I love fads. Food fads, child-rearing fads, exercise fads, psycho-babble fads, conspiracy-theory fads—the barmier, the better! Cosmic-sperm fads, Pangaia, Jesus and magic mushrooms, Terence McKenna's loony flying-saucers-from-the-future-impacting-on-the-present theories. Bring ’em on! Not that I actually follow any of them further than my front porch—that would be going too far. For me, the theoretical thrill itself is enough, the irresistible frisson of the latest New Thing––pollen of the Zeitgeist!—that will change us all in the twinkling of an eye.

My most recent encounter with a life-altering fad came up to Delaware County with my old friend X, a former world-historical maniac and industrial strength drug consumer who these past six years has reformed himself utterly—well, he’s still a bit of maniac, but still…. He’s given up not only drugs and alcohol, but milk, eggs, cauliflower, peas and wheat.

The great thing about nutty nutritional theories is that it allows former druggies to obsess about vitamins and supplements in the same way they once obsessed about pills and powders. Where once X could not get through his day without an impressive array of mood-spinning spansules—Vicodin, Desoxin, Percodan 122s, Quaaludes, Eskatrol, Christmas trees, purple hearts (plus the finest granulated product New York’s drug dealerships could offer)—now, at lunch, out comes a huge plastic bag full of equally daunting capsules and horse pills and little jars full of white powder with pharmo-speak names like Mintran, Minchex, Zymex, Okra Pepsin, Gastrex and Antronex.

But this is only frosting. The essence of X’s new cult involves blood. Yes, blood. That crimson plasma that courses through your veins, the vital essence of life. It determines everything—not in the crank racist sense, but in the anthropological/evolutionary sense. In a profound way, it is you—and everywhere you’ve been in the last, oh, 50,000 years. Blood is history, surely you knew that? The secrets of pre-history, like Alph, the sacred river, have been within you all along, and you never even suspected it.

You—fool!—have all these years been following the food fad of the season—macrobiotics, Vegan diets, mega-bran—when all along you should have been listening to the dictates of your blood. But along comes my friend X, the newly-hatched health nut (and lousy with fads), to clue me into the ultimate pre-historical diet. With portentous ceremony, he hands me a copy of Dr. Peter J. D’Adamo’s 4 Blood Types, 4 Diets: Eat Right 4 Your Type to set me straight.

The idea behind this cranky hypothesis is that blood types were determined by the lifestyle of our ancestors, and if we want to stay healthy, we must follow their eating habits. Type O is the blood type of the hunter-gatherer, the aggressive loner, proto-CEO and hustler. Around 15,000 BC, so this theory goes, agrarian society sprung up, along with a more settled way of life, and our blood mutated to adapt to a more sedentary, cooperative culture, producing the suppressed, neurotic personalities of A blood types. So, in a nutshell, the book says that Type Os—the hunters—should stick to meat, while Type As—the farmers—are better off chewing their cud.

I don’t know what my blood type is, and if I were more aggressive, a go-getter Type O, I’d go and find out. But since I’m from the Beatnik clan and would rather lie around and think about it, I guess I’m probably an A Type. It’s pretty simplistic stuff and may even be true, but what interests me is not a new shopping list but the spooky evolutionary traces that remain in us. The thing about evolution—and next year’s car models—is that you never entirely get rid of the original beast within. Evolution is an attic of discarded things that never get thrown away.

Phylogeny, they say, recapitulates ontogeny (or is it the other way around?), that snappy indigestible little catch phrase that sticks in the brain like a refrain from an ABBA song and says that, while gestating in the womb, we go through all the stages of evolution from protozoa to fish to monkey to human. It would be like if every car you buy contained within it the entire history of wheeled transport from ox-carts to carriages to Model-Ts to chromy, shark-finned ‘50s pink Caddies.

Look at yourself in the mirror, creature! As you glance back down the wind tunnel of time, you can feel all the tiny monsters you are composed of stirring, wriggling, flapping, gnawing, oozing out of the primeval slime. It’s not something you want to dwell on too long—spiky fins and oily compound eyes peering out at you from the tide pool of your own blood. Pure horror!

But stranger still is what evolution evolved into—Surrealism! A little terror from looking at oneself in the pre-Cambrian mirror is always worth it in the name of art. Darwinian family trees led directly to the Comte de Lautréamont (aka Isidore Ducasse), a nineteenth-century pre-Surrealist of genius who created the lush phantasmagoria of one of my favorite books, Les Chants de Maldoror—containing one of the great lines in all of modernism, the infectious cry of the mutant, "I need creatures who resemble me!"

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A few selected horrors from Les Chants de Maldoror:

"What! Is it you, toad! Fat toad! Unhappy toad! Forgive me .... forgive me! What are you doing here on this earth where the accursed dwell? But what have you done with your fetid, viscous pustules that you should have so fair a look? When you came down from above, sent by a higher command on a mission to comfort the various existing races of men, you swept down upon the earth with the speed of a kite, your wings unwearied by that long, majestic flight ... I saw you! Poor toad! How you made me think on the infinite, no less than on my own weakness!"

"Who is that being yonder at the horizon, that creature who dares to approach me fearlessly, leaping laboriously along its crooked way? And what majesty, yet what serene gentleness! Its eyes, though mild, are profound. Their enormous pupils move with the breeze and seem to be alive. I know not this creature. As I meet its monstrous eyes my whole body shudders for the first time since I sucked at the withered paps of what is known as a mother. There is a kind of glowing halo around this being. When he gave utterance all nature was stilled, trembling. Since it pleases you to come to me as if drawn by a magnet, I shall not hinder you. How beautiful he is! It pains me to say this. You should be strong for you have a superhuman countenance, sad as the universe, beautiful as suicide. I loathe you to the fullest extent of my power and would rather see a serpent coiled about my neck from the dawn of time than I would see your eyes."

"...he resumes his ferocious attitude and continues to watch the man-hunt, trembling nervously, and the wide lips of the vagina of darkness whence flow unceasingly like a river immense shadowy spermatozoa which take flight into the lugubrious ether concealing, with the vast manipulation of bat's wings, the whole of nature and the solitary legions of octopi, grown dejected at the aspect of these obscure and inexplicable fulgurations."

"In ancient and in modern times more than one great human imagination saw his genius appalled by the contemplation of your symbolic figures traced upon burning paper like so many mysterious signs living with a latent breath, incomprehensible to the vulgar and profane, which were merely the radiant revelation of eternal axioms and hieroglyphs that existed before the universe and will continue to exist beyond it."

"He who is singing now does not claim that his songs are new. On the contrary, he is proud in the knowledge that all the lofty and wicked thoughts of his hero reside within all men."

Translated by Guy Wernham, New Directions.