Young Blood
To make blood marmalade, first you need a quart of new blood—if not from a willful donor, then a freshly guillotined neck.
To make blood marmalade, first you need a quart of new blood—if not from a willful donor, then a freshly guillotined neck. If the execution is public, you can catch the jet loosed by the blade in a bowl or bucket. If the letting is for you alone, you might prefer a slender glass or porcelain bottle. Once procured, it must be left to congeal into a thick treacle, a slab of dark jelly, an aspic in which the rich pigment of invisible cells is suspended. Slice in and cut away the tacky substance before heating it on the stovetop, reducing like you would a sauce. Then pound the sauce in a warmed mortar, and strain it through a silk sieve until the serum is as fine as rosewater. Store and use before the next spring, when it should be replenished.
Do-it-yourself life extension recipes were recorded in Europe as early as the 16th century. Corpse medicine was practiced largely as sympathetic magic: powdered human skull prescribed to fix a migraine; a slab of human fat applied to help bruised skin bounce back. Blood was a cure-all, its fluid, pumping qualities thought to contain the essence of life itself, even when siphoned away from its host body. The more violent the death, the more effective the remedy. A hanged man’s last twisting throes were believed to vivify his “vital spirits.” The idea that pain can enhance product opposes the technique of today’s quality abattoirs, where it’s believed the adrenalin rush of a stressful death makes bitter and tough that which should be tender. Before consciousness was sieved from the flesh as flecks of gold from water, blood was the spirit’s suspension (see the heart, not the brain, as the locus of love). When slurped fresh from the body, it was expected to transfer its vitality to any given receiver—like food, only better, bypassing the energy-drain of digestion. Leonardo da Vinci writes of the Roman habit of quaffing slain gladiators’ blood, “We preserve our life with the death of others. In a dead thing, insensate life remains which, when it is reunited with the stomachs of the living, regains sensitive and intellectual life.” Past one’s prime, death begins its slow work. The body runs down. The mind is trapped in an encroaching corpse as libido dips, systems falter, dark marrow turns to dust, and the lubricating oil between joints dries up. For those who fill fine lines with Botox, or have silicone planes inserted to sculpt what puckers or sags, the horror of aging isn’t plain vanity; it’s that the rift between self-image and appearance has widened. Though it has become easier to augment the face and body so that age can be suspended, frozen in the face-lift grimace, organs still decay within, leaving only the shining chassis. To battle the difficulty of internal maintenance, new anti-aging schemes have arisen. The obsession is pervasive, created by companies responsible for the technological architecture of society. Each competes to find the elixir of life: Google owns the billion-dollar California Life Project, while Peter Thiel, Paypal’s co-founder, pours money into the Ambrosia and Unity projects.
Take one young mouse and one old mouse, as if you’re writing a fable. Peel away the skins, incise the scant muscle, and join the circulatory systems to create another creature altogether, as naturally-freakish as a post-Chernobyl daisy. Researchers observed a supernatural effect: as new blood gamboled through its system, the older mouse grew younger; it was more alert, more motivated, more sensitive to stimuli like a bouquet of sharp mint. The mouse’s distended old heart soon shrank to a vigorous size, quickening its sluggish pulse. “Every longevity experimenter has talismanic photos or videos of two mice,” writes Tad Friend of the procedure. “One timid and shuffling, with patchy fur; the other sleek and vital, thrumming with the miracle elixir.” Somewhere along the circuit that trots out innovations to investors, one scientist pulled a slide up before his audience: Cranach’s 1546 painting, The Fountain of Youth. The elixir was not the lavender ether pictured, rendered opaque as milk in oils. The secret to living forever, he said, was blood. A Stanford doctor, Jesse Karmazin, took note. He created Ambrosia, a Californian clinic whose pay-to-play clinical trial has turned one small miracle into a monetized scheme. Critics point out that, with no controlled variable other than wild lucre, Karmazin’s experiment is doomed to be inconclusive. As the world awaits word that young blood can truly change humans, rather than mice, a healthy elite is preemptively taking a gamble. Ambrosia demands $8,000 for a single young-blood transfusion, with a minimum of ten transfusions recommended before one is able to “see results.” Many find sufficient evidence in anecdotes of gray hair reversing to darkness or Alzheimer’s patients exhibiting sharper awareness. After all, today’s wellness culture is built on speculation. Herbal powders, derived from traditional Chinese and Ayurvedic remedies, have been gentrified to make the “Sex Dust” and “Brain Dust” favoured by aspiring Gwyneth Paltrows, while the fanaticism of “biohacking” sees efficiency-obsessed people “stacking” supplements in hopes of filling the gaps that nature forgot. Though it resembles science fiction, the practice in fact reaches back to the 1800s, when biologists experimented by notching two moths together to render them a single, flightless creature, or knitted the intricate organs of two rats in order to see them blink and breathe in unison. In a related 1939 experiment, Soviet biologists Dr. Sergei Brukhonenko and Boris Levinovsky wed beast and machine with the autojektor, or the heart-lung machine. The heads of decapitated dogs were attached to the contraption, which resembled a bellows and circulated blood and oxygen into severed brains. The dogs panted, blinked, and dribbled as if the violence never happened at all. Wislawa Szymborska writes in retrospect of the gruesome experiment:
A dog’s faithful head a dog’s friendly head squinted its eyes when stroked, convinced that it was still part of a whole that crooks its back if patted and wags its tail. I thought about happiness and was frightened. For if that’s all life is about, the head was happy.The dog’s head begs the question: what is the cost of living? The corpse-as-panacea isn’t so jarring to those who already thought themselves “shattered carcasses,” as one noblewoman wrote. In the 1680s, a tincture made from a poor person’s powdered skull was taken as needed to cure “crazy health,” “restless nights,” and “unquiet days.” A person ate the corpse because its correlative logic made its own kind of sense, seeing the healthy bit of body slot into their own ailing one in a rudimentary transfusion. But, as Bess Lovejoy writes in Lapham’s Quarterly, there was a latent contradiction in using the bodies of the poor: “corpse medicines were often derived from bodies alienated, in various ways, from ordinary humanity—distant, most of all, from you.” In the coverage of Ambrosia, more than one journalist has raised sober fears of the development of a biological underclass, an expected outcome of start-up culture—already charged with perpetuating precarious labour across the globe—attempting to draw a profit out from life itself. Little, after all, is written about the effects on the younger mouse: did it suffer for having shared its youth, or die sooner, having split its lifespan with its elder?
Much has been said about blood’s life-giving violence. The outpouring of life’s liquid form is “lost” when it’s out-of-body, and its revolting drips, vials, and splatters are traces or premonitions of all that is earthly and sinister. Blood re-circulates death’s enigma back into the earth. Spilled, it is not exceptional in its physics, but shocks with an innermost mystery, splashing out as plain as day. Between enemies, it curdles like common milk; race-for-race donation procedures cost lives during the world wars, and the wrong thought of “dirty blood” still restricts homosexual donations in a heteronormative world. In Alice Munro’s “Meneseteung” (1988), blood appears feral in the domestic setting. Staunched with a cotton napkin, with menstrual cramps abetted by a tranquilising medicine, it nonetheless draws the protagonist—a spinster poet living in a fresh colonial outpost—away from the mundane energies of studying courtship and guarding reputation. Instead, her period’s advent beds her into a hermetic and hallucinatory state. She flakes on a date and neglects her projects. Grape pulp, a component of the jelly she’d been making to kill time in a respectable manner, soaks through its cheesecloth bundle, until the basin underneath overflows and dyes the floorboards a bruisy hue: “The stain will never come out.” The unruliness of blood’s visitation—a female energy, overriding obligations, inviting tranquil indulgence that mutes town and men as if under a bell jar—feels beyond today’s hygiene, where a “She-E-O” nets millions off leak-proof synthetic underwear and fresh blood is as commodified as oil. In Ambrosia’s private Californian clinics, older clients lounge in recliners as plasma drips from IV bags into their opened veins. The transfusion room is akin to an office. Some tap energetically on their laptops, giving the impression of androids hooked up to recharge. Freshly whipped from litres of donated blood in a centrifuge, plasma has the appearance of a yolky, golden syrup; frozen, as it must be for storage before transfusion, it’s a light gravy. There is little documentation of whose blood, exactly, is sucked, and though patrons are assured that each donor is fit, healthy, and brimming with longevity-inducing hormones, there is a persistent question of which rubric is followed to select them. What turns bodiless blood from waste or witching into a goldmine? “There are all these people who say that death is natural, it’s just part of life, and I think that nothing can be further from the truth,” says Peter Thiel in an interview, revealing vampiric and Christian hungers, and those of a technophile who reads everything as a “project.” In Silicon-speak, it’s a catch-all, indicating a new venture as easily a decision to take up meditation. It’s a mindset best inspected by Tony Tulathimutte in Private Citizens (2016), wherein a man regards caring for his disabled girlfriend and splicing her face onto able-bodied pornography as the same continuum of “work.” All is loosely related in the ecosystem of technology, which underpins each aspect of his agoraphobic life. Loath to engage with the offline world, the slow hassle of mailing a letter moves him to furious tears. Though he is far from a mogul—his girlfriend is the alpha to his proud beta, netting millions to support her livestream-cum-social network idea—his attitudes are endemic to the Valley, where people make sport of stripping out life’s vulnerabilities. While even the most far-fetched scheme will only net 150 years of life at most, longevity procedures propose an altogether smaller comfort: that the fine-tuned body will become efficient at last, energized without comedowns, productive without crashing; it will cease to be a body, instead re-forged as the perfect vehicle for the mind’s unlimited potential. Those concerned about a “Thielist overclass” uncover an existing fatality: sustained by a prosthesis of good health, life beyond lifespan becomes hyper-dependent on capital; when the funds run out, the blood dries up. But the central vision of life—dependent on money, draining down the darkening tube of survival—does not belong to some invented world. Consider the uptick in welfare suicides undertaken in despair, correlative with funding cuts, and picked over by right-wing columnists who claim, ice-cold, that suicide “is not a rational response to economic hardship; it is not a rational response to having your benefits cut.” Contrast the demand for logic with Amia Srinivasan, who asks if it is “ever reasonable to forget what torture life (or work, or marriage) can be.”
In Katherine Faw’s Ultraluminous (2017), a many-named hooker called K sulks around New York City, snorting heroin and withstanding mundane, male-inflicted violence. For money, she has a client punch her in the face until it’s blackened; for pleasure, she eats calf brains and livers, drugstore sushi and red jam from the jar. Faw’s blank language—for surgical precision, she says in an interview, though the effect is closer to an anaesthetic—belies K’s post-traumatic anhedonia. She returns obsessively to a memory of herself, stabbed and dripping blood onto the white-hot pavement of Dubai. “Like everyone, I want to control the way I die,” she thinks, fearful of the unexpected. Control, however, is manifold: does it come at the end of a muzzled Glock, or in a square of Hermès-stamped glassine? Does it come in the coil of a garden hose looped over the rafters, or just in the meticulous management of dosage, task, and event? Does it ever come not as a shock, but as a logical end? When obsessively undertaken, both longevity and self-destruction contain the secret, persistent hope that fate can be escaped. “To be human is to have the capacity, at each and every moment, of killing oneself,” writes Simon Critchley in Notes on Suicide (2015). “Incarceration, humiliation, disappointment, disease—the world can do all of this to us, but it cannot remove the possibility of suicide.” Aging is but one of these contingencies. Its bodily effects are the consequence of entropy’s heavy wear. Critchley wrote his book in a hotel room facing the sea. Walking to and from the gray Atlantic, considering the rough beach, and eating wan Sebaldian meals—the undertaking was, in itself, the opposite of a suicide note: a project written without perfect conclusion, designed to keep its author alive in all of its drudgery. So Critchley admits, quoting sections from Kurt Cobain’s love-hate letter, the swarming and worn text flashing “begin at the end” and “end with love.” Lonely piano dances to and fro. “Those who actually die are the exceptions,” writes Rana Dasgupta in the similarly-named, yet unrelated, “Notes on a Suicide” (2017). “Far greater numbers are touched by the same current of despair, but are nevertheless held back from the ultimate act by life’s natural defences. These survivors are not left unscathed, however. They live astride the line between life and death, harbouring a kind of sentimental envy for those who have gone. Theirs is a suicide culture, and they lose some of the ability to identify with those who are simply, and unquestioningly, alive.”
Many blood recipes find edible analogues to help the aspiring corpse doctor better understand the textures they should achieve: “Distill the blood of a healthy man as if it were rosewater”; or “Stir it to a batter with a knife.” These instructives are redolent of heavy cookbooks with tastefully-matte photographs, found on the shelves of artful homes. Read alone, they possess their own tranquil beauty. One thinks of other blood proxies: rubies, pomegranate, beetroot, Rioja, the juice of Kentish cherries. Still, it is possible to be a glutton of immortality; myth and rumour are full of cautionary tales warning against sculpting oneself into a godly image. Consider Elizabeth Báthory, the famed noblewoman and serial killer. Throughout the 15th century, she tortured and killed young women, indulging in a nightly bath of virgins’ blood to keep her appearance resplendent. Báthory’s victims stretched into the hundreds (the highest figure cited at 650). Though her family guarded her from trial, she was imprisoned within her own castle, built on a green hill and appearing in aerial view not unlike the dog’s tooth of the doomed family crest. Without sustenance, she soon died in a windowless room, but her bedtime ritual is vaguely replicated in today’s beauty tincture of animal collagen. Derived from the bones, skin, and ligaments of slaughtered animals, the powder is stirred into lattés or smoothed directly onto the face, applied by those seeking, through the transformative death of others, the supple bounce of youth.
