An insubstantial matter of life and death
“Then he took the bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body, which will be given for you; do this in memory of me.’
And likewise the cup after they had eaten, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which will be shed for you.’” - Luke 22:19-20
In those words, for all the Catholics out there, Jesus gave the people the gift of transubstantiation. We partake in this spiritual manna, the flesh of God as Man, the bread — living matter turned to sustenance — and the blood — the life elixir that keeps man going.
To outsiders, it has always seemed a strange concept. “CANNIBALISM!” some cry. Of course, it’s also symbolism. The communion host has only been spiritually transformed. The consecrated host hasn’t become literal flesh, or there would be a strange reckoning and the realization that the supernatural is both real and ever present. Also the host would taste weird.
And yet, spiritually, we ingest it and accept that it is the flesh and blood of our savior.
***
Several cultures, across time, have an elixir vitae, an elixir of life. It grants eternal life or eternal youth. While the goal of alchemy is often reduced to gold, many alchemists have also sought an elixir of life. It originated in the East and moved westward toward Europe.
While there’s an entire Wikipedia entry devoted to Chinese nobles and royals who died from alchemical elixir poisonings, the west probably has as many alchemical deaths, some more gruesome than others, but less recorded by history.
***
Our popular image of Frankenstein is that the doctor creates his monster with a spark of lightning. The monster — Karloffian, dumb, childish, violent — is created under lab conditions, or the 1930s setpiece version of it.
In the book, the origin is more murky. Frankenstein is a chemist. Through a proprietary mix of chemicals he gives life to inanimate matter. The monster is intelligent and hideous, rejected by its creator. Frankenstein is motivated by grief to create the monster — but instead gives the creature his own grief.
But in the case of the book, there is a time when the monster is a mere vessel, an assemblage of inert things, and a point, after which, it is given life, becomes flesh, but twisted flesh — though not grave robbed.
By the end of the novel, the creature’s torment continues:
“But soon,” he cried with sad and solemn enthusiasm, “I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly and exult in the agony of the torturing flames. The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace, or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell.”
***
The Miller-Urey experiment sought to take the prebiotic conditions of Earth, imbue it with energy, and create the building blocks of life.
It wasn’t quite so simple, though. Only five known amino acids were created. Later, scientists would realize several more had been generated in other, unpublished experiments.
We still don’t know, for sure, when non-life becomes life, though. When do an assemblage of proteins become life? What was the first life like?
And does Earth have conditions — temperature, composition, atmosphere, UV light — that can only produce life.
***
Lichen — we know I love my lichen — are fascinating because they’re not an organism. Not in our traditional sense. They are a combination of fungi and a photosynthesizer, whether a simple plant like algae or a cyanobacteria species. It’s when they come together that they create the abundant, hardy organisms we see.
There are other creatures like this. A SCOBY, which makes your $5 kombuchas, stands for symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast. It looks like a jellyfish but is a fermentation factory of cooperative organisms. The results are either delicious or taste like rotting ball sweat and fruit, depending on who you ask, and what brand.
The Portegeuse Man o’ War is also a bit like these two things. It even kind of looks like a SCOBY. While it looks like a jellyfish, it’s a protozoan, one of the simplest forms of complex life. A relative of the jellyfish, but sort of off doing its own thing.
It’s also not so much an organism as a colony of organisms that each take on a special function, each organism acting as a cell (with cells of its own). It’s deeply venomous, too, quite unpleasantly so.
If you see this at a beach, don’t pick it up.
***
“Is the Kool-Aid Man the pitcher or the Kool-Aid?”
The question is the source of endless barroom debate. Who is he? What is his species?
These are the wrong questions. The question should be: Is the Kool-Aid Man an unholy communion transubstantiated into flesh, an artificial monster, or an organism not unlike a lichen? Could the Jar and the Liquid be both? At one point does the liquid in the jar run out and simply cease to be animate.
He can give freely of the Kool Aid. But he is nothing without it. It seems to be his only purpose in being.
Perhaps it’s alchemy. A pitcher is just a pitcher. A pitcher can break. A sugary liquid is just a sugary liquid. Combined, the two can create the one, through some miracle given life.
Could this, if the advertising world crossed over into our timeline, be the basis for creating more twisted life?
Perhaps the Kool-Aid possesses us, urging us to make and consume more Kool-Aid, and pass it on to subsequent generations. Perhaps the pitcher can exist without the Kool-Aid, but the Kool-Aid is like the Orthocordecep fungus that inhabits an ant’s mind, turns it into a zombie, and takes it to the highest place it can to explode with spores and do the whole thing all over again.
Perhaps the pitcher is a fungus, the Kool-Aid an algae. The fungus needs the algae for food, to photosynthesize and sustain the whole colony.
Perhaps the Kool-Aid is an elixir between life and death.
The question isn’t what is the Kool-Aid Man.
It’s why is the Kool-Aid Man.