, fusing them, transforming them. The
lost mass from the newly formed elements is converted to explosive energy and
radiates outward, holding up the sun and feeding the Earth until eventually
when the hydrogen is spent, the heavier helium atoms ignite. Even hotter now,
the sun engulfs the Earth as the inferno rips away from the sun's shrinking
core, the helium fuses into the heavier elements of carbon and oxygen.
The heavy core collapses as the star exhausts its fuel and then
for eons cools and shrinks until it reaches a final, cold equilibrium. The
conveyance is through.