pity the meat

'Pity the meat! Meat is undoubtedly the chief object of Bacon's pity, his only object of pity, is Anglo-Irish pity. . . . Meat is not dead flesh; it retains the sufferings and assumes all the colourings of living flesh. It manifests such convulsive pain and vulnerability, but also such delightful invention, colour, and acrobatics. Bacon does not say, "Pity the beasts", but rather that every man who suffers is a piece of meat. Meat is the common zone of man and the beast, their zone of indiscernibility; it is a "fact", a state where the painter identifies with the objects of his horror and his compassion. The painter is certainly a butcher, but he goes to a butcher shop as if it were a church, with meat as the crucified victim.'

Gilles Deleuze

From a post on Voltaire's Monkey on Francis Bacon, the rest here