Although the above is a bit more flowery than what I said to my mother, it gives the essence of my message. I don’t know what effect it had on her feelings about the picture, but that photo is still there, on a counter in her kitchen, and every time I look at it, I remember that exchange.
What Is It Like to Be a Tomato?
I slice up and devour tomatoes without the slightest sense of guilt. I do not go to bed uneasily after having consumed a fresh tomato. It does not occur to me to ask myself which tomato I ate, or whether by eating it I have snuffed an inner light, nor do I believe it is meaningful to try to imagine how the tomato felt as it was sitting on my plate being sliced apart. To me, a tomato is a desireless, soulless, nonconscious entity, and I have no qualms about doing with its “body” as I like. Indeed, a tomato is nothing but its body. There is no “mind–body problem” for tomatoes. (I hope, dear reader, that we agree on this much!)
I also swat mosquitoes without a qualm, though I try to avoid stepping on ants, and when there is an insect other than a mosquito in the house, I usually try to capture it and carry it outside, where I let it go unharmed. I eat chicken and fish sometimes [Note: This is no longer the case — see the Post Scriptum to this chapter], but many years ago I stopped eating the flesh of mammals. No beef, no ham, no bacon, no spam, no pork, no lamb — no thank you, ma’am! Mind you, I would still enjoy the taste of a BLT or well-done burger, but for moral reasons, I simply don’t partake of them. I don’t want to go on a crusade here, but I do need to talk a little bit about my vegetarian leanings, because they have everything to do with souls.
Guinea Pig
When I was fifteen, I had a summer job punching buttons on a Friden mechanical calculator in a physiology lab at Stanford University. (This was back in those days when there was but one computer on the whole Stanford campus and few scientists even knew of its existence, let alone thought about using it for their calculations.) It was pretty grueling work to do such “number-punching” for hours on end, and one day, Nancy, the graduate student for whose research project I was doing all this, asked me if, for relief, I’d like to try my hand at other kinds of tasks around the lab. I said “Sure!”, and so that afternoon she escorted me up to the fourth floor of the physiology building and showed me the cages where they kept the animals — literally guinea pigs — that they used in their experiments. I still remember the pungent smell and the scurrying-about of all those little orange-furred rodents.
The next afternoon, Nancy asked me if I would please go up to the top floor and bring down two animals for her next round of experiments. I didn’t have a chance to reply, however, for no sooner had I started to imagine myself reaching into one of those cages and selecting two small soft furry beings to be snuffed than my head began spinning, and in a flash I fainted right away, banging my head on the concrete floor. The next thing I knew, I was looking up into the face of the lab’s director, George Feigen, a dear old family friend, who was deeply concerned that I might have injured myself in the fall. Luckily I was fine, and I slowly stood up and then rode my bike home for the rest of the day. Nobody ever asked me again to pick animals to be sacrificed for the sake of science.
Pig
Oddly enough, despite that extremely troubling head-on encounter with the concept of taking the life of a living creature, I kept on eating hamburgers and other kinds of meat for several years. I don’t think I thought about it very much, since none of my friends did, and certainly no one talked about it. Meat-eating was just a background fact in the life of everyone I knew. Moreover, I admit with shame that in my mind, back in those days, the word “vegetarian” conjured up an image of weird, sternly moralistic nutcases (the movie The Seven Year Itch has a terrific scene in a vegetarian restaurant in Manhattan that conveys this stereotype to a tee). But one day when I was twenty-one, I read a short story called “Pig” by the Norwegian–English writer Roald Dahl, and this story had a profound effect on my life — and through me, on the lives of other creatures as well.
“Pig” starts off lightly and amusingly — a naïve young man named Lexington, raised as a strict vegetarian by his Aunt Glosspan (“Pangloss” reversed), discovers after her death that he loves the taste of meat (though he doesn’t know what it is that he’s eating). Soon, as in all Dahl stories, things take weird twists.
Driven by curiosity about this tasty substance called “pork”, Lexington, on the recommendation of a new friend, decides to take a tour of a slaughterhouse. We join him as he sits in the waiting room with other tourists. He idly watches as various waiting parties are called, one by one, to take their tours. Eventually, Lexington’s turn comes, and he is escorted from the waiting room into the shackling area where he watches pigs being hoisted by their back legs onto hooks on a moving chain, getting their throats slit, and, with blood gushing out, proceeding head downwards down the “disassembly line” to fall into a cauldron of boiling water where their body hair is removed, after which their heads and limbs are chopped off and they are prepared for being gutted and sent off, in neat little cellophane-wrapped packages, to supermarkets all over the country, where they will sit in glass cases, along with other rose-colored rivals, waiting for purchasers to admire them and hopefully to select them to take home.
As he is observing all this with detached fascination, Lexington himself is suddenly yanked by the leg and flipped upside down, and he realizes that he too is now dangling from the moving chain, just like the pigs he’s been watching. His placidity all gone, he yells out, “There has been a frightful mistake!”, but the workers ignore his cries. Soon the chain pulls him alongside a friendly-looking chap who Lexington hopes will grasp the situation’s absurdity, but instead, the gentle “sticker” grasps Lexington’s ear, pulls the dangling lad a bit closer, and then, smiling at him with lovingkindness, deftly slits the boy’s jugular vein wide open with a razor-sharp knifeblade. As young Lexington continues his unanticipated inverted journey, his powerful heart pumps his blood out of his throat and onto the concrete floor, and even though he is upside down and losing awareness rapidly, he dimly perceives the pigs ahead of him dropping, one by one, into the steaming cauldron. One of them, oddly enough, seems to have white gloves on its two front trotters, and he is reminded of the glove-clad young woman who had just preceded him from the waiting room into the tour area. And with that curious final thought, Lexington woozily slips out of this, “the best of all possible worlds”, into the next.
The closing scene of “Pig” reverberated in my head for a long time. In my mind, I kept on flipping back and forth between being an upside-down oinking pig on a hook and being Lexington, spilling into the cauldron…
Revulsion, Revelation, Revolution
A month or two after reading this haunting story, I accompanied my parents and my sister Laura to the city of Cagliari, at the southern end of the rugged island of Sardinia, where my father was participating in a physics conference. To wind up the meeting in grand local style, the organizers had planned a sumptuous banquet in a park on the outskirts of Cagliari, in which a suckling piglet was to be roasted and then sliced apart in front of all the diners. As honored guests of the conference, we were all expected to take part in this venerated Sardinian tradition. I, however, was deeply under the influence of the Dahl story I had recently read, and I simply could not envision participating in such a ritual. In my new frame of mind, I couldn’t even imagine how anybody could wish to be there, let alone partake of the piglet’s body. It turned out that my sister Laura was also horrified by the prospect, and so the two of us stayed behind in our hotel and were very happy to eat some pasta and vegetables.
The one–two punch of the Norwegian “Pig” and the Sardinian piglet resulted in my following my sister’s lead in completely giving up meat-eating. I also refused to buy leather shoes or belts. Soon I became a fervent proselytizer for my new credo, and I remember how gratified I was that I managed to sway a couple of my friends for a few months, although to my disappointment, they gradually gave
up on it.
In those days, I often wondered how some of my personal idols — Albert Einstein, for instance — could have been meat-eaters. I found no explanation, although recently, to my great pleasure, a Web search yielded hints that Einstein’s sympathies were, in fact, toward vegetarianism, and not for health reasons but out of compassion towards living beings. But I didn’t know that fact back then, and in any case many other heroes of mine were certainly carnivores who knew exactly what they were doing. Such facts saddened and confused me.
Reversion, Re-evolution
The very strange thing is that only a few years later, I, too, found the pressures of daily life in American society so strong that I gave up on my once-passionate vegetarianism, and for a while all my intense ruminations went totally underground. I think that the me of the mid-sixties would have found this reversal totally unfathomable, and yet the two versions of me had both lived in the very same skull. Was I really the same person?
Several years passed this way, almost as if I had never had any epiphany, but then one day, when I was a beginning assistant professor at Indiana University, I met a highly thoughtful woman who had adopted the same vegetarian philosophy as I once had, and had done so for similar reasons, but she had stuck to it for a longer time than I had. Sue and I became good friends, and I admired the purity of her stance. Our friendship caused me to think it all through once more, and in short order I had swung back to my post-“Pig” stance of no killing at all.
Over the next several years there came a few more oscillations, but by my late thirties I had finally settled into a stable state — a compromise representing my evolving intuition that there are souls of different sizes. Though it was anything but crystal-clear to me, I was willing to accept the vague idea that some souls, provided they were “small enough”, could legitimately be sacrificed for the sake of the desires of “larger” souls, such as mine and those of other human beings. Although drawing the dividing line at mammals was clearly somewhat arbitrary (as any such dividing line must be), that became my new credo and I stuck with it for two more decades.
The Mystery of Inanimate Flesh
We English speakers do not eat pig or cow; we eat pork and beef. We do eat chicken — but we don’t eat chickens. One time the very young daughter of a friend of mine exclaimed with great mirth to her father that the word for a certain farm bird that clucks and lays eggs was also the word for a substance that she often found on her plate at dinnertime. She found this a most humorous coincidence, similar to the humorous coincidence that “calf ” means both a young cow and a part of one’s leg. She was upset, needless to say, when she was told that the tasty foodstuff and the clucky egg-layer were one and the same thing.
Presumably we all go through much the same confusion when, as children, we discover we are eating animals that our culture tells us are cute — lambs, bunnies, calves, chicks, and so forth. I remember, albeit dimly, my own genuine childhood confusion at this mystery, but since meat-eating was such a bland commonplace, I usually swept it under the rug and didn’t give it much thought.
Nonetheless, grocery stores had an annoying way of bringing the issue up very vividly. There were big display cases with all sorts of slimy-looking blobs of various strange colors, labeled “liver”, “tripe”, “heart”, and “kidney”, and sometimes even “tongue” and “brain”. Not only did these sound like animal parts, they looked like them as well. Fortunately, what was called “ground beef ” didn’t look terribly much like an animal part, and I say “fortunately” because it tasted so good. Wouldn’t want to be talked out of that! Bacon tasted great too, and strips of the stuff were so thin and, once cooked, so crunchy, that they hardly conjured up thoughts of an animal at all. How fortunate!
It was the unloading docks at the rear of grocery stores that made the mystery come back with a vengeance. Sometimes a big truck would pull up and when its rear doors swung open, I would see huge hunks of flesh and bones dangling lifelessly on scary-looking metal hooks. I would watch with morbid curiosity as these carcasses were carried into the back of the store and attached to hooks that slid along overhead rails, so that they could be moved around easily. All this made the preadolescent me very uneasy, and as I gazed at a carcass, I could not help musing, “Who was that animal?” I wasn’t wondering about its name, because I knew that farm animals didn’t have names; I was grasping at something more philosophical — how it had felt to be that animal as opposed to some other one. What was the unique inner light that had suddenly gone off when this animal had been slaughtered?
When I went to Europe as a teenager, the issue was raised more starkly. There, lifeless animal bodies (usually skinned, headless and tailless, but sometimes not) were on display in front of all customers. My most vivid recollection is of one grocery store that, around the Christmas season, featured the severed head of a pig on a table in the middle of an aisle. If you chanced to approach it from the rear, you would see a flat cross-section showing all the inner structures of that pig’s neck, exactly as if it had been guillotined. There were all the dense communication lines that had once connected all the far-flung parts of this individual’s body to the central “headquarters” in its head. Seen from the other side, this pig had what looked like a smile frozen on its face, and that gave me the creeps.
Once again, I couldn’t help wondering, “Who once had been in that head? Who had lived there? Who had looked out through those eyes, heard through those ears? Who had this hunk of flesh really been? Was it a male or a female?” No answers came, of course, and no other customers seemed to pay any attention to this display. It seemed to me that nobody else was facing the intense questions of life, death, and “porcinal identity” that this silent, still head provoked so powerfully and agitatedly inside mine.
I sometimes asked myself the analogous question if I squished an ant or clothes moth or mosquito — but not so often. My instincts told me that there was less meaning to the question “Who is ‘in there’?” in such cases. Nonetheless, the sight of a partly squished insect writhing around on the floor would always give rise to some soul-searching.
And indeed, the reason I have raised all these grim images is not in order to crusade for a cause to which probably most of my readers have already given considerable thought; it is, rather, to raise the burning issue of what a “soul” is, and who or what possesses one. It is an issue that concerns everyone throughout their life — implicitly at the very least, and for many people quite explicitly — and it is the core issue of this book.
Give Me Some Men Who Are Stouter-souled Men
I alluded earlier to my deep love for the music of Chopin. In my teens and twenties, I played a lot of Chopin on the piano, often out of the bright yellow editions published by G. Schirmer in New York City. Each of those volumes opened with an essay penned in the early 1900’s by the American critic James Huneker. Today, many people would find Huneker’s prose overblown, but I did not; its unrestrained emotionality resonated with my perception of Chopin’s music, and I still love his style of writing and his rich metaphors. In his preface to the volume of Chopin’s études, Huneker asserts of the eleventh étude in Opus 25, in A minor (a titanic outburst often called the “Winter Wind”, though that was certainly neither Chopin’s title nor his image for it), the following striking thought: “Small-souled men, no matter how agile their fingers, should not attempt it.”
I personally can attest to the terrifying technical difficulty of this incredible surging piece of music, having valiantly attempted to learn it when I was around sixteen and having sadly been forced to give it up in mid-stream, since playing just the first page up to speed (which I finally managed to do after several weeks of unbelievably arduous practice) made my right hand throb with pain. But the technical difficulty is, of course, not what Huneker was referring to. Quite rightly, he is saying that the piece is majestic and noble, but more controversially, he is drawing a dividing line between different levels or “sizes” of human souls, suggesting that
some people are simply not up to playing this piece, not because of any physical limitations of their bodies, but because their souls are not “large enough”. (I won’t bother to criticize the sexism of Huneker’s words; that was par for the course in those days.)
I Am a Strange Loop Page 4