A fundamental requirement of life is the consumption of living tissue (or tissue that was once living) for nourishment.

The unwitting instruments of some grand energy conveyance, we 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. Our emotions, desires and identities expand outward from this fundamental point.

In art, the thrill of conquest and the reward of the feast have taken on many historical and allegorical adaptations. The debasement or transcendence of the ''other'' is sublimated in courtship, politics, religion, business and warfare.

To acknowledge something as ''other'' and then ascribe 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, an explosion of hydrogen into helium sparked by gravity pulling against the mass of a once giant gas cloud, is seeking equilibrium. The fiery mass is in a state of collapse, crushing in on itself, its hydrogen atoms fusing into helium, a dense core forming. The mass lost in the creation of helium explodes outward as heat and light, holding up the Sun and feeding the Earth. The more the Sun burns through its hydrogen the denser and hotter its core becomes. Next, it consumes its helium atoms, fusing them into carbon, it's hotter now and the Sun swells. The raging giant engulfs the Earth then falters. The carbon is too dense to ignite and the reaction is slowed. There's a final sputter as its fiery, gaseous coat is thrown off. The hard, dense core will now cool and shrink until it reaches a final cold equilibrium. The conveyance is through.