It seems to me I have gotten this far into this account without thinking through the symbolism of abjection, without looking for the ideas underneath abjection in my own case. It’s one thing to say that you are phobic about certain meat products. This describes a truth up to a point. It’s irrefutable, as long as you have physical symptoms. In a way, bodily symptoms of abjection are powerful precisely because there is no rhetoric attached to them. But that doesn’t mean you aren’t operating in a symbolic field, in the same way a dream ushers in its symbols. (I have a long-standing and pretty well-documented phobia of telephones, and I have spent many years trying to describe the origin, meaning, and purpose of my refusal to talk on the telephone. The reason to bring up this phobia now is simply to say that my telephone phobia is self-evidently full of meaning for me personally. There are historical and symbolically freighted reasons why I hate the telephone. So why not ask the same things about my feelings of disgust about meat?) Julia Kristeva created a blueprint for discussions of abjection in her essay on the subject, Powers of Horror, with results that were startling and important to me back in the time when I read a lot of theory. If abjection happens in your whole body, and its message there is complete, that doesn’t mean it is not philosophical and intellectual. What does disgust about meat tell us about who we are?
So: When I was a child, we used to go shooting, right near where I now live (in Amenia, New York), on a dairy farm. Some friends of the family stocked their considerable acreage there with pheasant, and during the fall, when the fields were about to be plowed up, and the feed corn siloed, we traveled north and blasted away at the birds. The shooting part was bad, I agree, though since my earliest childhood there were dead pheasant nailed up in the garage of my house, and I was somehow used to it. My mother’s father shot (and trophy fished), and my father shot, and our dog, a black Labrador retriever, was field trained in the traditional way. The hunt was a ritual in our family. Mercifully, I was a horrible shot. Apparently, I am just not meant to have a gun in my hands, and could never hit anything with either rifle or shotgun. Not even a clay pigeon was ever prey to me, nor ever shall be, now that I have renounced guns. But just the same I loved it out on the shooting trips. I loved the gray days, and the blustery days, and the threat that the Jeep was going to get stuck in the ruts of mud. I loved autumn. And yet the lessons of the dairy farm were more profound than this. I felt bad about the birds getting shot down, and I felt bad about the dog carrying the dead birds around in her mouth, and I felt bad about the cows on the dairy farm, who mainly seemed to stand around in their own wastes and moan plangently. And I felt bad for the dairy farmers themselves. They seemed dusty, weary, overburdened, and poor.
One day, we were running through the long, beautiful files of corn in autumn, and we—my sister, my brother, and I—came out by a mound near the river that ran through the valley there. The mound, it became apparent, had a bunch of hooves and parts of cows reaching out of it. This is my memory of the events, at any rate. A burial mound for whatever was left over of the cows, the sick cows, the last of the cows, the cow leavings. They came to this place, after they were useful no longer, and the farmer or his employees plowed up some dirt, and covered over the cow parts with a glaze of dirt and blood, and then left the whole infernal mess to rot. I had a profound sense, as a child, of the evil of that mound, the carnage of it, and of the loneliness of it. I felt, actually, as though not all the cattle were deceased. As though they were restless because of the way they were sacrificed. As though the bovine ghosts necessarily ambled around those environs, pawing at the ground and snorting with disquiet. In a kind of shock, we ran back to the shack where we were going to spend the night. Away from the burial mound. It was one of those moments of insight, one of those profound bodily insights: into the origin and end of all flesh.
In some way, the abjection of meat, for me, dates back to the sacrifice of the animals at the dairy farm. Lots of people, it seems to me now, are able to have this experience, the experience of learning about farming, without identifying with the animals, and without feeling compunction about eating animals, and I applaud them for their serenity. For whatever reason, I was not able, after a time, to go along with this cultural blinding. Perhaps part of the reason for the horror of the dairy farm, and the burial mound, was the problem of class. My class, the upper middle class, glorified narratives of subjection, the subjection of people and animals, but without ever explaining how the privilege came to be, at least to me. It was part of the aristocracy in those days that privilege came with the acreage. So of course there were dairy farmers who let us blast away at pheasant on their property, and of course there were dead cattle piled in one corner of the property. My having stumbled on this narrative of woe in the course of running around in the cornfields was a recognition of class, and it was hard not to feel, even if subject to delay, my eventual surfeiting of nausea.
I let go of bacon in 1999, but I think there was no wealth of bacon beforehand, in any event. With bacon it’s mostly the curing agents that are the attractive part. Simulated bacon tastes great to me these days. I hung on to fish for a few more years. I let go of fish not because of conviction about the psychology of fish, but more because of dwindling fish stocks, the crisis of overfishing, the profound stupidity of the way we manage the oceans, the fact of Icelandic whaling, etc. Once I had renounced beef, chicken, poultry of any kind, pig, and lamb, fish was easy, and then there were not really any meats left that I was eating. It was hard not to conclude that I was a vegetarian, that the conversion had taken place without preparation. Upon concluding that I was a vegetarian, however, it seemed important, in some way, to have a theory of vegetarianism. Besides simply that meat disgusted me. Eventually, I came to believe that my idea of vegetarianism was this: It was wrong that nonhuman animals had been unable to consent to their being eaten. In the same way that I felt bad for the dead pheasant with the buckshot in them, coaxed out of their cages into the open expanses of the dairy farm, given an hour to wander off, then chased down and slaughtered, there was a feeling of injustice about the eaten that I couldn’t and can’t square with the civilized delicacy of mealtime. I couldn’t and can’t, somehow, eat the meal if the basic food group represented there is the food group called injustice.
Moreover: I feel powerfully that nonhuman animals have inner lives, senses of self, for which I have no demonstrable evidence of a scientific sort, but merely anecdotal evidence and firsthand experience. I base this idea on the fact that I am myself an animal and I have an inner life, and the only difference between me and a dog, for example, is computing power. I don’t actually believe that computing power counts for much. This feeling about animals is an effect of the process in my life of abjection, vegetarianism, pacifism, religious and spiritual practice. And the end point of this thought about animals and their inner lives is, inevitably, compassion for the animals. This is a not very pleasant feeling to have sometimes. Animals are routinely tortured. We are against the torture of other human beings, or most people are against torture, but then we torture animals routinely, every day even. And if we don’t participate in their torture, we profit from their torture, and this is painful to think about. I wore a black-leather motorcycle jacket for many years, and I loved that jacket, and Peter Singer advises it is OK to continue wearing a leather jacket if it was already purchased, but after a point the jacket just made me feel bad, just as the eating fish was making me feel bad, and I had to put the leather jacket in the closet.
I don’t eat a lot of dairy, but I eat a little bit of yogurt, and I have been known to eat an egg if I can be certain it came from a cruelty-free farm, though I am aware that these words, cruelty-free, are more ambiguous than they ought to be, and some farms get away with things. I have eaten lobster a few times, once a year or so, despite the commentary by my friend David Foster Wallace. I do kill hornets and yellow jackets if they get in the house. I have had a ladybug plague at my residence in the winter in recent years, and if I manuall
y removed them all to the outside, which I have done many tens of times, I literally would do nothing else but remove ladybugs. I have therefore dispatched an army of ladybugs to the hereafter, with keen regrets. And so my vegetarian results are mixed, despite the power of my conversion.
The murderousness of human beings extends to me too, that is, but I try to do the least damage I can do and to let the animals be where the animals are. There was a bat in the dining room where I ate dinner just tonight, and people mobilized in an attempt to send the bat on its way. But the bat is just being a bat. There’s a line in Ram Dass, which I am herewith recreating from memory: “I believe that faith can remove mountains. I literally believe this to be true. But upon reflection I have come to see that the mountains are exactly where they belong.” If you take this thought too far, you will allow for murderous rage of humans. (Dante says something similar about this in Paradiso: “Thus it can be that, in the selfsame species, some trees bear better fruit and some bear worse, and men are born with different temperaments” (Allen Mandelbaum translation).) But in my interpretation of Ram Dass, what he’s saying is: Let the animals be who they are.
The drama of conversion is to be found in the fact that even though it happens suddenly, or has its metaphorical white light, it can undo itself at any moment. And yet, despite the slightly impure condition of my conversion, it has now lasted for a full fifteen years. I offer these remarks on the lives of the nonhumans for those whose conversion might come soon.
Three Poems
Sandra Meek
FLIGHT CAGE
Aviculturalists prefer their birds in naturalistic
open-style aviaries unlike this hospital’s
gift-store-Valentine’s diorama I keep
looping back to, avoiding Surgical Waiting’s
gregarious and nest sleepers stocked
with board games or pillows. Behind glass, a lone
Tri-Colored Nun Finch; two Frosted
Peach Canaries clutch frizzing fists of rope,
basket nests dangling at the apogee
of kissing Ceramic Hedgehogs. An aluminum tree
shivers the landing of Zebra and Star
Finches who settle among badges
of red-felt hearts. So tiny, these birds, nothing
like the only Bohemian Waxwing I’ve ever
spotted in my yard or yesterday’s stains
left against the glass he’d
flung himself hard to death at, spatters inked
so darkly purple who would believe
a living heart had pumped them.
Ominous, one day before my father’s last
presurgery recital for his bed’s hem of interns
how the three-years-ago surgeon cracked
open his chest to discover the porcelain aorta that
couldn’t be clamped. Lips lecture-pursed, my father’s
right hand punctuates air in professorial
mudra, thumb pressed to index finger:
knowledge mudra, though he doesn’t
know it. Pinky winged
ever skyward, touch middle fingers
to thumb, and you’d get heart mudra. No glossy
crimson card stock, the oldest
surviving Valentine’s a poem that Charles, Duke
of Orléans, penned his wife from his
Tower of London chamber, imprisoned
since the Battle of Agincourt, famous for the first
mass use of the English longbow
made of yew so scarce by 1472 a Statute
of Westminster mandated every docking ship deliver
per tun of goods, four bowstaves yew. Four hours
post pre-op, Gloster Fancy Canaries
and European Goldfinches hold court
inches from the window buttressed
by tiny tin trays of birdseed rain-bowed brightly
as sugar sprinkles on the Inaugural Day cake
giddy staff, paper flags cocked
from surgical caps, carry
away from the cafeteria across
the atrium from Pintail Whydahs and Red-Headed
Parrot Finches crisscrossing the glassed air
of Society Finches which do not occur
in the wild. Ditto this Stuffed Goose
and Gander in Wedding Veil and Tuxedo
Jacket centering the view you could enter
in a free-flight hall where bird-watchers
sail through curtains of cords and every door
is wire-netted. The door
through my father’s ribs was wired
shut three years ago, bracing
that surgery’s failure, the damaged valve left flailing like a tiny
broken wing. The world’s largest aviary breaks
into thunder on the hour, sanctuary dome spattering
rain to cordate leaves which twitch like the necks
of perching birds, listening: Blue-Faced
Parrot Finches, Blue-Capped Cordon
Bleu Finches—Blue Babies’ formerly
fatally flawed hearts surgeons learned to resculpt
fifty years ago but it’s my elderly
father floating above me in a surgical theater
undergoing apico-aortic conduit implantation, his heart to be
punched and stitched to a plastic stint tipped
with the pig valve that for years could very well
save his life. What makes this
experimental isn’t the blood’s
radical rerouting but the heart kept
continuously beating. The myth
about hummingbirds is perpetual
motion, that their wings
must never stall: Turtle doves the first aviaries
perpetually stilled were continuously fed
millet sweetened with wine, dried figs chewed to pulp
to plump them for market, but these bright,
slight birds flitting their hospital home are
not for sale, and caging may or may not
save them from the narrowing tunnel
of extinction that also holds the ancient
Egyptian belief if your heart weighs lighter
than the Feather of Maat, you will join
Osiris in the afterlife, but if you fail the scales
the demon Ammut will eat your heart and thus
vanish your soul. What percent of a feather
frames a passage for air? 1651, a freak accident leaves air
free-flowing the gaping chest
of an aristocrat’s son; his pumping heart
could be directly observed, even
touched, as did King Charles the First
of England, that royal hand reaching through mystery’s
swung-open cage. None of this hurt
the young man, who, history writes, lived out
a normal life span. The numbers
line up in the signage, but how do they measure
wingspan for these tiny blips
of turquoise or magenta, Gouldian Finches
in caps bright and variable as the surgeon team’s
sharp relief to the puffy showerlike one
in spaceman silver the pre-op nurse
beknighted my father with as the lead doctor drew
a finger across his chest to show
where they would cut. When Hanuman tore open
his own chest it was to reveal how literal
his fidelity, the beloved faces of Ram
and Sita tattooed on his still-
beating heart, stamped indelibly as the ♥
first imprinted on coins of Cyrene in homage
to the Silphium seedpod, the plant, reliable
birth control, enriching that North African
city-state until harvested, yes,
to extinction. Layson Honeyeater, Black
Mamo, Passenger Pigeon, Crested
Sheldrake: How many species of birds
have gone missing since
the 1904 St. Louis
World’s Fair raised in wire the world’s largest
flight cage, before aviaries evolved to glassed
miniature natural habitats or that of the latest
upcoming holiday for which loopy
cursive cards and small stuffed animals
are available at the hospital
gift store along with heart pillows
to cushion the hurt of a loved one’s post-
surgical coughing? You never know
who will survive to the point
of that pain; my father may simply
walk out of this place with his name
still braceleting his wrist, IV bruises blooming
papery skin like pressed tea roses
pasted along this hall culminating
in a velvet ♥ encircled by several cherubs
on the wing. ♥ has two wings but
the human heart, four chambers,
no wings. Chamber in the sixteenth century
meant a certain ordnance to fire
salutes from guns that replaced
the longbow, thereby allowing the yew’s
return to British forests
and Cupid’s tiny arrow to appear
merely quaint centering the hospital’s
main entry into this lobby I’ve wandered
back to where on a dozen televisions
the new president has just
sworn his oath; in the broadcast
small thunder of a 21-gun salute, departing visitors
paused before the screens move on
Menagerie Page 18