Try that again ---

"Fat! Even the whisper of the word reduces to masses of unquivering jelly the narrow-minded, death-fearing, life-pretending disciples of today. They seek only the avoidance of death, but what is thinner than a skeleton? Do they believe that somehow they will fool the gods by skinnying sideways , that by being a shadow of a self, they will avoid the death that jogs behind them grinning?

Oh yes, they pretend to joy, to love, to life. But their anxious skulls peep out in ungenerosity. Why were the great kings and queens of the past so large, so fleshly? Why did Henry circle himself with 8 wives, and the happy Hawaiian gorge herself regally? They were the fat of the land incarnate: the generosity of spirit proclaiming that everything flowed from the abundance of the universe, through them, and covered the world in plenitude.

What is the reason for the brittleness in the struggle of the sexes today? Is it not that the clash of bone against bone has replaced the snuggy rub of tub against tub, that the vain hope that two twigs rubbed together will produce sparks is mocked by the galivanting elsewhere in the woods, where the forest quakes with the lubricious mating of vast equals, like the great hemispheres of the world dancing the Continental? Elephant, hippopotamus, whale -- the rulers of land, river, sea! What is Moby Dick but the universe hurling itself about in infinite tonnes of finned fat! A day without lipid is insipid: it is the cream of the cream, the sizzle on the bacon, the succulent bosom, and the comfortable bottom. "Fat Lux" said God, "Let there be Fat!" And there was Fat, and Leviathan danced with the Rubens All Star Ladies Softball Team, and the lean, grey years were no more.

- excerpt from "The Fat Lady's Booth" (Peter Winthrop, Follicles, 1988)