The Physics of Sorrow

by Georgi Gospodinov, Translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel

  Even language has not yet gotten used to this. We say “in the face of death,” but this is already a phrase from a bygone era. Death has lost its face and therein lies the new horror. There is no face.

  Several random examples. Achilles killed Hector and that was an epos, it was history, a dance between the killer and the victim. A ritual, in which the victim has the right to his moves, his gestures, and his lines. (Now that’s why a Homer of modern gunfire is impossible.) Even when Lycomedes tricked Theseus and was about to push him off a cliff on the island of Scyros near Euboea, there was again the touch of a human hand, presence.

  What happened afterward? Here we’re not even talking about the slaughterhouse of war. Kennedy is riding in his limo, he smiles, makes a painful grimace, slumps down. That pantomime of death, which we’ve watched stamped on film, says it all. Achilles has become invisible. Theseus, yet another mythical serial killer, is hidden in the crowd and shoots from there. You don’t have time to get ready, to mentally say farewell to a few people, to make bequests, to leave behind your final words, to make smart remarks, to zing your killer with a cutting line, to fix your hair. The full-stop of the bullet, which arrives before the first word of the sentence. An anonymous piece of lead from an unknown perpetrator. There is something deeply unjust about that. Something that radically goes against every nature.

  No animal would do that.

  NO ANIMAL WOULD DO THAT

  The animal in me. So here’s the new moral law—side by side with “the starry sky above me.” The basic question, the litmus test, the divider between good and evil—could what I’ve thought up be done by an animal? Step inside the skin of your favorite animal and find out. If it wouldn’t do it, then you shouldn’t do it, either, or you’ll be committing a mortal sin. A sin against nature. All sins have already been committed. But at least the boundary of the natural remains.

  Theseus was a matador. “Matador” means killer, borrowed from Latin. Every butcher in the slaughterhouse shares in Theseus’s sin.

  I add this ordinance, which is actually quite relevant, to the box:

  ORDINANCE No. 20/2002

  For reducing to a minimum animals’ suffering during slaughter

  CHAPTER 1: Animal Stress and Pain

  Scientific research has shown that warm-blooded animals (this includes livestock) feel pain and the emotion of fear . . . Fear and pain are very strong causes of stress in livestock and stress affects the quality of meat obtained from this livestock. (Of course, everything is done for the quality of the meat. Less suffering means better taste.)

  Animals will also shy at moving things, as well as darkness and they may refuse to enter a dark place . . . (I’m sure of that, I know this from firsthand experience.)

  They are afraid of sparkling reflections, dangling chains, moving people or equipment, shadows or dripping water. (Shadows or dripping water . . . that’s almost poetry, no, it’s a cave.)

  CHAPTER 7: Slaughter of Livestock

  Preparing livestock for slaughter

  Animals injured during transport or not yet weaned should be slaughtered immediately (out of compassion), but if this is impossible, then no later than two hours after being unloaded. (Because the quality of the meat decreases, following the logic of suffering = bad taste.) Animals incapable of walking should be slaughtered on the spot or conveyed by cart or platform to the proper place for immediate slaughter. When ready for slaughter, animals should be driven to the stunning area in a quiet and orderly manner without undue fuss and noise . . .

  There are three main technologies used to effect stunning: Percussion, Electrical Shock, and Gas . . .

  The most widely used method for stunning is the captive bolt gun. This method works on the principle of a gun and fires a blank cartridge and it propels a short bolt (metal rod) from the barrel. The bolt penetrates the skull bone and produces concussion by damaging the brain or increasing intracranial pressure, causing bruising of the brain. The captive bolt is perhaps the most versatile stunning instrument as it is suitable for use on cattle, pigs, sheep and goats as well as horses and camels, and can be used anywhere in the world . . .

  Bulls: place the gun firmly against the forehead at a right angle 1 cm to the side of an imaginary line connecting the top of the head and a straight line between the eyes. (What mathematics of death, what geometry of murder . . .)

  Calves: the gun should be placed slightly lower than with adult cows, since in calves the upper part of the brain is still underdeveloped. (Man really has thought of everything)

  Fig.51. The correct positioning of a stunning gun.

  (From “Guidelines for Humane Handling, Transport and Slaughter of Livestock” in accordance with the European Convention for the Protection of Animals for Slaughter.)

  Now that’s what I call an innocent, hygienic text, as cold and aseptic as the tiles of a slaughterhouse—washed sparkling clean once the job is done.

  No animal would do that.

  THE MINOTAUR’S DREAM

  I dream that I’m beautiful. Not exactly beautiful, but inconspicuous. That’s what it means to be beautiful, to be like everyone else. My head feels light. My eyes are on the front of my face. I have a nose, rather than nostrils. I have human skin, thin human skin. I walk down the street and no one notices me. Now that’s happiness—no one noticing me. It’s a happy dream.

  I walk slowly, avoiding the people coming toward me at first, I keep to the very edge of the sidewalk, near the walls of the houses. But a miracle has occurred. No one rushes to get away from me, no one screams in horror that they’ve seen a monster, children don’t cower behind their mothers, the old folks don’t cross themselves, the men don’t draw their swords. I’m walking down the street. It’s light out. I haven’t seen this much light since I was born. One woman accidentally bumps into me. I’m afraid she’ll scream. She turns around, looks at me from very close up . . . she doesn’t recognize me . . . she doesn’t scream . . . she smiles . . . and apologizes. No one has ever apologized to me before.

  I see people sitting on benches. I sit down, too. Alone. I watch what the people are doing and do the same thing.

  They sit and watch other people.

  I sit and watch other people.

  Then dusk starts to fall. I hear one little boy telling his father: dad, let’s go home, it’s getting dark. The words “dark” and “home” are the first worrisome thing in the whole dream up until now. The dark has always been my home, but now I feel homeless. For the first time I get scared that I’m lost. Which is ridiculous, since I have never gotten lost, I come from the Labyrinth, after all. And the more my fear grows, the more I shrink. A tall man leans down over me, grasps me with his large hand (I notice he’s not holding a sword), and asks me if I’m lost and whether I know my address. I keep silent. And where is mommy, the man asks, can you tell me where mommy went? He shouldn’t have asked that question. I can feel my jaw elongating, my skull growing heavy and hard, but I don’t want to hurt him. Thankfully the dream is coming to an end, since the situation is getting pretty desperate. That’s the moment in which dreams tear apart.

  I woke up in the dark in my usual home. That was my happiest dream. One day with people whom I didn’t kill, who didn’t kill me, who didn’t even notice me. There was no bad blood between them and me. I presume that people don’t have those sorts of dreams. In their dreams, they wander through dark labyrinths and battle Minotaurs.

  IRREVOCABLE

  From time to time I emerge from my refuge and go to Odeon, the art-house movie theater in town. Old black-and-white films are the only thing I feel like watching. I had read that they were showing a Dziga Vertov panorama and I didn’t want to miss that. It was a cold January afternoon, dingy and slushy. As it turned out, five minutes before the film was supposed to start, there were no other takers. They could hardly be expected to show it just for me. Then I noticed two bums loitering around outside, shifting their weight from one foot to the other and smoking. I asked them if they wante
d to come inside and watch a film and warm up. They looked at me mistrustfully, like people who were not used to getting such offers. One asked what film. I told them it was a classic, and he nodded, stubbed out his cigarette, and the two of them went in with me. I bought three tickets. The usher looked at us with the contempt of a full-blooded Aryan, but she didn’t dare turn them away. As we went in, I glimpsed how they surreptitiously straightened up their coats and took off their winter hats. They settled into the back row, it was warm in the theater and from what I could tell they blissfully dozed off shortly after the opening credits. It was a silent film and the theater had hired a pianist to accompany the film just as during the 1920s.

  An enthusiastic camera, still intoxicated by its own possibilities, climbs over the rooftops, changes angles, lies down on the train tracks. The whole madhouse of 1920s Russia, the drunks, the Pioneers, the bums on benches. And now comes the reason why I’m telling this story—a report about a slaughterhouse. The routine slaughter of a cow, and its subsequent “resurrection” through playing the film backward. The title appears: “Twenty minutes ago, this meat was a cow.” It’s as if the camera is calling: “Lazarus, come out!” And the sliced up pieces of meat turn back into an animal, beef turns back into cow. The intestines slip back into its belly, the steaks plaster its haunches . . . “And now we’ll put on the skin.” And it’s as if the butchers’ knives have become thick sewing needles, while they themselves are the tailors, dressing it in the skin, which they had stripped off only moments before, they scurry about, ridiculous in their backward movement. Even the pianist’s music speeds up, the key somehow more major.

  “And now we’ll bring the cow back to life”—the title on the screen announces. And here, where you expect the culmination, the miracle, the “Ode to Joy” (the pianist’s hands dash over the keyboard), instead we’re in for a shock. The cow’s death throes, rewound, remain death throes. That moment of dying, the electrical shock, the detuning of the body, the horror, the adrenaline, the whites of the cow’s eyes, played backward only intensify the mortal agony, rather than bringing it back to life, as the cameraman had expected. And despite the fact that only seconds later the cow stupidly flicks its tail, it is nevertheless clear to you: the cow is irrevocably dead.

  On my way out of the theater, I have to bring back from dreamland the two blissful bums, who have missed the incorrigible death of a cow.

  Every year, 1.6 billion cows, sheep, and pigs, as well as 22.5 billion birds are slaughtered by humans for food. We are hell for animals, the animals’ apocalypse.

  A TALE OF THE VEGETARIAN MAN-EATER

  “Once upon a time, there was a man-eater who was a vegetarian.”

  “What’s a vegetarian?

  “A person who doesn’t eat meat. Like you and me.”

  “And is a man-eater a person?

  “Wellll . . . yeah, it looks like a person, but it’s even scarier.”

  “Stop scaring the boy with your nonsense!” A woman’s voice comes from the room next door.

  “Mom, I want to hear the story about the vegetarian man-eater. Should I shut the door?”

  “Shut the door, so we don’t scare mom.”

  “But people are made of meat, right?”

  “Yes, we’re made of meat.”

  “So that poor vegetarian man-eater must’ve been dying of hunger.”

  “He wasn’t only dying of hunger, but from putdowns, too.”

  “Wait, can you really die from putdowns?”

  “Putdowns are the deadliest thing of all. All the man-eaters were making fun of him, calling him a fruit-eater and grass-grazer. Nobody wanted to talk to him. Because if you didn’t eat people, you didn’t have anything to tell your fellow man-eaters. And they were telling funny stories . . .”

  “Scary . . .”

  “Stories that are scary for men, but funny for man-eaters. Each would tell a tale more outrageous than the last and they’d bust a gut laughing . . . Meanwhile, our vegetarian man-eater just stood off to the side and didn’t have any stories to tell. If he happened to go over to the group of real man-eaters, they would rib him mercilessly: hey, why don’t you tell us how you battled three raspberry bushes and came back home all bloody. That kind of stuff. Or how many cabbages can you behead at once? And the poor vegetarian man-eater would slink off with his tail between his legs . . .”

  “So they have tails?”

  “That’s just a saying. Then one lady man-eater, who was secretly in love with our man . . . with our man-eater, she went over to him and told him that he should try people meat at least once in his life, he might like it and get himself straightened out. And he’d best try precisely with a vegetarian . . .”

  “Dinner’s ready,” my mother says, standing in the doorway.

  ON THE EATING OF FLESH

  My father is a vegetarian. And a veterinarian. He simply does not eat his patients. I can see it now, how the waiters look at him when he orders some meatless dish. Just as the man-eaters looked at the vegetarian man-eater. I can still remember how one of our neighbors was always grilling him about why he refused to eat meat, had somebody been putting him up to it, had he joined a cult by chance, had he read something, how is it that everyone eats meat, but he’s broken away from the collective, if you get what I’m saying? Come on now, man up, order a trio of sausages with a side of beans, or baked kidney pie or lamb’s head. As for me, he’d say, when I grab that head, I first open up its mouth nice and wide and pull out that little tongue, mmm, then I split that little skull right open with a knife and, then, you slurp out the brains with a spoon! To say nothing of those yummy little eyeballs . . . Here my father would get up suddenly and say he had to go outside, I would run after him to puke in the bathroom. Just take that little lamb, it only eats grass, why don’t you start with that . . . the neighbor would call after him.

  Funny that socialism and vegetarianism don’t go together. Like yogurt and fish.

  We know that where the neighbor has been, the police are sure to follow. My father was prepared and when they called him down to the precinct, he explained to them in detail how the human anatomy was adapted to a vegetarian diet—a long gastro-intestinal tract, six times longer than the human body, unlike carnivores, whose tracts were only three times longer; flat molars, alkaline saliva and so on. He even quoted Plutarch and his essay “On the Eating of Flesh” to them, where it is said (he had copied this out in his notebook): “But if you will contend that yourself was born to an inclination to such food as you have now a mind to eat, do you then yourself kill what you would eat. But do it yourself, without the help of a chopping-knife, mallet, or axe.”

  They let him go.

  My father was proud that he had managed to convince them with anatomy and Plutarch. While they had probably decided he wasn’t worth the trouble, figuring he was slightly nuts, but ideologically harmless.

  ANTI-ANTHROPOCENTRIC NOTES

  During World War II, in the period between 1940 and 1944, in air raids on European museums, seventeen dinosaur skeletons were destroyed. I can clearly picture these double murders, the crushed dead bones, the toppling of these Eiffel Towers of ribs and vertebrae. No animal would do that. To kill someone who had already been dead for millions of years all over again, to reawaken that prehistoric horror in the black box of its skull.

  Actually, has anyone ever counted the bodies of animals killed during wartime? Millions of sparrows, ravens, robins, field mice, torn-apart foxes, scorched partridges, rats, the moles’ ruined bomb shelters, the lightly armored turtles crushed by heavily armored tanks—their giant likenesses . . . No one anywhere has ever made an inventory of such deaths. We’ve never really stopped to think of the suffering we cause to animals during wartime, during air raids. Where do they hide, what happens in the “wild” brains of our “fellow brethren in pain,” as Darwin called them in his notes.

  I love natural history, but not its museums. I don’t see anything natural in them. In the end, they are more like mauso
leums. What else could we call a place with gutted antelopes, Tibetan yaks, badgers, does, and rhinoceroses? I’ve never experienced pure, unadulterated joy from zoos, either. But everyone is always forced to visit them once, as a child, since parents are convinced that you’re dying to see the elephant listlessly flapping its trunk or the wolf pacing anxiously in its cage, which stinks of carcass.

  I’ll never forget the elephant’s heavy sorrow, which almost crushed me (yet another one of my fits), then the melancholy of the black panther stretched out on the dirty cement, or the undisguised tedium with which the tiger met and saw off its guests. On the way out, I recall, I was filled with animalistic sorrow. I can attest that this sorrow is far denser than human sorrow, it’s wild, unfiltered by language, inexpressible and unexpressed, since language nevertheless soothes and calms sorrow, disarms it, bleeds it, just as my grandfather would bleed a sick animal. When they took me to the Museum of Natural History the next day, I had the feeling that the whole zoo had been slaughtered in a single night, stuffed and brought there. I’ve never gone into such tombs since.

  NEGLIGENT MURDERS

  Whole columns of ants, over all these years, which I’ve stepped on without noticing it. I have big feet, size 12, which increases their destructive power. And my guilt.

  MIRIAM, OR ON THE RIGHT TO KILL

  We were talking, or actually, I was talking about the need for an anti-Copernican revolution, how important it was—and I mean vitally important—to oust man from the center of the universe, about death, and animals . . .

  “I lived with a Buddhist for three years,” Miriam said, splitting open a large mussel with her long fingers.

  I love such beginnings, with no preface, raw, hard.

  “It was a long time ago,” she added, heading off my unasked questions. “Know what the most unbearable thing about living with a Buddhist is?” The mussel sank into her mouth, strong white teeth, pearls and the grains of sand between them, seconds until this magnificent meat grinder had made short work of the flesh. “The vow not to kill. That’s the most brutal part . . .” Another mussel.