Aleksandar Prokopiev

Ethica anthropofagon

1. Always be hungry! Then you’ll become like each other.

2. Treat him or her like pancake. Smear with honey, cherry jam, peanut butter, chocolate. Taste as s/he wants to be tasted.

3. Give him or her a little metal box, decorated with your initials, containing your index finger without a ring or your ear with an earring. S/he will be enormously satisfied by this gesture, as if you’d given the last rose or a new time-travel machine.

4. Be gourmands. In every mouthful find something of yourself. Chew sincerely and you become necessary to each other.

5. Imagine! Searching for food really is as exciting as eating. Be falcon and chick, wolf and lamb, lioness and stag. The role of prey will change with the weather: when it’s hot you’ll be the victim; when it’s rainy, she will be.

6. Improve appearances! Use lace, velvet, silk or mohair, inspired by the refinement of French hedonists. Their deepest drive is to bring together spring water and ripe cheese; decay and pink skin fresh from the bath. The smell of incense could be as brutal as a god biting into an over-ripe pear.

7. Make jokes! Write a suicide note and put it in an envelope. Next, ravenously eat a miniature marzipan replica of yourself (or it could be made of jelly or blancmange). Then, nonchalantly, rip open the envelope and read your testament: “I donate my body and soul to culinary progress”.

8. Romance dies on an empty stomach. But to be stuffed is banal, make you lethargic and punctures fantasies. Every day tickle your appetite but never overfill your stomach. Always be hungry!

(Translated by the author with Fiona Sampson, in: Orient Express, The Best of Contemporary Writing from Enlargement Europe, 1-2, Autumn 2002, Oxford, U.K.)