A Chickens Guide to Life

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On the tenth of September 1945, farmer Lloyd Olsen's wife Clara asked him to slaughter a chicken so she could make a special dinner for her mother-in-law. Olsen chose a plump five and a half month old Wyandotte rooster and chopped off its head with an ax.

While freshly killed chickens normally survive a few seconds or even minutes before dying, this chicken showed no signs of having been adversely impacted by his decapitation and soon rejoined his chicken friends, pecking at the ground as if he still had a beak. The next morning, Olsen found the chicken still alive and was profoundly moved by the chicken's devotion to life and its refusal to leave either the farmer or its other chicken friends in the yard. Olsen named the chicken Mike and began feeding him grain by hand, giving him water through an eyedropper. Treated generously, Mike grew from two and a half to eight pounds in the eighteen months he lived without a head.

Olsen soon set out on a national tour showing the headless wonder to curiosity seekers willing to pay up to twenty-five cents for the experience. Tragically, on a leg of the tour when Olsen and Mike were spending a night in a motel in the Arizona desert, Mike began to choke. Olsen was unable to find the dropper used to clear his esophagus and his friend Mike died.

For the most part, like Bataille's Acephale, Mike didn't need a head. Mike illustrates the continued perseverance and resignation of the late modern subject to continue living and moving forward without the benefit of a coherent system of logic or hierarchy. Mike's transformation sets an example for us to follow.