(…) Our brain, initially reptilian.
For our bodies are also beasts, ancient beasts laden with the timeless memory of genes.
(…) These beasts live on tenderness, a tenderness that sometimes flows from our gaze, from masters and mistresses.
These are profound beasts, primal beasts. They hold us is space and give us time (…). For us, they are the primary relationship upon which all other relationships are modelled. Our bodies are our fundamental companions from which everything springs.
(…) They are that part of our selves which does not truly belong to us, yet which we feel is ours, which, alive, lives without needing our commands, yet at every instant fights for us—the skin as fortress with its restorative monocytes, the fixative mucus and disinfecting tears, the defensive scabs and healing platelets, the hunter corpuscles and protector scabs, not to mention the antibodies, those clever poisoners. Even at their cleanest, our beasts are downy dwelling places for mould, fungus and bacteria of all kinds.
(…) And why this impression that our beasts extend only to the neck? As if the body had no head, or rather, as if the head with all of its holes were not body.
A question of tiering, perhaps of straightening.
From the nose to the ground, to the nose to the wind. A movement that caused us to lose our heads and chase after the reptiles in the viscera. Poor cerebral cavern—open to the winds, oscillating as it can at the end of its column (…).
(…) And the beasts that we are, in the very depths of their eyes harbour a poignant desire, almost always camouflaged or veiled, for the gesture’s tenderness, which at times makes us the master of these other beasts that we love so much.