The River Capture

by Mary Costello

  By what are these ruminations periodically interrupted?

  By the report of a not-too-distant chainsaw while he dresses in the bedroom. By the sight of the open latches on the wooden trunk at the end of the bed. By a palate salivating and a tongue blue mouldy for the want of red wine.

  Into what further ruminations or actions do these latter interruptions propel him?

  The report of the chainsaw causes him momentary sorrow for the grief of the surviving trees. The sight of the open latches of the wooden trunk provoke in him the urge to view the wedding gown in its transparent protector inside the trunk.

  Does he succeed in mastering this latter urge?

  He does not. He opens the trunk, lifts out the white silk brocade gown, removes the protector, drapes the gown across the bed, sniffs the fabric and opens the pearl buttons at the back. He considers trying to convert the cost of the gown ($450 in 1962) to today’s money but realises that such an attempt would, without the use of a calculator to compound the interest, be futile. He removes his shirt and jeans, lifts the heavy gown over his head and shoulders, pushes his arms into the sleeves and pulls and tugs until the ample skirt and tulle underskirt flow from a point approximately three inches above his waist and the hem is approximately four inches off the floor. He then turns and views himself in the mirror of the wardrobe door. As he adjusts the wardrobe door to get a better view he catches his reflection in the mirror over the fireplace and, in the motion, his own image is doubled, tripled, quadrupled – multiple, infinite Lukes in a wedding gown caught in the act of adjusting infinite doors in one fluid flowing infinite motion. Light-headed and a little dizzy, he puts a hand out to steady himself and the hand comes towards him as if to greet himself. The mathematics of turbulence, he thinks. No, the mathematics of quantum mechanics, where all possible outcomes do happen, each in its own universe, and every road is travelled and a particle can be both here or there precisely because it is here in one universe and there in another. A profusion of parallel universes and in each universe, right now, there is a copy of him in his wedding gown. For an instant he is trapped in the mirrors, falling towards the man in the white gown as the man in the white gown falls towards him. Vertiginous in mind and body he pauses, stands very still. He puts his hand to the wardrobe door and slowly, carefully, moves it back so that the fireplace mirror is out of view and the multiple Lukes are out of view and he can return to his singular self. He sighs deeply, smiles at himself, then joins his hands in a bridal pose. He twirls, pouts, preens, then runs his hands over his chest and his make-believe breasts. Do you Lukey-Luke-Luke … Tippy two, tippy tea, tippy ta-ta too … till death do you part?

  By what means does he prevail over the salivating palate?

  By hastily casting off the wedding gown, throwing on his own clothes, hurrying along the landing, down the stairs, along the back hall into the kitchen. By uncorking a bottle of Campo Viejo Tempranillo Reserva, filling three-quarters of a large glass, taking a slug of it, and feeling immediately his own return, his palate soothed and his equilibrium restored.

  What meditations occupy Luke during the preparation of his evening meal and with what edible, audible and olfactory pleasures does he accompany these meditations?

  Meditations: on the taste of altar wine as first experienced from the Holy Communion chalice at Sunday Mass in St Anne’s Church, Clonduff, circa June 1986; on his childhood fascination with the grotesquery of transubstantiation and, at age nine, his re-enactment with Lucy, aged eleven, of the Last Supper (preceded by the wedding feast at Cana) using, as props, a Waterford Crystal wine glass, diluted Ribena, discs of Barron’s sliced white pan and a yellow plastic bucket half full of water; on whether he should immediately uncork another bottle of wine so that it has ample time to breathe before being imbibed, or better still – because uncorking does nothing to aerate the wine – decant or double decant; on the pleasure of altar wine for an alcoholic priest; on the problem of altar wine for a recovering alcoholic priest; on Bloom’s reluctance to elaborate on the futility of calculating the trillions of billions of millions of imperceptible molecules on a single pinhead and progressing to the nought nowhere that is never reached. Accompaniments: three handfuls of Manhattan salted peanuts intermittently scooped from the packet and shot from the palm of his hand into his open mouth. Two additional glasses (large) of wine. The first (and most favoured) movement of Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert. The aroma of sautéed onions and garlic, golden fried, sea-salt-sprinkled potatoes; the sound of three small lamb chops being seared on a hot pan.

  What informational titbit regarding the application of heat to protein first conveyed to him in biology class in his first year at St Mary’s Secondary School does he now recall?

  The application of heat to protein causes the protein to coagulate as evidenced when a raw egg or raw meat meets a hot surface.

  How does he eat the lamb chops, the sautéed onions and garlic, the sea-salted, golden-fried potatoes?

  With knife, fork, additional sea salt, additional wine, and relish.

  What thoughts, memories and images are triggered by his evening meal?

  The Sunday lunches of his childhood years, comprising roast beef with homemade gravy, or leg of lamb with shop-bought mint sauce whose sharp acidic tang made him shudder. That the misery of man escapes when he drinks. That Kafka’s grandfather was a butcher. The image of the first ever blooding of man, the first hominoid or Homo erectus or Homo sapiens that ingested, digested and assimilated the first morsel of flesh – animal, fish, fowl, insect or worm; the weight of it, raw, on the tongue, the ferrous tang, the texture of tissue and sinew taut in the teeth. The journey of the masticated meat down the hominoidinal gullet, the action of hominoidinal enzymes in the hominoidinal intestines on the meat, the digestion and incorporation of one creature into another, flesh into flesh, the laying down of one set of DNA on another, the commencement of new epigenetic signalling as animal impressions mingle with early human instincts. Millennia of incorporation. He belches, sighs, pours more wine. Incorporate. He says the word aloud. Corp. Irish, French, Latin, all the same. With the fingers of his right hand he pinches the plumpest part of his left forearm and watches the released flesh spring back into place. Tissue, sinew. Sin-you. Decades of meat consumption. Well-blooded by now, the animal residue amassed in his cells. He bends his head and smells his left armpit. Policemen sweating Irish stew into their shirts – funny old Poldy! He sits back and attempts to calculate the ratio of human-to-animal molecules extant in his body, or, easier, the Luke-to-bovineovineporcineavine ratio.

  What Luke-to-bovineovineporcineavine ratio does he arrive at?

  With a current body weight of 11 stone 7 pounds (73kg) and assuming that he supped solely on milk for the first year of life and, notwithstanding the fact that he probably comes from one of the greatest meat-eating families in the Sullane valley if not in the entire province, consumption of meat in his infancy was negligible, so he commences the FCC (Flesh Consumption Count) from the age of four years and takes the daily recommended meat allowance of four ounces (100g) of meat (bovine, ovine, porcine or avine) as his benchmark unit and uses this unit as a (modest) measure of his daily meat consumption over the course of thirty years, and allowing that between 40 to 60 per cent of food (herbivoric, carnavoric and omnivoric) is assimilated (depending on genetic factors, physical activity, individual variable basal metabolic, thermogenetic and excretory rates) and remembering that the higher the carnivoric content the greater the assimilation rate, and acknowledging that the majority of food is either converted to fuel to run the metabolic and physiological activities that sustain life, tissue building and maintenance, or stored as fat, and that the tenth rule of trophic assimilation states that only 10 per cent of organic matter is stored as flesh, and not forgetting that the body mass of an average healthy man comprises approximately 62 per cent water, 16 per cent protein, 16 per cent fat, 6 per cent minerals, >1 per cent carbohydrates and other nutrients … he attempts to hold thes
e rapidly accumulating facts, figures and variables in mental pyramidic arrangement while simultaneously attempting a mental pyramidic tally … and soon concludes that such mind-boggling holding, arranging and tallying (while also feeling the seductive lull of the Tempranillo) is next to nigh impossible, at which point he reaches across the table for a pen and a sheet of paper and, taking a calculator out of the table drawer, proceeds to calculate as follows:

  Consumption: One (100g) unit of meat daily × 30 years = 1,095,000 g = 1,095kg

  Assimilation: 50% (at an aver. of 40–60% assimilation rate) of 1,095kg = 547.5kg

  Stored as flesh: 10% = 54.75kg

  Divided by 30 years = 1.825kg assimilated

  Body weight: 73kg

  Assimilated meat as % of body weight = 1.825 ÷ 73 × 100 = 2.5

  He concludes that the Luke-to-bovineovineporcineavine ratio is 40:1. He is 2.5 per cent animal.

  Why is he sceptical of this result?

  Because his calculation does not take into account (his ignorance of) the complexities of chemical digestion and the anabolic, catabolic, deaminatory and myriad other functions of protein and amino acids; because of his scant knowledge of the coupling of intercellular water and active metabolic processes or the coupling of mammalian stress systems and human gut biomes, or his limited knowledge of intestinal enzymes, intestinal flora, the functions and processes of nutrient absorption, human metabolic rates and the factors affecting these (such as physical activity, health of the organs, emotional state, body toxins, body temperature and food temperature at times of consumption); because of his failure to apply deferential calculus to the calculation; because of his inability to adhere to the scientific method of calculation; because the figure arrived at (or a more accurate figure that might be arrived at using deferential calculus) takes no account of lateral gene transfer, epigenetic inheritance, epimutations (particularly meat-related epigenetic changes), or of the marriage of flesh unto flesh and instinct unto instinct and the thirty years’ accumulation of animal essence in his essence and animal soul in his soul; because the first time Gandhi ate meat he heard the lamb he had eaten bleating in his belly.

  Has he ever abstained from eating meat or considered the benefits of routine fasting?

  In his early childhood, as a result of his parents’ feeble attempt to respect the last vestiges of Catholicism still extant in them, the family half-heartedly abstained from meat on Ash Wednesdays and Good Fridays. In 2004 he observed the twenty-four-hour Lenten fast with the Belvedere boys, during which he developed an acute headache that rendered him half blind and fully mute. At the end of the fast he experienced a brief feeling of elation followed by a profound – and again brief – sense of peace. While he retains a great admiration for those who lead disciplined ascetic lives, he suspects his own innate nature veers towards the gluttonous, the conger eel, making him an unlikely candidate for ascetic practices. Rachid, who fasted Ramadan annually, ardently advocated the benefits of fasting for the body, mind, and soul – and to ensure a place in Heaven. Luke watched the film Hunger three times. After one viewing he read about the process of ketosis and though the thought of his body eating itself from the inside out repulsed him, the knowledge that fasting helps repair hair follicles temporarily interested him.

  What theories concerning mankind’s evolution interest Luke and what separate theories has he himself hatched?

  Bio-techies and Astronomers Royal alike agree that (a) Darwinian evolution is drawing to a close; (b) Man is on the precipice of a great anthropogenic catastrophe; and (c) the post-human era is fast approaching, when computers will augment our brains and out-think and out-do mankind so that the shackles of body and blood are finally loosed, allowing the human species to diverge into artificially enhanced, intelligent cybernetic organisms. However, as we await our fleshless progeny and if, in the interim, man hasn’t already boiled himself to death through global warming or exterminated himself in a major environmental perturbation or so psychically damaged himself by intolerable stress, pervasive surveillance and inhuman violence that his soul is corroded beyond redemption and his very humanity is compromised beyond repair, Luke theorises that he – we – will either (a) eat ourselves into extinction by reason of obesity-induced immobility, infertility, sperm immotility and sterility or (b) epigenetically mutate – after reaching a tipping point of consciousness – into an enlightened, ungendered, asexual hermaphroditic species existing on a plane (and among a new biota on the planet) so spiritually elevated that the base instincts and appetites we are currently encumbered with will be sublimated into mystical states of bliss. In other words, Man will be either too fat to fuck or too blissed out to bother. Either way, Elijah is coming.

  What evidence forms the basis of such theorising?

  The consistent rise in childhood and adult obesity, diseases of the affluent and the growth in the fat industry – gastric reduction surgery, fat clinics, etc.; the preponderance of motorised buggies operated by gargantuan persons in supermarket aisles, airports and public spaces; the demand for oversized seats on passenger aeroplanes, the widening of aisles on said aeroplanes and the notable increase in width, girth and weight of flight attendants; the demand for the introduction of a sugar tax and other fat-reducing measures; the 50 per cent drop in human sperm count in the last forty years; the growth and widespread availability of online porn thus abrogating the need for sexual congress with another human being, thus-thus eliminating the possibility of reproduction; the growth and success rates of IVF and surrogacy; the no-longer-impossible-to-imagine scenario of The Handmaid’s Tale; the evolutionary queering of humanity encompassing the rise in non-binary sexual orientation, the broadening of the sexual continuum, the shifting and fluidifying of gender reaching its possible culmination in a median gender akin to the hermaphrodite, where we will all be both male and female or neither, but very content; the human impulse for enlightenment, the human urge for the expansion of consciousness and/or altered states of consciousness; the contingent growth in consciousness programmes, self-awareness courses and the popularity of spirituality gurus and mentors. The proximity of Sisyphus’s hour of descent as theorised by Albert Camus. The idea of the epiphany. The concept of the tipping point. The hypothetical phenomenon of the hundredth monkey effect. Luke’s own susceptibility to revelations.

  Why does Luke not regard the idea of man’s extinction as tragic?

  Because the natural order of every living thing is that it ends. Because it will be time for a new era and the turn of a new species to inhabit whatever survives of this planet. Because when the time comes, it will be the right thing to happen. Because man is not the centre of the universe. Because the universe has undergone previous cataclysmic changes and survived and there is no reason to suspect it will not continue to exist. Because man will return to the great consciousness of the universe and get a well-earned rest after all his travails.

  The universe is conscious?

  If we accept that the day is not far off when scientists will confirm that all sentient beings are conscious and indeed – and notwithstanding – that some degree of consciousness will be attributed to what we now regard as non-sentients (single-cell organisms, plants, organic matter), it is possible to imagine the universe as a great and continuous flow of consciousness, in the form of all matter, sentient and non-sentient, constantly in flux, moving and changing, forever dying and being reborn and transforming. In other words: the universe itself striving for greater consciousness. Luke is attracted to the ideas that philosopher David Chalmers postulates: first, that consciousness might be a fundamental feature or property of the universe, like space-time or energy or mass. And second, that consciousness might be universal: pan-psychism (pan meaning all and psyche meaning mind) – the idea that every system has some degree of consciousness. Not just humans and apes and dogs but also sea anemones and microbes and even sub-atomic particles. That microbes and photons might have some primitive element of subjective feeling, some precursor to conscious
ness, the first brief flickering of mind. And the further you advance along the continuum – from photon to sea-floor creature to mouse to man – the greater the consciousness. (And if we consider that 400 million years ago we swam in the same gene pool as creatures that later evolved into fish and birds (are not our hands converted fins?) then it’s not such a stretch to imagine we might share consciousness with these and other distant kin.) So, all across the planet, trillions of minds are constantly generating vivid subjective experiences not unlike our own. Such ideas, while odd to the Western mind, are not inconsistent with Eastern philosophies where the human mind is seen as continuous with Nature.

  How, now, is Luke alerted to his own altered state of consciousness?

  When he stands, prompted by the need to relieve himself, the wall to his fore and the two walls to his sides tilt to the right and he tilts with them before dropping back down on the chair and reconsidering whether the walk to the bathroom is absolutely necessary. He stands again, touches the spot above his pubic bone, which, being sensitive, indicates a full bladder. Lily meows. He turns, walks, slips and falls.

  In what posture does he find himself, after what period of time?

  After undetermined hours and/or minutes, he finds himself prostrate not prone, semi-laterally inclined in a semi-foetal position, cold, stiff of neck, shoulder and back, with a pain in the thigh and the face. With a view of: the narrow leg of a chair, stout leg of the table. He chuckles. Stout. Mammy hated that. Used it on her enemies. That Bridget Kelly is getting very stout. Itchy face. Damp. Bloodied. Lily-clawed face.