Menagerie

by Bradford Morrow

  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