The Imperial Diet

"The time for debate and hesitation has passed, starvation is present and rapidly spreading." I.P.C. report for the United Nations. Quoted in the New York Times, August 22, 2025.

 I ask myself, why stop? The famine continues. The suffering in the Zone intensifies. The answers I provide, however, represent irrefutable emotional facts. Anxiety, paranoia, and nighttime hallucinations overcame my ability to continue. No, that's wrong. The shame lies in the fact that they overcame my will to continue. The choice was always mine. [Added 8/23/25: With a couple of days distance, and a couple of days of sustenance, I return to the idea of "choice." Here, I recall my friend's words from day nine: "I have had to accept that I do not know what to do with the weight of the world and that attempting to lift it breaks me. I am ashamed to be that weak...”] 

This gesture was futile from the start, I admit. I felt compelled to do something, even something futile. Alone. The Imperial Diet demonstrated my ignorance. So many friends, some close, some new, expressed their sense of powerlessness, helplessness. Their embodied revulsion against the crimes of our time. My gesture may have been futile, but this community matters, our shared grief, our determination, our solidarity. We are not alone in this fight for decency and compassion. [Added 8/23/25: Failure was built into this exorcism. The empire, the Zone, and their phantoms, persist. The only "successes" were unexpected, the voices of distant collaborators penetrating my isolation,--D.W., B.J.S., Anonymous, J.B.,--and cautiously affirming this simulation's pointless necessity.]

I am too close to this enterprise to comprehend or summarize.  [Added 8/23/25: Only in retrospect do I see the outlines of a sequence, with a kind of elated delirium emerging around day three or four, peaking on day five, and then, on day nine, transforming into anxiety, depression, and nihilism.]  For now, I want to thank the concerned friends who followed my rambling, confused mind. I think, especially, of my friend, KP, who kept in contact and attempted to keep me grounded; BJS, who wrote nearly daily letters in response to my entries—and threatened to write a bad review of my work if I died; DC, who convinced me that I had to be healthy for the barricades; and, my friend GS, who began suspicious, but became a loyal reader and supporter. There are others, I know, who read these dispatches with regularity. Thank you.

My deepest gratitude to R., who knew the risks, knew the futility of the gesture, but still saw the necessity. She supported me, focused my camera, watched baseball holding my hand, and generally worried. R. was in every respect a partner in this journey. 

The photographs I've added document the fast. I've employed poetic realism rather than journalistic literalism, to echo the tone of these dispatches.

Weight: 167lbs

It is 7:35 am, my stomach is all acid, my skin hurts, my shoulders. I cannot convey the depth of my bodily discomfort this morning. Most of my friends would be glad for me to end this project, though their support has been sweet and generous. No one in the Zone knows. I could take a bite from an apple, and it wouldn't make a difference. And so day nine begins.

Yesterday I wrote about Nina Simone, listened to Bessie Smith, and played some blues guitar. Then, in the evening, when R. made her dinner (and I could smell the stove), my composure melted. I couldn’t hold still when sitting. If I stood, I paced. All I could think about: food. 

I haven’t been shy about pointing to the unexpectedly “mystical” atmosphere produced by my biochemistry. One of my closest friends (cited below) admits to envying this invisible geography. To honor him, and my other friends with such inclinations, I’ve tried to attend to my experience. But when I silence the world, and look inward, I hear: Eat! Eat! Eat! Only by reflecting upon experience, creating an intellectual distance from the most profound demands made by my body, do I find any relief from the endless, painful command to consume. 

This came on onion skin, hand-typed by my oldest friend, a spiritual, artistically gifted, and ethical man, who lives, now, in the service of his community: 

“Throughout my life I have experienced my relative powerlessness over the evil of the world as a dull pain. One of the indelible memories of my first year in Boston was going to see Lanzmann’s Shoah, the only documentary of the Holocaust that I know of that shows no corpses, only survivors talking to the camera and mostly effaced sites where evil occurred. I was dazed for about a week, even now I feel like I carry some weight from it. Over COVID I bought it on DVD; I’ve only been able to bring myself to watch about an hour of it. At some point over the decades since I first watched it I have had to accept that I do not know what to do with the weight of the world and that attempting to lift it breaks me. I am ashamed to be that weak, but I have not discovered how to make myself stronger.” 

His words reflect my struggle, but with alienated majesty. I have been ashamed too long. Today, at least, I am not ashamed. 

My friend, C., a talented educator, I think he might say that, at times, I’m too much in my head. If he said that, he wouldn’t be wrong. My intellectual life has always been my defense against a world with too many bullies. And I used that intellect to try to understand the pain I saw in my family, neighbors, and friends. As R. said to me, “you have the urge, and ability, to see a larger context, and use that context to find meaning.” In my art practice, I’ve leaned into this capacity, and produced a body of intriguing works. But they are, admittedly, cold, like the blue that dominates their color palette. Some pieces may convey emotions, but those emotions are distant and abstract, carried by words like “haunting,” “melancholy.” None of my pieces will make you cry. In a recent text exchange, C. pointed out something I hadn’t considered. The Imperial Diet is unlike anything I’ve done in the past. It is hot. It should burn your eyes.

Weight: 168lbs

Nina Simone's voice... How can I put this? Unique, haunting, but almost too intimate. When we think of terms like "intimate" or "intimacy," we tend to attach a positive valence. But some intimacy hurts. Nina Simone's voice hurts. It took me a long time to love that voice. But these last years, I turn to her more than Lady Day. Or, a better comparison--since Billie has no real peers or competitors,--more than Dinah Washington. Miss D, oh my, high notes, blue notes, and a voice sexy as silk. But she's not slick. Witness her bebop blues recordings from the late '40s with Lucky Thompson... Even a tragic death... Dinah Washington sings a song like she wrote it. Nina Simone sings like she means it. R. asked me, only half joking, whether I'm trying to die. No. Just trying to sing like Nina. 

This is not a simulation of famine, or hunger driven by poverty. It is an insistence upon the power of refusal, a simulation of sabotage. Further, it is a replication, a transformation of my flesh into an image of the external world. My flesh become emulsion.

And, as I’ve said, and repeated, this is an exorcism. But what am I exorcising? The faces of the damned or the demons of empire? My friend J. offers an answer soaked in the kind of psychoanalytic insight I admire: “a desire to self-flagellate and purify through punishment…I have a hard time believing that there isn't something cleansing about denying yourself.” J. forces me to confront the possibility that I am exorcising myself, exorcising my guilt, exorcising my complicity. After all, I paid for the rifles that patrol the Zone. 

The Imperial Diet is just one fractured soul’s attempt to answer a series of questions that J. puts to words, words that could have been taken from my hand: “what do we do with our guilt? With our grief? What is productive, and what is self-harm? What constitutes mental illness in the world we live in? How can we exist in the imperial core?” 

In a familiar, fictional world where madness is sanity and the innocent are guilty, self-mutilation is self-defense. 

Before I finish for the day, I want to offer a brief health update. Today’s entries were completed early. That gives an indication of my energy level. Yesterday (day 7), I woke out of sorts, and physically uncomfortable. Not this morning. Today, I didn’t even feel like I was fasting until my bike ride—then I felt it hard. My weight loss has stabilized, and for the first time, I actually think I might be able to make it to day 21. 

As always, thank you for spending time reading these reflections.

Weight: 169lbs

Today's been tough so far. My cognition has slowed. I suspect that will become evident as my style decays. 

I've known hunger from poverty, during brief periods as a child, then, again, as an adult. I've gone to bed with an aching empty stomach. But never seven days without food. While I may not be experiencing famine, my body will undergo some of the same changes imposed on citizens in the Zone. In that sense, as my friend suggested, my body becomes a mirror of the world. I like that interpretation. However, I wonder whether this well-fed Midwestern flesh will reveal much, even after three weeks. Most of the changes will be felt more than seen. (Not ideal for what is, essentially, a photographic project.) 

Yesterday I spent twenty minutes talking to a new friend who believes the earth is flat. We started a casual chat in the August sunshine, and less than a minute in, he begins to list the evidence for his hypothesis. At that moment, I felt such compassion. How many conversations has he killed with this introduction? How many potential friends lost? R. said it would be impossible to find common ground, because his world is flat, and ours spherical. Yet we continued, and the conversation shifted from geography to war and peace, to human suffering and salvation, and finally, in a round about concealed way, to post-traumatic stress disorder. By the end of our twenty minutes together, I recognized how much more he carried than I do. I'm not sure if I could bear the weight on his back. And I've never been around the world, so what do I know? 

I wonder if this love of humanity that's holding me captive, this tendency to see in every face a potential friend, rather than a hidden enemy, is no more than some mutated and misshapen survival instinct? I think of the strays I take home from the streets, and the projectile affection they launch when the clip of the can cracks. 

I can't feed my cats anymore. R. has taken over. The meat looks too appetizing.

A partial list of other things I would be willing to eat right now (in order of preference): raw hamburger, blood pudding, raw blood, the fat off bones from a restaurant dumpster, McDonald's. 

A dear friend I have known since 1986 texted me a voice message in response to this diary. I have redacted any identifying information. Posted with permission. (In the first 45 seconds, there are four instances in which a tone was used to redact identifying information. After that, most of the recording is free from that tone. It's worth listening to the entire recording. My friend is making an argument that builds over time to a touching and thoughtful conclusion.)

Weight: 168lbs

Hunger, as manifestation of poverty, exists in context. As with famine, fear and uncertainty are bound to the experience of enforced hunger. My only uncertainty is whether I eat again in six days, sixteen days, or tomorrow. Downstairs, an icebox packed with fruit, produce, beer, and ice cream. I may be starving, but I am not hungry. 

Several friends suggest that "The Imperial Diet" has the structure of a mystic's ritual. This exorcism does not seek enlightenment. But the chemical cocktail produced by starvation acts as a potent tranquilizer, insulating the animal from fear of death. I am no politician. Not prophet, nor preacher, nor poet. Just an isolated cartographer looking for the way. And I'm lost. In the distance, I hear a broken melody, barely aching through the breeze. Nothing else to do, so I'll follow the wind. 

Yesterday, I felt at peace, my body, my mind.  Today, my mind remains somehow clarified (even though, paradoxically, I'm having memory trouble), I continue to flow through sad compassion, but my flesh feels frustration and demands to be fed. 

I have been intentionally circumspect in defining the Zone. Because the Zone is multiple. The internal contradictions empire must repress and sustain, create the Zone. It is a physical place,--or, really, multiple, interrelated spaces separated by geography and time--that emerges, primarily, as a fortified site devoted to the production of pain. All the suffering and injustices that scar the empire's children weave the fabric of projections that conceal the Zone. Its citizens are as vapor. "The number of the dead will never be known." The enunciation was neither dramatic, nor poetic. It came from the flat monotone of a newscaster's cadence. References here: Edward Said, Frantz Fanon. 

Friends have reached out to me. Thank you. I need you. 

Weight: 170

Noon. No cramps this morning, not much bodily pain beside the hole in my belly. Just lethargy, and hunger that passes in waves. Thirty minutes, rode bike hard, no problem. Drank fasting salts. Eyesight better than yesterday. 

Emotionally, I am possessed by an enormous compassion that conceives every hurtful act as tragedy rather than malice. All the old resentments are gone. Instead, hunger magnifies the flaws in my own heart. Even so, for the first time in memory, the compassion I feel for others I’ve extended to myself. 

Workers often understood the power of refusal. Domination may involve nothing more than the imposition of a master’s will on an unwilling subject. Labor exploitation, however, necessarily depends upon reciprocal (though unequal) exchange. By withdrawing cooperation, refusal sabotages this circuit. The General Strike has always been the most terrifying weapon of the working class, at least from the perspective of the powerful. Society is sustained, fundamentally, through human labor. Withdraw that labor and all the chatbots on the net become as useful as bricked phones. Or the hunger strike, sometimes less effective, but nonetheless nerve-shattering for the ruling class. Sit down at your dead machines, park your cars on the highway, walk out of class, out of the office, refuse. sabotage. and through negation, the cards crumble, the Zone disappears. 

Not famine. “The Imperial Diet” is metaphor and model for the New Great Refusal. It is a simulation of sabotage. 

I'm not sure why I found day three so difficult and painful. Perhaps it was my mind embodying the realization that this was actually happening. In any case, the nausea and pain of that third morning have not reappeared. I'm not surprised about the cramps on day four. Since a variety of my bodily and imaginary maladies manifest as muscle cramps, I expected some trouble. But, at least so far, they've been less bothersome than feared. When I wrote today's earlier entry, I was steady. Not energetic. But not lethargic. 

Just after, I met with a new collaborator on this project (more about this soon). We spoke for almost two hours, and shot pictures of my upper body. Once again, social connection--at least pleasurable social connections--pushed away any lethargy. At the end of the visit, I crashed. The floor fell out. My daily allowance of juice brought me back. If the entire fast felt like today, I suspect I'd complete the three weeks.

Here I want to make a point that I should have made forcefully at the outset. I have absolutely no idea whether I can complete a three week starvation fast. I'm disciplined. More or less healthy. But I'm neither young, nor cut. Just an average, averagely challenged, aging man. That's the point.

I can say that I'm confident that I'll.... But "confidence" means nothing. Too often, recently, we've seen that "confidence" rises in inverse proportion to "competence." 

Maybe I'll make it through tomorrow. Maybe I'll make it through August 19. Maybe to September 1. 

My friends read these dispatches. You have my gratitude for your solidarity. It makes a difference. 

Weight: 171lbs

Only noon. Twelve long hours left in the day. But I’m tired, so I’m posting early. 

I don’t need physical sustenance when Nina Simone wraps me in her song. “oh lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood…” Another gap between simulation and reality. No jazz in the Zone. 

Time’s flow normalized. Slept in fits again, but found the last episode seductive enough that, as the sun broke my pane, I resisted the invitation and rolled beneath my pillows. When I finally stood beside the bed, my legs cramped and I fell like a card house, howling. Woke R. Other than cramps, not much pain. My eyesight is noticeably diminished. I cannot focus shots, nor recognize friends at distance. The computer screen blurs, and the words on my typewriter, always hard to decipher, look like an ink blot. Forty minutes of aerobic exercise was an ordeal. At the end of the ride, couldn’t catch my breath. 

Feel cut off. Lonely. My censors have been failing. Emotions all on top, a compelled “radical honesty” (Caveh Zahedi) so powerful that I police my contacts. Yet, because I am safe, supported, because I have Nina Simone, none of my unmasked feelings threaten danger. I am suffocating in love, unable to evade melancholy, sympathy, compassion, even for the enemy. But if I lived in the Zone, if I had to dodge fire for bread crumbs, if I watched my mother die, or my spouse murdered, or my daughter disappeared, I suspect the silence of the censors might unleash unkind passions, even suicidal nihilism. At least in me. 

I had to put aside Davis, for now. Too close to the bone. Instead, I’m exploring Desmond’s Poverty By America. 

The longer I pursue this project, the further I feel from "famine." The more I measure and assess my experience, the more clearly I recognize that "famine"--as we know it in the age of rationalized warfare--is as much about chaos, uncertainty, and the threat of external violence, as it is about hunger. I'm beginning to suspect that violence is not simply associated with famine, but fundamental to its meaning. I may be simulating something. But it is not famine. 

Weight: 175lbs

I thought I’d post entries at midnight. But I didn’t anticipate how much the day would weigh. 

We know what’s happening. We want it to stop. If I didn’t share that desire, I would not share these pages. But this simulation is not politics. I’ve participated in political activity, and, in every instance I recall, action required agency. Whether “choice” or not, I don’t know. But it felt like choice. Once I conceived the possibility of this simulation, I could not put it aside. Idée fixe. (I needed to get some sleep.) Since The Imperial Diet emerges from denial, rather than affirmation, action loses agency (or at least the feeling of agency). Consumption requires destructive, directed activity. Denial has the abyss. 

Even the mild hunger of two days makes such passivity seem obvious. No wonder starvation is a preferred weapon in rationalized warfare. 

Beginning tomorrow (day 3), and for the rest of this simulation, I will organize my personal diaries using four open-ended questions, and a simple cognitive test, to provide some methodological structure for my self-interrogation.  

Weight: 177lbs

Height: 5'10"

Not as hungry today as yesterday (during my pre-famine fast). Physical activity cramped my belly and I'm belching death. No debilitating hunger headache. But I anticipate. Brushed teeth for the mint, a few times. Spoke to G.S. about the project. He was suspicious. I'm anxious and a little more paranoid than usual. Physically energetic. My mind, however, already stumbling (perhaps obvious). End of the day, rinsed with salt water. Refreshing, like eating a Platonic pretzel. Spoke to my daughter. Made me promise to see a physician after day ten for heart check and blood work. She also recommended the salt water rinse.