Decomposition, Or, "Maggots Already"

This blog showcases composition and seeks to foster creative activity through the reading, collecting,  exhibiting, and curating of "pollen"  as food for thought and the inspiration for future productions.  It is therefore quite odd to be offering a quote that showcases decomposition and yet may still inspire the same sort of reflections.   

Today's quote is taken from Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild (which was also made into a film released in the fall of 2007) which documents the life and untimely death of the young Christopher McCandless, who ventured into the Alaskan wilderness in the early summer of 1992 and died three months later.    Krakauer's book offers deeper insights than the film into Chris's own writings.  In this scene, Chris describes his futile efforts to preserve a moose that he has killed. The appearance of the maggots indicates his failure and he second-guesses his slaughtering of the moose. In these diary entries he appears as earnest yet youthfully idealistic.  The maggots appear as a naturalist convention in this work, underscoring the harshness and struggle that survival in the wilderness entails--and, perhaps, the inevitability of our own decomposition.    The selection begins with Krakauer's words and moves into the diary entries:

"Alaskan hunters know that the easiest way to preserve meat in the bush is to slice it into thin strips and then air-dry it on a makeshift rack.  But McCandless, in his naivete, relied on the advice of hunters he'd consulted in South Dakota, who advised him to smoke his meat, not an easy task under the circumstances.  'Butchering extremely difficult,' he worte in the journal on June 10.  'Fly and mosquito hordes.  Remove intestines, liver, kidneys, one lung, steaks.  Get hindquarters and leg to stream.' 

June 11: 'Remove heart and other lung. Two front legs and head.  Get rest to stream.  Haul near cave.  Try to protect with smoker.'

June 12: 'Remove half rib-cage and steaks.  Can only work nights.  Keep smokers going.'

June 13: 'Get remainder of rib-cage, shoulder and neck to cave.  Start smoking.'

June 14:  'Maggots already! Smoking appears ineffective.  Don't know, looks like disaster.  I now wish I had never shot the moose.  One of the greatest tragedies of my life.'    "

---Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild (1996)