Defile the Sacred Body

I think that more people should try self-injury. As i've talked about elsewhere, it can often be very effective, and a lot of the harm it can cause is the direct result of stigma around it rather than the act itself (for many people it seems that the main reason they want to stop is that it causes feelings of shame, which it wouldn't if people didn't keep fucking saying that it does). But there's also a more abstract reason.

The Sacred Body is the image of a body that is young, strong, healthy, inviolate. It is placed over us to obscure the crack in the sky, the wrongness of the world: that nothing is inviolate. The Sacred Body is a place to hide for people who won't accept that fact, and are lucky enough not to have to. It conceals the irony of saying that shorter lives and lives with "broken" bodies are worth less using a mouth that will shed its teeth and rot, propelled by an engine of mere flesh.

The Sacred Body cannot be sustained in the face of deliberate self-injury. This is because its animating force is not the light of the soul or the structure of the divine pattern, but the terror that those things may be insufficient, the terror of real embodied suffering and its inescapablility. That terror can't be denied when people face it, leap into it and intentionally make it worse. The Sacred Body is hard, yet knives can cut it. The Sacred Body is pure, yet we know that it's stuffed with offal. The Sacred Body is good, yet we can despise it, strong, yet easily hurt, healthy, until we make it bleed. The Sacred Body is only skin deep, blood is profane (so long as it is real blood, not crimson water for the tree of liberty but blood from a specific person's body).

Cut the Body open to see the flaw hiding behind it. Burn its smooth skin so it won't slip out of the grasp of the material. Bruise it so the blood inside can be seen. Profane that which seems to be inviolate, there is a world you can touch hidden behind the parade of images.