The Undead

A friend once at christmas wished me a merry zombie jew birthday - Jesus the reanimated.

I think the truth is far different. Life is not a substance - it is meta-substance.  Substance is an old word to capture that which continues to exist by itself - atoms are probably a good instance.  Life continues to exist by remaining within a world maintaining a certain character.  Living cells are just an organisation of dead atoms for which the process of becoming disorganised is so slow and complex that there is opportunity to address the winding down by manufacture of more life. In human consciousness, we get to meta-meta-substance, to being-in-the-world with such speed and exactitude that our ability to adapt far outstrips the worlds ability to kill us with collapse.  And yet, the meta-meta-substance of the mind depends on the operation of the meta-substance of cells which depend on 'dead' matter, and the substantial deadness of matter shows us by contrast the weakness of our bodies, the errancy of our minds.  The truth of the zombie myth is that we know we do not have life in ourselves. It is a temporary fire in us, but ur-zeit is end-zeit, and in the end and really, we are dead.

Why are zombies so hungry? What does a live human look like, smell like, feel like, taste like to a zombie?  Life. The living look like we wish we looked - enduring, full of health. They look as if a single mouthful would fill you forever, like they are so nutritious your wounds might heal and your ghastly pallor might be restored.  The living look like Jesus.

"And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst…. I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world."   John 6:35, 51